Posts Tagged ‘Ethereum pool mining’

ETH Nanopool, One More New Ethereum Mining Pool

19, Aug 2015

eth-nanopool-ethereum-mining-pool

It seems that now we have another mining pool for Ethereum available, what seems to be the third one actually. The new pool ETH Nanopool is also in a testing phase with a zero pool fee while in testing period and 0.01 Ether fee per payout with payouts made 2 times a day, the payout scheme used is PPLNS. Do note that there could be issues with this pool while it is in beta testing stage, so you might want to spread your hashrate between the two currently open for new miners pools and maybe even solo mining. Ethminer works just fine with this pool and you can use our Quick Guide on How to Mine Ethereum on Windows to get started with this new pool. There is one important different that ETH Nanopool has compared to the other two mining pools already available and that is the lack of user setting for the difficulty. This should not be much of a problem for people with more hashrate, however for users with less hashpower this pool might not be a very good place to try to mine Ehther (ETH) coins.

Getting started with Nanopool:
ethminer -F http://eth1.nanopool.org:8888/0x683feddafc2a8542744a4587de0c45626d7b8e68 -G

The above command line is an example you can use to get started mining with ethminer at Nanopool, you just need to replace the wallet address with your own Ethereum wallet. Since this pools does not support user setting for the mining hashrate (share difficulty) there is no parameter used for that in the ethminer command line, as a result it is not very suitable for miners with low hashrate as the default difficult may be too high. The above line is for mining using the OpenCL version of ethminer, for using the CUDA fork you need to replace the parameter -G with -U and you should be ready to go.

– To check out the new Ethereum mining pool ETH Nanopool (in beta stage)…

Pooleum, a New Ethereum Pool In Pre-Alpha Phase

18, Aug 2015

pooleum-new-ethereum-mining-pool

Since Ethpool, the only Ethereum pool up until now, stopped accepting new miners everyone else that wanted to mine for Ether (ETH) had to go solo mining. The good thing is that the community has reacted to this and started working on solutions to this problem with a Bounty being offered for an open-source Ethereum mining pool and releasing a new mining pool even though it is still in pre-alpha phase and there could be a whole lot of issues with it. The new mining pool for Ethereum is called Pooleum and it functions in a very similar way to Ethpool, essentially offering an alternative, though it is not yet so nice looking or with the full functionality. As already mentioned it is in pre-alpha stage and needs some work, but you can try mining with a single GPU if you have more than one at the new pool and reporting any issues you may find, so that we can get a good working alternative to Ethpool in no time. You can use our Quick Guide on How to Mine Ethereum on Windows to get started with the new pool, just replace the pool information, the rest is the same.

Update: We would advice to avoid this pool as apparently it has been left nonfunctional refusing connections for over 24 hours already!

Some Updates and Additional Tips for Mining Ethereum

14, Aug 2015

ethpool-no-new-users-accepted

Mining for Ethereum’s Ether (ETH) coins is turning out to be a problem as it is still in its very early stages, it is still hard for non-advanced users to get started with it. Evven when you follow a guide like our guide on How to Mine Ethereum on Windows yuo can get to another challenge like the mining pool refusing your connections. This has happened today with the ethpool stopping to accept new miners resulting in connections for users trying to use new wallet addresses getting refused while all older miners can still continue to use the pool. The problem here is that ethpool is still the only Ethereum mining pool, so now the only alternative for new users is to solo mine – we have prepared a guide on getting started with Solo GPU Mining Ethereum on Windows. With solo mining however the risks are higher, but the rewards can also be higher if you turn up lucky, there is however no point in solo mining with CPU as the hashrate will be pretty low and you will need a lot of luck to hit a block.

We have updated our mining package that includes the geth client for generating a local Ethereum wallet and also needed for solo mining to the latest version, it is compiled for 64-bit Windows. The package also includes two versions of ethminer (also 64-bit only), the standard one with CPU and OpenCL mining as a part of cpp-ethereum and a second one forked to support CUDA as well. Note that the CUDA version can be used to mine with the CPU, OpenCL and CUDA and you should be are able to use OpenCL on Nvidia GPU’s as well. The CUDA miner should work on GPUs with Compute 2.0 or later, but if you are having trouble running the CUDA miner you can try with the OpenCL one, the resulting hashrate should not be much different between the two implementations. Also we have discovered that adding the parameter “–gpu-batch-size 20” (without the quotes) to the CUDA version of ethminer (works with the OpenCL setting of that miner as well) can increase a bit the performance you get, so we have added it by default to the example bat files for the CUDA version. The hashrate improvement is actually pretty small on Nvidia GPU’s, but on AMD cards using OpenCL it can give better results. We got up from about 24.4 MHS on Radeon R9 280X to about 26.5 MHS by adding the parameter, be aware however that this parameter is only available in the CUDA fork of ethminer.

Another interesting tip regarding issues with low hashrate, either local or reported by the pool, is to try deleting the DAG files that are being generated the first time you run ethminer. Sometimes when you are playing with different settings for the miner it seems that the DAG files may not work that well, so deleting them and having the miner generate them again with the latest settings can bring back the usual performance. So if the locally reported hashrate by the miner suddenly drops or the pool reports only a small fraction of what your total hashrate should normally be you can try deleting the DAG files and having them generated again. On Windows you can find them located in the AppData / Local / Ethash folder under your computer’s Username in the Users folder (example: C:/Users/myPC/AppData/Local/ Ethash). You may need to enable the showing of hidden system files first in order to see the needed folders in Windows Explorer if you have not enabled it already.

– Download the latest geth and ethminer compiled for Windows and ready to be used…


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