It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
The last few days we have seen yet another serious spike in the price of Ethereum’s Ether (ETH) coins reaching a new all time high at almost $6.5 USD per coin and showing growing interest from users including miners. Things have gone almost crazy around Ethereum in the last few days and we have even started seeking some of this interest moving onto the Ethereum forks as well, so if you have not been following these, then you might want to check them out. There seem to be three different forks active at the moment – Expanse, Shift and Soil with the first fork released being Shift, though at the moment Expanse seems the most promising alternative.
Ethereum (ETH) forks:
– Expanse (EXP)
– Shift (SHF)
– Soil (SOIL)
You can mine these Ethereum forked altcoins the same way you can mine Ethereum using ethminer, they use the same Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm as the original they have been forked from. We have published many guides on how to get started with Ethereum using the console and GUI wallets as well as how to mine using ethminer and these guides are applicable to the different forks as well in most part, so if you need some help you can check them out.
The first alternative crypto currency that is based on the Ethereum code called Shift (SHF) has been launched and you can currently solo mine it if you are willing to check it out (source). Since Shift uses the same mining algorithm as Ethereum you can mine the coin using ethminer just like you will do with Ethereum, you can check our Quick Guide on Solo GPU Mining Ethereum on Windows if you need some help. The Shift client is based on geth (Go Ethereum Client) so it is pretty straightforward if you have used it for Ethereum already. The most notable difference with Shift is that they have launched a simple GUI wallet that works requires the shift client also working, but it makes things like knowing your balance and sending transactions much easier than just typing commands in the console. There are already pre-compiled binaries available for Windows and Linux for the client and the GUI wallet, so there is no need to compile from source to get things started.
Update: The first mining pool for Shift is now available – shift.suprnova.cc, pool mining is the same as for Ethereum – help on pool mining. There is also a basic block explorer for Shift (SHF) now also available that may come handy, even for quickly checking your balance when you have no direct access to a local wallet for example. The first crypto currency exchange that has added Shift (SHF) is Bleutrade.
– For more information about Shift (SHF) check the coins announcement thread…
Ethereum has multiple options for clients that you can run in order to have your wallet and operate with Ether (ETH) coins as well as to have access to the network. This allows users to choose what client works best for them and what they prefer to stick with and can also help with issues like with the fork of the network earlier today. There was a consensus issue that occurred on the Frontier network at block 116522, mined on 2015-08-20 at 14:59:16+02:00 that has affected geth implementations up to and including versions 1.0.1, 1.1.0 and develop (“unstable 1.1.0”), while eth (C++) and pyethereum (Python) were unaffected. There was a fix released for the affected Ethereum clients released shortly after and users are required to update their geth client (source) if they are running it .
Since geth is our preferred Ethereum client software and we have been using it for our guides as well, if you also rely on geth you should update it with the fixed version of geth 1.0.2. We have provided a fixed Windows binary in our mining package below that you can download and update on your system. All you have to do is to stop the old client, replace the old geth.exe with the new one provided and run the new geth client software and you should be just fine. After the update it is Ok for you to see an error message like the one marked in red on the screenshot above, this is normal and the error message should disappear after a while when all clients update to fixed version of geth. You are seeing the error message as you are getting connected to a peer with an older version of geth, so once there are no more peers with the older non fixed version the message alert which will resolve itself. Exchanges and pools should update very soon if they have not yet updated to the fixed clients and should resume their normal operation, though there could be some delays in transactions and some issues with transactions sent during the problem with the network.
– Download the fixed version of the geth client compiled for Windows and ready to be used…