Pan-African Bitcoin Startup BitPesa Raises $2.5 Milion

The bitcoin payments company is looking to add customers amid expansion.

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Indonesia’s Largest Private Bank Launches $15 Million Fintech VC Firm

Relaxed regulations help Indonesia's biggest private bank bulldoze its way into the Fintech space.

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Japan Could See 20,000 Bitcoin Accepting Merchants in 2017

The number of bitcoin accepting merchants in Japan could quintuple this year.

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Monday, January 30, 2017

New PascalCoin (PASC) Pool with Stratum Support and AMD/Nvidia Sgminer

Another PascalCoin (PASC) pool, one brought by Suprnova, seems to be now open for beta testing, though apparently not fully functional. The new pool brings much better support and functionality as compared to the first available pool from Nanopool, so you might want to check it out. The PASC Suprnova pool offers Stratum support and comes with the familiar sgminer with support for mining PascalCoin on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs, though apparently a version of ccMiner will also soon be available for Nvidia miners… there is also a Windows and Linux miner available.

The pool has not yet found its first block and the payment part does not seem to be fully functional yet, but you can still try the miner and point some hashrate to help in testing things out. The pool fee is 1% and you should be able to do manual payout and not have a minimum payout limit, also stats is working much better and reported hashrate is quite accurate on miner/poolside, the stratum support also should ensure better efficiency. We have given a try of the Windows miner and have noticed it does tend to have a pretty high CPU and memory usage, but it does still seem to work well.

You can check out the new PascalCoin (PASC) mining pool at Suprnova here…
Here is a 64-bit Windows binary of the sgminer fork with PascalCoin support for the pool…

The First PascalCoin (PASC) Mining Pool is Now Online

The craze surrounding PascalCoin (PASC) continues, but aside from solo mining with a very high difficulty that is viable only for very large miners, users with less GPUs and significantly smaller hashrate can now use the first available PASC mining pool from Nanopool. Do note that the Pascalcoin mining pool does currently have some limitation such as the availability only of a 64-bit Windows miner and you need to use the specially modified miner for the pool. Also the minimum payout is 1 PASC with with block reward confirmation after 110 blocks and the pool uses PPLNS payout scheme where N is defined as all submitted shares during the last 3 hours.

Among the good things is the fact that you don’t really need to have a PascalCoin account to mine on the pool (you need to find a block yourself to get an account), instead you can directly mine to an exchange’s account such as Poloniex. You only need to make sure that aside from the exchange address that you will be given you also set the correct unique payment-ID or payload in order to be able to get your payments. It is interesting to note that all of the top miners in terms of hashrate are mining directly to Poloniex addresses, obviously with the idea to trade the mined coins and not keep them long term. This may as well mean that the current high exchange rate may not be able to keep up the selling pressure and as soon as the first pool payments hit it may start dropping, so be wary of that as well.

Here is an example command line for running the miner on Pasc.Nanopool.org:

PascalCoinMiner.exe -s pasc-eu1.nanopool.org:15555 -p 0 -d 0,1,2,3,4,5 -n 86646-64.ab4df757230f6366.480s

In the above example you the very important part is the one after the -n parameter, where first you set the account address (86646-64 is for Poloniex), then the second part after the point is the unique ID being generated from the exchange and after that you can set the worker name such as 480s in the example. The other parameters such as server address, the platform ID and device IDs that will be used for mining are pretty much the same as for the miner available for solo mining aside from setting the pool address of course.

If you are looking for a mining calculator for PASC you can check out the one provided by CryptoCompare here. Be careful with the estimates the calculator is giving you as by the time you actually mine some coins and have them confirmed (it could take a couple of hours) the numbers might be very different. Also make sure that you measure the power usage of your mining rig(s) as the algorithm used by PascalCoin can be more power hungry than what you were lately used in terms of power consumption by other popular crypto coins such as Ethereum or Zcash for example.

To download the PascalCoin Windows miner needed for PASC Nanopool…
To check out the PascalCoin (PASC) mining pool now available from Nanopool…

PascalCoin (PASC) Altcoin Is Currently Getting a Lot of Attention

PascalCoin (PASC) is not a brand new launched altcoin, it has been available for a while already, but the recent addition of the coin to the Poloniex exchange and the high trading volume has sparkled a lot of user interest in the coin. PascalCoin is interesting because of its design to work without a historical operations requirement (no need to download the complete blockchain), yet is still able to control double spending or check balance. PASC is not directly forked from another altcoin and that has its advantages and disadvantages and as a result it is also not very easy to understand how to use it by new users or even ones that already have some experience with other altcoins. This probably also is one of the reasons that there was not much interest in the coin prior to the recent listing on Poloniex, but now new people are rushing in to discover more about it and start mining the coin.

