Posts Tagged ‘FeatherCoin’

Mining Feathercoin After the NeoScrypt Fork with AMD and Nvidia GPUs

27, Oct 2014

neoscrypt-gtx-750-ti-opencl

Feathercoin (FTC) has hard forked from the Scrypt algorithm to the NeoScrypt as was announced earlier this year after block 432000. You need to update your wallet to Feathercoin 0.8.7.0 in order to continue using it after the NeoScrypt update and you need to download a special version of cgminer with support for the NeoScrypt algorithm (link below). The goal of the hard fork away from the Scrypt algorithm is to make FTC not mineable with Scrypt ASIC miners giving back the opportunity to GPU miners to mine the coin. Currently the profitability of mining FTC is quite high compared to other coins that are being mined with GPUs, so there is high interest in Feathercoin at the moment. Do note that here is no special miner dedicated for Nvidia miners to mine NeoScrypt using CUDA, however the version of the cgminer with NeoScrypt support actually works quite well not only on AMD, but on Nvidia GPUs as well using OpenCL. The screenshot above is from a GeForce GTX 750 Ti video card at stock frequencies giving a bit over 40 KHS and with some overclock you should be able to push the performance of a single GTX 750 to about 50 KH/S.

Mining with cgminer 3.7.7B with NeoScrypt support (source) on AMD GPUs has something that you make sure to do to get the best performance out of your GPUs. You need to make sure you have Catalyst drivers 13.11 installed, and then run the cgminer to compile the kernel with the settings you are using, then update to the latest 14.9 drivers and run the miner with the already generated kernel (BIN) file with the old drivers. Make sure you don’t change settings affecting the kernel after getting back to the latest video drivers as this will invoke the compilation of a new kernel that will not work and you will most likely be getting HW errors only. Generating kernel with newer drivers and not using a kernel generated with the older 13.11 drivers will not work and you will be getting only hardware errors instead of actual work being done. This is a bit of inconvenience, but you will have to do the driver trick only once and hopefully there will be a fix for this in the future as well as further performance improvements. Currently we are getting about 90-100 KH/s on a single AMD Radeon R9 280X GPU, so the performance on Nvidia graphics cards compared to AMD is looking very nice considering that we are using OpenCL and not CUDA.

– You can download the cgminer 3.7.7b with NeoScrypt support for Windows OS here…

Feathercoin (FTC) Scrypt based cryptocoin

20, Jan 2014

feathercoin-scrypt-crypto

Feathercoin (FTC) is an Internet currency not controlled by any central bank or institution. Feathercoin bypasses the old banking system by using peer-to-peer technology. Payments are borderless and can be processed by anyone with affordable computer hardware using free software. This work is rewarded with new Feathercoins which are issued by the network. Payments are fast, global, and secure with near zero payment fees. Therefore merchants do not have to pass on the cost of business to you the customer, meaning you are able to enjoy spending less on the things you love.

Website
– http://www.feathercoin.com/

Block Explorer / Crawler
– http://explorer.feathercoin.com/

Specifications

  • Scrypt Algorithm
  • 200 Coin reward per block
  • 336 million coins total
  • Block target is 2.5 minutes
  • Difficulty changes every 504 blocks
  • Block reward halves every 840,000 blocks

DOWNLOADS
– Online Wallet
– Windows
– Mac
– Linux

Source Code
– at GitHub

PORTS

  • RPC Port: 9337
  • P2P Port: 9336

POOLS
https://coinotron.com/
https://www.multipool.us/
http://ftc.pro-tech.bz.it/
https://www.nut2pools.com/
http://give-me-coins.com/
http://ftc.hashfaster.com/
http://fc.ltcoin.net/
https://ftc.mining4all.eu/
http://www.wemineftc.com/
http://ypool.net/
https://coinotron.com/
http://www.guugll.eu:11327/static/
http://p2pool.org:9377/static/

EXCHANGES
– Bittrex
– Crex
– C-cex

Litecoin (LTC) and other major Scrypt crypto currencies

8, Jan 2014

litecoin-logo

Litecoin (LTC) is the second most popular peer-to-peer digital crypto currency released as an open source software project after Bitcoin has gained quite a lot of popularity. Similar to Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin generation and transfer is based on cryptographic proof-of-work scheme and is not managed by any central authority and is relaying on a P2P network consisting of the users that are mining the crypto currency. Litecoin is intended by its developers to improve upon Bitcoin, offering new improvements and relying on a different crypto algorithm that made it a popular alternative to Bitcoin. Litecoin was released in 2011 by Charles Lee, a former Google employee, who used the Bitcoin-Qt client as a basis, bud modified it in order for the Litecoin to have a decreased block generation time, increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm, and a slightly modified GUI.

What made the Litecoin very popular and the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization at the moment is the fact that it was one of the earlier alternative crypto currencies that offered both differences and new things that set it apart from the competition. But the most important thing was the fact that it is a Scrypt based and not SHA-256, making it ASIC-proof or with other words not being able to mine LTCs with the already available Bitcoin ASIC miners. This brought back the GPUs as the primary mining solution for generating Litecoins, something that has been left in the past by Bitcoin, so you can say that Litecoin is following in the footsteps of Bitcoin. Another way to look at the to crypto currencies is if we compare the Bitcoin to Gold and the Litecoin as Silver.

Much like with Bitcoin, Litecoin also has a lot of alternative crypto currencies based around its basic code and concept, in fact LTC has much more alternatives that cannot be mined with Bitcoin ASIC. And the fact that Bitcoin ASIC miners are so powerful nowadays there is not much point in releasing SHA-256 based alternative crypt currency similar to Bitcoin, it is better to have it based around Litecoin and scrypt, though lately we are seeing announcements for upcoming Litecoin ASIC miners later that year already. Some of the more interesting and notable alternatives to Litecoin that are also Scrypt-based are: FeatherCoin, WorldCoin, DogeCoin, Lottocoin and many others appearing all the time, though a lot of these don’t get much attention from the users and die quickly.


top