Posts Tagged ‘Grin’

The Second Grin Hard Fork is Planned for January 2020

30, Nov 2019

The Grin project has already successfully hard forked once already earlier this year with a change in the C29 PoW algorithm from Cuckaroo29 to Cuckarood29 and now a second hard fork has been planned. Grin’s Hard Fork 2 is planned for block 524160 that should be reached sometime in January next year (around the middle of the month) with the testnet expected to fork a month earlier. Compatible versions of grin node, grin-wallet, and grin-miner will be versioned 3.0.0 or greater with the first releases of these are scheduled for December.

Grin remains true to its commitment to tweak CuckARoo as part of every network upgrade it does in order to discourage manufacturers from building specialized ASIC mining hardware for it, ASICs on the other hand are encouraged and being developed for the other algorithm C31 that Grin uses. As such, the currently used algorithm Cuckarood29 will be deprecated for a new algorithm called Cuckaroom. This means that if you want to be able to continue mining Grin with the C29 algorithm after mid-January next year after the fork happens you would need to update your miner software to support the new algorithm. The first beta binaries of the software should be available in the next couple of days along with details about the new algorithm, so miner software developers will have enough time to integrate the required changes for the new algorithm by the time the hard fork executes.

New GMiner 1.80 With Support for Cortex and Additional Ethash Coins

26, Nov 2019

The latest GMiner 1.80 miner adds support for the Cortex algorithm used by the Cortex (CTXC) AI on Blockchain crypto project as well as support more Ethash coins along the recently introduced support for Ethereum: Pirl (PIRL), Callisto (CLO), Metaverse (ETP) and Expanse (EXP). Do note that the DevFee on the Cortex algorithm is currently set at 5%, which is higher compared to the regular 2% for the other supported algorithms, though this is to be expected since the official Cortex liner is only for Linux and GMiner seems to be the first with Windows support. When mining Cortex if you get a weird “Write timed out” error you might need to lower the intensity from the default 100 value, use the -i option with a value for each GPU separated by space (single value will be just for the first video card). It also seems that the power usage for the GPU when mining Cortex is lower than the max TDP value at the moment (further optimizations possible?), so the mining video cards are using less power and run cooler.

The GMiner miner software was originally only an Nvidia GPU miner, although some algorithms are already supported on AMD GPUs as well. Do note that GMiner is a closed source miner for Nvidia and AMD GPUs with binaries available for both Windows and Linux, there is a 2% developer fee built-in the software.

– To download and try the latest release of the Gminer v1.80 Nvidia and AMD GPU miner…

New lolMiner 0.9 OpenCL GPU Miner With Cuckatoo 31 Performance Boost

20, Nov 2019

The latest update of the AMD OpenCL GPU miner lolMiner 0.9 brings significant performance boost for the Cuckatoo 31 algorithm used by Grin on 8GB AMD cards (+22% on Polaris and up to 30% on Radeon VII) and reduced Grin stale shares. The new version also has the 16GB solver for GRIN-AT31 disabled as it seems that the 8GB solver is faster at the moment in terms of hashrate. Do note that currently AMD Navi support is disabled for the new algorithms and Cuckatoo-31 on ROCm drivers falls back to 4GB kernel.

Expected performance on Cuckatoo-31 (stock settings):
– Sapphire RX 580 Pulse 0.55 g/s
– Radeon Vega 64: 1.2 g/s
– Power Color Radeon VII 1.53 g/s

We remind you that lolMiner is a closed source OpenCL GPU miner available for Windows and Linux as pre-compiled binaries only and that there is a developer fee for using the software (1% for all supported algorithms). The miner should work on Nvidia GPUs with OpenCL, however stability and performance could be far from optimal, so it is best for use with AMD GPUs. For Nvidia GPU miner with support for Cuckatoo 31 you can check out the latest GMiner, NMBiner or some of the other option like BMiner etc.

– To download and try the latest lolMiner 0.9 OpenCL miner for Windows or Linux…


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