Currently PascalCoin (PASC) only supports solo mining, so you need to have a local running wallet and then run the GPU miner to connect tot he wallet (the latest miner is OpenCL-based), mining with CPU is pointless due to the low hashrate. With solo mining things rely more on the luck you have in the amount of blocks you can mine, but with the current hashrate you might expect to wait something like a day or even two with a 6x GPU mining rig using RX 470/480 video cards and the block reward is 100 coins. Hopefully a pool for mining PascalCoin (PASC) will soon be available as well making things more balanced, especially for people without that much GPU mining power available.

In order to solo mine with the latest PascalCoinMiner v0.2 you need to have a running wallet and then run the miner pointing at the IP address of the wallet running by default on port 4009 (using the -s command line parameter). If you are mining only on a single computer running the wallet you can use localhost, if you want to mine using multiple rigs on a single system running the wallet you will need to use the system’s local network IP address instead. With the -p command line parameter you set the GPU device platform to use (normally it should be 0 for most cases) and with -d you specify the video cards you want to use. The last parameter -n sets the miner name you want to use, below is an example:

PascalCoinMiner.exe -s localhost:4009 -p 0 -d 0,1,2,3,4,5 -n MYNAMEtestMiner

You can download the latest official PascalCoin Wallet Windows Binary from here…
You can download the latest official PascalCoin Miner v0.2 Windows Binary from here…

Open Frame GPU Mining Rig Made with Copper Tubes

Nowadays people are making multi-GPU mining rigs for mining crypto currencies from a lot of different materials – plastic, wood, aluminum frames and whatever they have handy. Peter Selmeczy however did go for an interesting approach with his GPU mining rig build – he went on using copper tubes to build his mining rig. Furthermore he has provided a detailed build of his project, so if you think that the idea is cool, you might want to take a look on how he built his rig. The 4 GPU mining rig he built was entirely made from copper tubes and aluminum joints for the tubes. It all goes together with 8 large 140mm Noctua fans for better airflow and the color of these fans does go along very well with the copper tubes, so the whole thing does indeed look really cool.

Peter Selmeczy has started working on the second improved version of his built that will have all of the GPUs cooled using the Arctic Cooling Accelero Hybrid III water cooling system, 100% of the wiring passed through the copper tubes, the use of cable combs for the wires and have a significantly reduced size for the whole thing. So you might want to keep an eye out on the progress and how will version 2 of the open frame copper tube mining rig look like when it is finished.

For more details about twe open grame GPU mining rig from copper tubes…

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Add2Psu, An Easy and Safe Way to Use 2 Power Supplies Together

Add2Psu is an interesting product that allows you to easily and safely connect and use two computer power supplies together when just one PSU is not powerful enough for your needs. The Add2Psu product was created by David Lorentzen after he found that the standard PSU (Power Supply Unit) configuration in his home server was not meeting his needs. It was not originally designed for use with crypto currency mining rigs, but it has turned quite popular solution for connecting multiple power supplies for such. Power users don’t usually need to go for such product when using two or more power supplies as they know what and how to connect things to make them work. Still Add2Psu makes things very easy for users, both not so advanced and advanced ones without having them rely on some sort of a DIY solution.

If you still haven’t looked into the product, then you might want to give it a try should you need to connect two or even more power supplies together to make them work powering a single system. Besides Add2Psu, there is also a different version called Add2Psu-D and it is essentially the same adapter, but with the option to set a custom delay for shutting off the second power supply. This delayed shutdown for the slave PSU may not have much use for crypto mining rigs or ASIC miners, but it could still be helpful in some specific computer setups. Note that there are many non-official Add2Psu adapters available as well, some of which are very cheap clones that you might want to stay away from as they can actually cause trouble and not help resolve ones.

