Posts Tagged ‘ProgPoW miner

The latest GMiner 2.00 miner adds support for the ProgPoW algorithm used by the Super Zero (SERO) project. SERO’s use of the ProgPow mining algorithm is not new,but apparently it has lately caught more attention of users and hence more happening around the project lately. There is a catch however, the ProgPow support of Gminer requires you to have the latest Nvidia CUDA Toolkit installed or you will be getting the “Failed to initialize NVRTC library” error message wen trying to run the miner software for mining SERO. This is a few gigabytes of installation package, though in theory you can get the smaller network installer and select to install only the Runtime Libraries and not the full package that includes unnecessary data as far as mining is concerned and no actual CUDA software development is required… nevertheless it is bothersome requirement for a mining software. Older algorithms supported by the miner should work fine without the CUDA Toolkit, so it is a requirement only if you want to mine SERO with the latest GMiner.

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 v2.00 Nvidia and AMD GPU miner…

ProgPoW or Programmatic Proof-of-Work can be seen as the successor of the Ethash algorithm with enhanced ASIC resistance and while it has been available for a while there hasn’t been that much going around the new algorithm up until recently. The fact that Ethereum (ETH) is considering the switch from Ethash to ProgPoW in the near future has sparkled interest in the algorithm and we may soon start seeing more coins and miners talking about the use of that particular algo. Some of you might remember that Bitcoin Interest (BCI) was the first crypto coin to switch to the ProgPoW a couple of months ago. And while BCI hasn’t been doing that well actually, before or even after the fork to ProgPoW, it is still interesting to note that it was the first to use it and it also provided pre-compiled binaries of the initial miner for ProgPow.

Meanwhile there hasn’t been that much alternative miners up until recently that had support for ProgPow, probably due to the fact that further significant optimizations in terms of performance might not be possible for the available mining hardware. One of the more recent and not very popular yet miners available with ProgPoW support is TT-Miner, a closed source miner with 1% developer fee available only for Windows and working only on more recent Nvidia GPUs. TT-Miner (TradeTec Miner) also supports Ethash, UBQhash and MTP aside from ProgPoW and in our limited experience it has performed pretty good on a variety of Nvidia GPUs.

Another really fresh ProgPow miner that was just made available and that apparently needs more work is Progminer. It is forked from Ethminer and the source is available along with compiled binaries for Windows and Linux, do note that there are separate pre-compiled binaries available for AMD and for Nvidia GPUs, so make sure you download the correct one. This is probably the best miner to go for at the moment for ProgPoW specs wise, unless you have some trouble making it work on your particular hardware as we have encountered some issues already… Feel free to report your issues (if you have) and what performance running any of these ProgPoW miners in the comments below.

A few days ago the Bitcoin Interest (BCI) fork of Bitcoin has successfully switched to the ProgPoW algorithm, becoming the first crypto coin to actually utilize this new algorithm. ProgPoW is a proof-of-work algorithm designed to close the efficiency gap available to specialized ASICs. It utilizes almost all parts of commodity hardware (GPUs), and comes pre-tuned for the most common GPU hardware utilized in the Ethereum network. The design goal of ProgPoW is to have the algorithm’s requirements match what is available on commodity GPUs, so if the algorithm were to be implemented on a custom ASIC hardware there should be little opportunity for efficiency gains compared to a commodity GPU. This all means that in theory the ProgPoW algorithm will not see ASIC mining hardware, due to no opportunity to get much faster speeds compared to what a GPU is capable of delivering. This essentially means that ProgPoW should in theory be a really ASIC-resistant proof of work algorithm…

If you are interested in more details you can check the official BCI website, and miners would most likely be interested in the mining software, pools and a Bitcoin Interest mining calculator in order to see what is the current mining profitability of your GPU rigs. Here you can also find a BCI Block Explorer to see how are things progressing with the Bitcoin Interest blockchain. You might also be interested in the Bitcoin Interest GitHub repository for the official wallets, miners and so on.

BCI ProgPoW Miners:
Nvdia ProgPoW miner for Windows
AMD ProgPoW miner for Windows
ProgPoW miners for Linux

BCI Mining Pools:
LuckyPool
AltPool
Suprnova
CoinBlockers
ProgPool
NibiruPool
BasementPool

BCI Exchanges:
HitBTC
Stex


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