While Vitalik Buterin is thinking about how to update his Ethereum, pin down miners and untie the hands of coin validators, while he is scaring everybody with complication bomb and PoS transition, big miners and traders shook up the ETC rate this spring. Not only did they show many a path to retreat in case of “fire,” but they gave people with old AMD RX 4GB and Nvidia 1060 3GB video cards a chance to return to normal earnings. The income of such miners depended entirely on mining the cryptocurrency RVN, now there is a choice.
If we turn to the Whattomine portal, we can see that ETC is higher in profit than RVN on the most profitable and old Nvidia 1060 3GB graphics cards.
If we take the people’s favorite AMD RX 580, but with 4 gigabytes of RAM, we see a similar picture.
It is more profitable to mine ETH on the eight-gigabyte version of the RX 580.
ETH mining difficulty calculator (ETC)
For those who want to know if their video card will pull mining this asset, there are several difficulty calculators for mining ether classic (ETC). Finding them through search engines is not difficult.
We can recommend using the Minerstat project. Calculation on its basis is just 7 simple steps:
- Go to “ETC Calculator”.
- Enter the hash rate of video cards.
- Specify power consumption.
- Fix the commission rate of the pool.
- Choose a currency for calculations.
- Insert energy costs.
- Click the “Calculate” button.
Alternative options may also be the following calculators: What to Mine, Profit-mine, Coincalculators, 2CryptoCalc. The site of the latter has a convenient choice with built-in parameters of the most popular video cards.
How to mine Ethereum Classic on a PC
For those looking for data on how to mine on a computer, Ethereum Classic may prove to be one of the most convenient and promising options. Its algorithm allows you to use the most average by modern standards computers for mining.
The main system requirements will be:
- Availability of a video card from NVIDIA or AMD with RAM from 3 GB;
- Windows or Linux operating system;
- Ability to install swap file from 5 GB for the video card;
- Ability to install special software for mining.
You will need to create your ETC wallet with a unique address. To it will come the profit from mining. Both full blockchain storage (Ethereum Classic Full Node Wallet) and its counterparts will do for this:
- a wallet on a cryptocurrency exchange site (e.g., the Matbea site);
- an online wallet (like ETC Web Wallet);
- a mobile wallet.
Programs for Ethereum Classic (ETC) mining
The list of popular and widely recognized programs for mining Ethereum Classic (ETC) includes the following:
- Phoenix Miner – miner, etc (used for both AMD and NVidia video cards).
- T-Rex Miner – Ethereum Classic miner (suitable for NVidia).
- Gminer (universal for two types of video cards).
- LolMiner (another universal).
- NBMiner (NVidia and AMD).
After installing any of these programs, you will need to modify them to mine in one of the pools. You will need to make changes in a file like “start_miner.bat” (batchkit).
You can find recommendations for the creation or editing of batnick on websites etc pool mining. The edits will concern the correct addition of your wallet address. The rest of the information can be simply copied from the example.
Difficulties and possible network problems
Network problems can arise with pools as well as withdrawals of currency to a wallet. When solo-mining, there are often blocks that overheat the video card and do not allow the computer to unravel it.
Advantages and disadvantages
The advantages of Ethereum mining are as follows:
- Convenient and easy to figure out the process on your own.
- Quick updating of the mining software.
- Maximum security of the procedure and its transparency to the miners.
- The system is accessible and inexpensive.
- Constant improvement of the performance of the calculator for Ether.
Protection of users from external attacks.
The currency is promising and continues to gain popularity among miners. But it has a number of disadvantages, namely the instability of the rate. Etherium has a high rate of volatility, so the direction of the currency changes frequently.
Industrial mining of Ethereum
The challenge of the cryptocurrency mining process is that solo mining loses its effectiveness as the cryptocurrency evolves. Solo mining is inefficient because of the appearance of a large number of competition and blocks in the process. When a block appears, a single PC with high power will not be able to solve it and get the cryptocurrency. Therefore, several PCs are combined into pools, and joint commercial mining of Etherium takes place.
Ethereum Classic rate chart
The value of the coin is growing quite steadily, experiencing, like others, small corrections. Why Ethereum Classic rose:
- The crypto market is in a bullish trend – many coins are rising;
- Ethereum plans to switch to Proof-of-Stake algorithm makes miners look at other promising coins which can be mined further, and in the case of Ethereum Classic the yields can be lower but more stable;
- The belief of crypto-enthusiasts in the project and the support of major players;
- Limited maximum supply suggests further price growth;
- The increasing number of developers and traders;
- Stability and reliability of the coin.
Conclusion
For a while after the hard fork, the difficulty of mining will not be very high. The owners of Nicehash have no plans to add ETCHASH support to their platform.
In all likelihood, ASIC manufacturers have not yet released firmware updates for the ETCHASH algorithm for their devices (e.g., Innosilicon A10 Pro). The new version will take some time to be released and tested, which will positively affect the decentralization of the computing power of the ETC network.
This allows us to hope for a good income from mining Ether Classic in the next few months after the Thanos hard fork.