For more details about the Add2Psu adapter for connecting and using multiple PSUs together…

SGMiner-GM 5.5.5 With Support for ETH, XMR and ZEC Now Available

SGMiner-GM is a revitalization of the sgminer project (source), brought to you by Genesis Mining and being developed and maintained by Philipp Otterbein, OhGodAGirl and Wolf. The latest version sgminer-gm-5.5.5 comes with support for ETH, XMR and Zcash and NiceHash has also just released a fork with support for their services for using the miner for selling your hashrate on their service for Ethereum and Monero. The recently added support for Zcash mining using sgminer-gm relies on the Zawawa’s Gateless Gate implementation, so it is not very competitive as compared to other faster solutions at the moment.

Similar to the Zcash implementation not being the fastest out there, there are also other algorithms supported by the SGMiner-GM project that may not be the best performing for the moment hashrate-wise. You can however try mining Monero (XMR) with this release of the sgminer-gm as opposed to other alternative miners as it seems to be performing very competitively hashrate wise as well as in terms of power usage. Below you can find a Windows binary of the latest xgminer-gm 5.5.5 release ready for you to try out if you want to check it out. It is the official sgminer-gm and not the fork with NiceHash support, so if you want to use NiceHash’s services use the link above to download their fork.

Download and try the sgminer-gm 5.5.5 Windows binary with ETH, XMR and ZEC support…

Bitmain Getting Ready to Launch the Antminer L3 Scrypt ASIC Miner

Another interesting piece of information about the popular ASIC manufacturer Bitmain as apparently the company is planning to launch their first Antminer L3 Scrypt Miner. Some of you might remember that back in 2014 Bitmain was planning to launch Antminer L1 Sctypt ASIC miner, but that one never came into existence. Apparently back then the company reached a stage that allowed even without launching a product to continue working and get an even more efficient solution and here comes the L3. There is some information available about the device already, even though it is not yet officially listed on the English website of Bitmain (you can find a product page on the Chinese one).

You can find some photos and even some early performance results online from peopel that managed to get some early units apparently, including a tweet from charlie Lee who created Litecoin (LTC) about getting one of these devices. More general availability is expected sometimes in February probably because of the incoming Chinese New Year, so we are going to have to wait some more time. What is the most interesting thing about the Bitmain AntMiner L3 Scrypt ASIC miner is the efficiency that the device not only apparently promises, but also delivers – 250 MHS hashrate with just 400 Watt power usage. This makes is significantly more power efficient compared to its only competitor with a recent generation of Scrypt ASIC hardware available – Innosilicon A4 Dominator (280 MHS at 1000W). The price listed on the product page is 1.825 BTC or a little over $1600 USD at the current exchange rate. Do note that the Antminer L3 ASIC does come without a power supply, but with the power usage the device has it does not require expensive and harder to find power supply, a decent 500W PSU should do just fine.

Bitmain Antminer L3 Specifications:
– Scrypt mining hashrate: 250 MHS
– Power consumption: 400W ± 10% (at the wall, with Bitmain’s APW3-1600 PSU, 93% efficiency, 25°C ambient temperature))
– Power efficiency: 1.6J/MH ± 10% (at the wall, AC / DC efficiency of 93%, 25°C ambient temperature)
– Rated voltage: 11.6 ~ 13.0V
– Chip Type: BM1485
– Chip quantity per unit: 144 chips
– Number of boards in the whole machine: 4 pcs
– External dimensions: 230 mm (L) * 135 mm (W) * 158 mm (H)
– Machine weight (without packaging): 2.5kg
– Operating temperature: 0°C to 40°C
– Operating Humidity: 5% RH-95% RH, non-condensing
– Network connection: Ethernet
– Noise level: 60dB

New Bitmain AntMiner T9 ASIC Miner Offering 11.5 THS Hashrate

Bitmain has announced a new AntMiner T9 ASIC miner that should go on sale today for $1104 USD offering 11.5 THS hashrate. The new miner is based on the previous AntMiner S9, though it comes with a bit less chips that are apparently clocked at a higher operating frequency. The new T9 is a bit cheaper, but not as efficient as the S9 as based on the official specs it consumes about 1450W for the 11.5 THS while the Batch 22 of the S9 came with 11 THS at 1078W and Batch 23 was with 14 THS for 1372W. The new T9 miner comes with just 171 BM1387 chips while the S9 was based on 189 BM1387 chips. The two fans cooling the new device are the same as on S9, so you can expect similar level of noise from the device. So in short the new AntMiner T9 does not in fact seem so attractive to miners, but with the lack of new S9 miners you might not have much of a choice…

