Posts Tagged ‘RavenCoin algorithm change’

Ravencoin (RVN) Has Successfully Hardforked and Switched to KAWPOW

6, May 2020

Ravencoin (RVN) has officially hardforked and has switched the PoW mining algorithm from X16Rv2 to KAWPOW. If you are running a local Ravencoin wallet you need to make sure that you have the latest Ravencoin v4.1.0 release installed. Most mining pools and services supporting RVN have already updated and support the fork, though as usual you should be careful moving coins for a while after the fork just to be on the safe side.

The Mining Rig Rentals service for leasing and renting mining rigs has recently added support for KAWPOW rigs, and so just did the NiceHash hashrate selling/buying service right in time for the fork. It will be interesting to see what will happen and if NiceHash could end up being more profitable than directly mining for Ravencoin with the user attention that the fork is generating already. And although the fork should drive away ASIC miners from the Ravencoin network the NiceHaash support could bring a lot of mining hashrate from GPU users that are not interested in RVN itself, but are in it just for the sake of better profit. AMD GPU miners can mine RVN with the new KAWPOW algorithm only using NBMiner for now at least. Nvidia GPU miners have much more choice for mining software such as kawpowminer, TT-Miner, GMiner, T-Rex, Z-enemy and Bminer. The latest kawpowminer and TT-Miner do not have dev fees, others do have 1% or 2% fee, so while performance is very similar with all of them the difference in terms of development fee can influence the decision you make.

Are You Ready for the Ravencoin (RVN) Fork to KAWPOW Algo

5, May 2020

With just 1 day left until the hard fork of Ravencoin (RVN) to the new KAWPOW algorithm everyone that is planning to mine the cryptocurrency once more should be well prepared. There are already a number of miners supporting the new algorithm available, as well as some test pools where you can test and setup your GPU mining rigs for optimal performance. The Mining Rig Rentals service for leasing and renting mining rigs has just added support for KAWPOW rigs, but NiceHash has not yet added support for the new algorithm, so no massive hash going on and off on the RVN network after the fork. The KAWPOW algorithm is a variation of ProgPow and the available miners are offering very close performance, so the deciding factor in choosing should be what you are more familiar with and what works better for you (has less fee, or no dev fee at all, is open source or not etc.). Users with Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti might benefit the most from the new algorithm to be used by RVN, AMD owners with one of the most popular Radeon RX 480/580 GPUs might not be too happy whit the hashrate they will be getting (about half of the GTX 1080 Ti). KAWPOW is more GPU intensive and not affected by the video memory that much, so the more powerful the GPU, the higher the hashrate.

AMD Radeon users are significantly limited in their choice of mining software for the KAWPOW algorithm at the moment as there is essentially just one option available – the closed source NBMiner with 2% dev fee for KAWPOW that also supports Nvidia GPUs. The only opensource miner with no dev fee is the official kawpowminer that only works with Nvidia GPUs for the moment, though AMD support will hopefully be also added. The other KAWPOW miners are all closed source and work only on Nvidia GPUs for the moment, these are GMiner with 2% dev fee, T-Rex with 1% dev fee and TT-Miner with 1% dev fee. Our preferred choice out of these miners at the moment is T-Rex for Nvidia GPUs, though we are still waiting to also see an updated release of the z-enemy miner, so our preference may change in the future. We are also hopefully soon going to start seeing some additional optimizations to help differentiate performance from different miners at least a bit more…

New Kawpowminer 1.2.0 and Raven Testnet Pool on BSOD

1, May 2020

There are just 5 days left before the Ravencoin (RVN) fork to the new KAWPOW algorithm and you should probably get ready for mining. To do so you might want to try the latest official Kawpowminer 1.2.0 bugfix release supporting the new KAWPOW algorithm to be used by Ravencoin for mining after the fork. This release is based on Progminer ProgPoW miner and is opensource and has no development fee unlike some other miners available that also do support the KAWPOW algorithm. Do note that the miner binary release still does not include the required Nvidia CUDA libraries, so you would also need to have the latest Nvidia CUDA Toolkit installed (or at least the runtime libraries from it).

Besides the Minermore RVN testnet pool announced with the initial release of the Kawpowminer, there is now a RVNt pool for testing KaWPOW mining on BSDO Pool as well. You can use the below command line to test mining on the BSOD pool, just set a WALLET address and you should be ready to go:

RavenCoin KAWPOW testnet BSOD pool:
kawpowminer -U -P stratum+tcp://WALLET.worker@pool.bsod.pw:2638

Do note that BSOD pool recommends that you test with the latest Kawpowminer or the latest NBMiner 30.0 as other mining software such as GMiner 2.09 and TT-Miner 4.0.0 apparently still have some issues that need to be fixed for proper KAWPOW support, though they will hopeful be fixed in time for the fork expected to happen on May 6th 2020 at 18:00:00 UTC.

– To download and try the latest official Kawpowminer 1.2.0 miner for KAWPOW…


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