Posts Tagged ‘FTC’

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…

U.S. Court Halts Bitcoin Mining Operation Butterfly Labs

23, Sep 2014

butterfly-labs-logo

The news agency Reuters has just reported that a U.S. court has shut down Butterfly Labs, a Missouri company, which the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges for deceptively marketing Bitcoin mining hardware.

“The FTC’s complaint against Butterfly and its corporate officers alleges that the company charged consumers thousands of dollars for its bitcoin computers, called BitForce, but then failed to provide the computers until they were almost obsolete, or in many cases did not provide the computers at all.”

“Butterfly sold its computers from $149 to $29,899 based on the machines’ purported computing power. The FTC said that more than 20,000 consumers had not received the computers they purchases as of September 2013.”

At the time of writing this the Butterfly Labs’ website is still online and there is nothing official coming from the company as a response to the court ruling. We can’t say that we are surprised from this development as Butterfly Labs as one of the first makers of Bitcoin ASIC miners probably was not ready for the overwhelming user demand and a for months and years they literally failed to gt a hold of what was going on with the Bitcoin market and continued to take pre-orders of hardware that they were apparently not capable of delivering. We’ll see if other crypto currently mining hardware companies would suffer the same fate.

– To read the complete Reuters report on the court ruling for the company Butterfly Labs…

CEX.io Adding LTC Mining to their Pool, LTC Cloud Mining Coming?

11, Mar 2014

ghash-io-ltc-mining-pool

It seems that the CEX.io cloud mining service for Bitcoin has added support for Litecoin (LTC) mining in their pool Ghash.io and this could also be a sign that the service might also plan on introducing Litecoin cloud mining soon. The LTC mining pool is with a mining fee of 0% just like the fee for the Bitcoin mining pool.

Stratum Server: ltc.ghash.io:3333. Please use -scrypt -o stratum+tcp://ltc.ghash.io:3333 in your command line. You should name your workers username. (e.g. username.worker1). Workers are added automatically, you can use any/empty password.

For the moment there is no official information about the addition of LTC mining pool or any future plans for adding LTC cloud mining capabilities, but we suspect that this is something that might soon happen…

Update: More alternative crypto pools are appearing on Ghash.io, aside from LTC there is now DOGE, AUR and FTC. Though unlike with LTC there is nothing yet in the CEX account balance for other new crypto coins, so it is a bit unclear how you will be getting the coins if you start mining them now.

– For more information about the Ghash.io mining pool and to try the LTC mining functionality…


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