BitMain AntMiner T9 Specifications:
– Hash Rate: 11.5TH/s. A variation of +/- 5% is expected
– Power Consumption: 1450W +7% (at the wall, with Bitmain’s APW3 PSU, 93% efficiency, 25°C ambient temperature)
– Power Efficiency: 0.126J/GH + 7% (at the wall, with Bitmain’s APW3 PSU, 93% efficiency, 25°C ambient temperature)
– Rated Voltage: 11.60 ~ 13.00V
– Chip Type: BM1387
– Chip quantity per unit: 171 chips
– Dimensions: 350mm (l) x 135mm (w) x 158mm (h)
– Cooling: Two 12038 fans. Front fan: 6000RPM, rear fan: 4300RPM
– Operating temperature: 0°C to 40°C
– Network connection: Ethernet

Genesis Mining Offering Litecoin Cloud Mining Again

Litecoin (LTC) is one of the oldest altcoins and it is still alive, although soon after the first wave of Scrypt ASIC miners appeared the interest and numbers of users mining the crypto has started diminising. You can say that LTC was in a bit of a slumber pretty much everywhere besides China at least until a few months ago when Innosilicon has finally released their A4 Dominator Scrypt ASIC miners. So the last few months things have started to move a bit once more and the development of Litecoin has also been a bit more active with SegWit support getting ready to be implemented as well.

The early Innosilicon A4 Dominator Scrypt ASIC miners apparently had some issues according to users that got the devices and they are still being offered, though with the upcoming Chinese new year there could be some delays if you purchase now. The A4 Dominator is supposedly offering 280 MHS hashrate with 1000W power usage and is available for a price of $1800 USD. You will need to get a power supply for the device separately as it is not included in the purchase price of the miner.

Interestingly enough with the increase of the interest in Litecoin (LTC) you can now again purchase Scrypt cloud mining hashrate for mining Litecoin from Genesis Mining. The cloud mining company has been offering Scrypt cloud mining contracts before, but stopped doing so quite some time ago and it now brings back the contracts again. One can easily assume that their new offers are most likely based on A4 Dominators and the pricing is pretty good as an alternative to purchasing the hardware yourself.

You can get 2 MHS Scrypt cloud mining hashrate for $28 USD, 50 MHS for $650 USD of 200 MHS for $2400 USD as a preset packages or any custom hashrate in between. The Scrypt cloud mining contracts are with a duration of 2 years and there is no maintenance fee, everything is included in the price you pay for the hashrate. You can also use our special discount code CryptoMiningBlog5 to get some extra discount and get even better price should you decide to purchase a Scrypt cloud mining contract.

For more information about the Scrypt cloud mining offers available from Genesis Mining…

Bitcoin is Now 8 Years Old and Over $1000 USD per Coin

Great start of the new 2017 for Bitcoin (BTC). The crypto currency is now trading at over $1000 USD per coin and today also marks the 8th year since the first block with 50 BTC was generated. That was the genesis block of Bitcoin or with other words the first ever block generated for the BTC blockchain. Time sure does fly fast and Bitcoin has been doing very well lately with predictions raging from $2000 USD exchange rate by the end of this year to much more, especially if the economic situation all around the world does not improve significantly in a short period of time. So happy birthday Bitcoin and may be the force be with you or something else along those lines.

For more details about the Genesis Block of Bitcoin on a block explorer…

Hashrate Benchmarks for Monero CPU and GPU Mining

Monero (XMR) has been rising up lately in terms of price and user interest and lately it even started rivaling the total market capitalization of Litecoin (LTC) as well as Ripple’s (XRP). In fact XMR, LTC and XRP and currently pretty close in terms of market capitalization and are seriously fighting for the 3rd place among the top crypto currencies in terms of market cap. With Ripple not mineable it is up to Litecoin and Monero to fight for the miners’ interest and Monero is doing much better lately when compared to Litecoin (ASIC mineable). Even with the availability of the new Innosilicon A4 ASICs being available for a while the interest in mining Litecoin hasn’t picked up much.

Monero (XMR) is gaining more interest however and people are getting back to mining it and trading it even more with new big exchanges such as Kraken adding XMR trading pairs as a result of the huge boom in the exchange rate of the altcoin. If you are interested in mining Monero and it is a coin you are still not very familiar with, then you can check a website dedicated for benchmarks with different hardware and miners to see what works best and what you can expect from your hardware. Also feel free to submit your own benchmark results as well…

To take a look at the website with GPU & CPU Benchmarks for Monero Mining…