Primecoin mining software
I think that because you can hit a ceiling so fast on the amount that you can invest in mining, it is only worth it if you believe in these less tangible benefits to some extent and you are interested in the technology behind it. On the other hand, if you already have a powerful home PC that you use for gaming or VR, then it is not going to hurt to have it mine at night and while you are at work.
Not all cryptocurrencies can be mined profitably with GPUs. In the earliest days of Bitcoin mining long before I knew about Bitcoin , people could mine thousands of Bitcoins with their CPU alone. At some point, someone wrote a program that allowed miners to mine Bitcoin with their GPUs which allowed them to significantly increase their hash rate.
Eventually, lots of other cryptocurrencies were designed that chose to use different hashing algorithms which could not as easily be mined with ASICs. For example, Ethereum uses a different hashing algorithm that requires lots of memory. In addition miners have to execute smart contract code in order to verify blocks. Finally, with Ethereum switching to proof of stake soon, it would not make sense to design an ASIC that would work only for the next year or so.
With this switch from a proof of work consensus algorithm to a proof of stake algorithm, there is a very small window of profitability left for mining ETH. Once that switch is complete, GPU miners will have to switch to other coins. Fortunately for miners, there are plenty of other coins that can be mined with GPUs. It is likely that GPU mining will be profitable for at least the next few years. Of course miners will have to upgrade their GPUs every years or so to stay competitive because of the Law of Accelerating Returns.
In the long term, I think proof of stake will become the dominant consensus algorithm and more cryptocurrencies will use proof of stake except for the ones where the proof of work algorithm provides some useful result like Primecoin and Curecoin. This is because proof of stake is more secure and uses less electricity then proof of work. When choosing mining software I wanted to use one of the official Ethereum clients so that I could trust that the software did not contain any hidden malware, and to ensure that it did not charge any fees.
For example, the official cpp client includes this text in their Readme:. The support for GPU mining has been dropped some time ago including the ethminer tool. Try using the fork https: To use Genoil you need download a binary from the releases folder in their repo, not the zip on the releases tab in Github. I tried mining with Genoil and got it running fine, but was not able to find any shares within an hour.
While troubleshooting the problem, I found a Github issue that suggested it may be an issue with the latest AMD drivers. One of the replies recommended switching to Ethminer because it is more up to date. I am still not sure what caused the problem, or if I was just unlucky, but when I tried Ethminer I was able to successfully find shares.
Ethminer is a fork of Genoil which seems slightly more active in terms of development. I downloaded the latest version and was able to successfully get it to mine. I am now comparing my results against Claymore's Miner which is the first miner that I used for a few weeks.
I recommend Ethminer because it charges 0 fees, is open source and seems to have one developer who is actively making commits to the project. Claymore's miner is a bit easier to use, but the shadiness of the app makes me want to use something else. It seems that this is a mining client associated with Nanopool. I was hesitant to use this miner for a number of reasons. Fist, the code is not open source. The Github repo belongs to Nanopool and when you look at their website there is no information about whether a company or individual owns it.
The fact that it is closed source and seemingly developed by a person who does not want to use a real identity is slightly suspicious. Another shady thing is that apparently, Windows Defender recognizes it as a virus. From the Claymore Readme:. Windows 10 Defender recognizes miner as a virus, some antiviruses do the same. Miner is not a virus, add it to Defender exceptions. I write miners since So for example if the requirements for a block are a sextuplet with difficulty n, then a quintuplet with the same difficulty could constitute a valid pool share or quadruplet, or whatever the pool operator wishes.
Note that finding a quintuplet is O log p times easier than finding a sextuplet. Pooled mining works because of the many quintuplets found, eventually one will be part of a sextuplet, thus being a valid block. One drawback of this implementation is that miners may optimize they prime number generation for quintuplets instead of sextuplets, finding more shares but less blocks. To avoid this problem, the pool software must validate that the shares do have the potential to be blocks according to some precomputed sieve.
Careful crafting of this sieve will ensure that tuning the mining algorithm for finding blocks instead of shares is still the most profitable way to mine in the pool. Lots of mathematicians study prime numbers. Many conjectures on prime number constellations and prime number distribution in general rely on the Riemann Hypothesis , which has a prize of 1M USD for anyone who can prove or disprove it.
If they are willing to give that much money, it means exploring them should have some value. Even if the only value of Riecoin's proof of work algorithm is getting people interested in prime numbers, it already is worth trying. Rabin-Miller primality tests are probabilistic. What if a composite number is accepted as prime? This is very low. This number is really really low, and it's only for 2 clients: D Now install the requirements for the mining software and then download and install the mining software.
Copy over this line and press enter:. E The command above will take serveral minutes to complete. When the command line shows the " " symbol again you can continue.
The next step is to setup and start your miner. We'll use the Beeeeer. Replace the "your xpm address here" in the command with your real address and copy the command to the server and press enter. Adjust the -genproclimit flag with the number of 's you ordered. You don't need to change the password field. F Congratulations, you are now mining! You can close the browser and the server will continue mining.
The screen output should look like the picture below. The mining speed is accented in the red box. The system is designed so that the work is efficiently verifiable by all nodes on the Primecoin network. Other cryptocurrencies including bitcoin commonly use a Hashcash type of proof-of-work based on SHA hash calculations, which are of no value beyond its own economy. List of largest known Cunningham chains of given length [13] includes several results generated by Primecoin miners.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Archived from the original PDF on Proof-of-authority Proof-of-space Proof-of-stake Proof-of-work. Dogecoin Gulden Litecoin PotCoin.