Posts Tagged ‘privacy coin

IronFish (IRON) is a new privacy-oriented Layer-1 Proof-of-Work crypto project that is launching its mainnet tomorrow on April 20th 2023 and that is when the actual mining of the IRON coins will start. IronFish has been in development for a while now and has been running an incentivized testnet for quite some time in order to make sure that at launch everything will be operating properly and everyone will be ready to start mining and using IRON. Every single IronFish transaction is encrypted, hiding sensitive user information on who the sender, recipient, or the amount of transaction was with an accompanying zero-knowledge proof (zk-SNARKs).

The IronFish genesis block will include 42M tokens that will be distributed to insiders, foundation, and community members and to incentivise testnet participants. So, do have in mind that there will be high initial number of coins generated even before mining actually starts, though these will be a 1-year lock-up period for most of these coins, meaning that no tokens can be traded or transferred by an insider for 12 months after the mainnet event. The mining will start with 20 IRON coins per block and a 60 second block time with the block reward going down a little by little every year (not halving every year!).

Now, let us get onto mining IronFish (IRON) coins. Due to the incentivized testnet there are already some pools and mining software available that support the Blake3-based IronFish mining algorithm and you can head on and give it a go mining with your existing GPU hardware. Currently you will be mining testnet coins, but the pools and miners should continue to mine with the launch of the mainnet when that happens tomorrow. This simply means that you can be ready ahead of time and start mining right at the launch, though for that you would need to get the CLI (needs to be compiled) or GUI wallet (node is not syncing) and install it and generate a wallet address that you can use to mine (the address should continue to work on the mainnet, though no coins mined from the testnet will be available there). Pools where you can mine IronFish (currently on the testnet) include HeroMiners, Flexpool and Kryptex and others will probably soon follow with support as the mainnet launches tomorrow.

There are currently three miners available for GPU miners to choose from for mining IRON coins – BzMiner v14.2.0 (AMD/Nvidia), Rigel 1.4.1 (Nvidia Only) and SRBMiner-MULTI v2.2.4 (AMD/Nvidia). Our advice will be to opt out for the SRBMiner-Muilti for the moment as it seems to be faster than the other two options, about 3 times faster on Nvidia RTX 3070 in our comparison tests with similar power usage. Another good thing about the IronFish mining algorithm is that it is a GPU-intensive one, being Blake-based, so memory can run at the minimum operating frequency and you can use a GPU offset to further lower the operating voltage and reduce power usage. In fact, if you have mined KASPA (KAS), Radiant (RXD) or any other of the more recent GPU-intensive crypto coins you should have a good idea on what settings to use for the GPU clock, offset and memory clock in order to optimize performance and reduce power usage (the same clocks should be a very good starting point).

Here is an example command line to run SRBMiner-Multi on Nvidia RTX 3070 for mining IronFish:

SRBMiner-MULTI --disable-cpu --algorithm blake3_ironfish --pool de.ironfish.herominers.com:1145 --wallet WALLET-ID.WORKER-ID --gpu-cclock0 1750 --gpu-mclock0 810 --gpu-coffset0 250

Make sure you set the WALLET-ID and WORKER-ID in order for the miner to properly function and mine to your IronFish wallet!
A good idea to work on is adding Zilliqa (ZIL) dual-mining to go along with IronFish mining as it will increase profit without affecting much the IRON mining, another thing to consider is triple-mining by also adding a memory-intensive algorithm as well in the mix.

Update: Rigel 1.4.2 and BzMiner v14.2.2 updates made them perform faster than SRBMiner-Multi 2.2.4, the Rigel 1.4.3 currently seems to be the fastest option for Nvidia. F2Pool has added support for IronFish mining as well as does not require you to have a wallet address to mine (just when you want a payout). The official GUI wallet has been taken down for now as it is apparently having issues.

For more information about the project visit the official website of IronFish…

There is a new fork of GRIN based on the MimbleWimble protocol called Epic Cash (EPIC) that has officially launched their blockchain a day or so ago. EPIC can be CPU, GPU, and ASIC-mined with 3 different algorithms available for each type of hardware and block rewards are distributed according to a schedule that balances wide distribution with long-term security. One of the main goals of the project is to offer high level of privacy to the users with a monetary policy very similar to that of Bitcoin (BTC). This includes a maximum supply of 21 million coins and a higher initial emission in order to reach and synchronize with Bitcoin in terms of available coins in a couple of years time frame. The so called Epic Singularity will happe in 2028 when the Epic circulating supply intersects the number of Bitcoin’s circulating supply, at which point Epic Cash adopts the Bitcoin block reward and halving pattern. Until then the starting block reward is 16 coins halving around every year initially and then around every two until it reaches a halving every 4 years.

The Epic Cash blockchain is initially available to CPU, GPU, and ASIC miners by using three respective hashing algorithms: RandomX, ProgPow, and CuckAToo31+ wih different percent distribution for each one starting with higher CPU advantage and slowly transitioning to GPUs and then ASICs. Since for the moment there are not publicly available CuckAToo31+ ASIC miners the algo is available for GPUs as well, however work is being done by multiple manufacturers and maybe by the end of this year or early next year such devices might become available on the market (optimistically speaking). So far, so good the project looks interesting and promising, though not everything seems to be that great for non-advanced users interested in mining EPIC. If you are looking for a crypto exchange where you can trade EPIC, then you can head on to Citex.

First of all EPIC can currently be only solo mined and since it is based on GRIN codebase, just like GRIN it is not that user friendly running and mining it. LINUX users have a better advantage as for example the CUDA GPU miner is not officially available for Windows yet and the OpenCL one is giving trouble and using third party ProgPow miners for solo mining the coin is also a kind of a challenge with no pool available yet. CPU mining is working pretty well with the available miner, but solo mining with the already high difficulty could be a challenge for most users to mine even one block. mining pools should be coming out shortly with talk about icemining probably being the first on the train, though nothing official about that yet.

If you are interested in checking out more details about the Epic Cash (EPIC) project…


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