We are constantly monitoring the performance of our mining pools and thinking about how we can further improve the experience for our miners. June 2019 brings a new series of upgrades aimed primarily at our non-European users. This month we’ve changed completely our servers infrastructure. Thanks to vRack technology we’ve improved the performance of the servers in Asia and US locations. The dashboard code has been updated. We’ve started to implement the SSL connection possibilities to our pools. We’ve been working to launch the Beam pool in June. However, there is a short delay and we expect it to appear later this summer.
Contents
Server Infrastructure Update
Previously, we have been running virtual server instances in the US and Singapore data centers to minimize the ping times for miners abroad. Of course, these were high-performance and not the “$5/mo” servers, but still, our metrics have indicated that this should be improved.
This month we have moved onto real dedicated server pools located in Vint Hill, VA, USA, and Singapore. They are connected to our main backbone servers using a so-called vRack technology that provides faster inter-server connectivity. This resulted in two things: ping times have decreased and CPU performance has increased resulting in higher chances of mining a non-uncle/orphan block. We also contribute to the overall crypto network connectivity for the currencies we support by providing high-speed, minimal-lag backbone nodes in USA and Singapore now.
The screenshot below shows the “before” and “after” for one of the Ethereum Asia server.
The New US and Asia Servers
We’ve implemented servers in US and Asia locations for these coins: Aeternity (AE), Ravencoin (RVN), Grin.
Please note that EU servers are located in Germany, US servers are located in Vint Hill (VA), Asia servers are located in Singapore.
We advise you to select the server which is located closer to you to minimize your ping and share acceptance time (What is share?). You could find the list of the servers on the “How to start” page of every pool. Here is an example for Aeternity Help:
Aeternity Mining Pool is Online and Growing
On June 4th we started the Aeternity (AE) mining pool dashboard. This coin is very important as it has been selected by 2Miners community. Moreover, AE is always among the top of the mining calculators like 2CryptoCalc.com and Whattomine.com
Aeternity mining was engineered by our awesome specialists from the ground up. As you may know, a mining pool can be a mere “proxy” server that routes the miners to the backing node and counts the number of shares submitted. However, this is not the case for any 2Miners pool: due to the high load (as we’re holding as much as 80% of some cryptocurrency hash rate) each coin instance is a separately engineered high-performance solution that is capable of handling as much as 10x of the current network hash rate on a single instance.
This requires careful optimization and custom engineering and clever solutions. So each new coin (especially based on non-standard algorithms and principles) brings us an additional challenge of implementing things up for it. And we love it! This is why we’re taking our time to roll out new and promising cryptocurrency support: we have to make sure our solution is fast, tolerant, and bulletproof so both our miners and the network as a whole could contribute to it. With that being said, we’re wholeheartedly welcoming AE to our family. In less than a month we have more than 200 miners online and more than 4% of the network hashrate.
SSL Mining Pools
Some of our miners were constantly asking us about SSL connection support. This month we’ve started to implement such a feature on our servers.
The mining pools of these coins already support SSL connections: Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Akroma, Musicoin, Expanse, Aeternity, and Monero. The SSL connection works for all the servers locations we have EU, US, and Asia. The setup is pretty simple. You need to change the port of the mining pool by adding 1 at the beginning. Let’s have a look at the basic setup for SSL connection to Ethereum mining pool. The standard EU server address is eth.2miners.com:2020. That means the SSL server address is eth.2miners.com:12020. Here is how to set up your mining software.
Claymore’s miner:
EthDcrMiner64.exe -epool ssl://eth.2miners.com:12020 -eworker RIG_ID -ewal YOUR_ADDRESS -epsw x
Ethminer:
ethminer.exe --farm-recheck 2000 -U -P stratum1+tls://YOUR_ADDRESS.RIG_ID@eth.2miners.com:12020
PhoenixMiner:
PhoenixMiner.exe -epool ssl://eth.2miners.com:12020 -wal YOUR_ADDRESS -pass x -worker RIG_ID
Callisto Halving and Missing Payment
On June 24th the Callisto Halving happened. The block reward has been decreased 2 times. We do recommend all the miners to check the most profitable coin to mine on 2CryptoCalc.com
Our pool is committed to transparency and we strive to provide the best possible experience and reliability to our miners. Unfortunately due to a technical fault on our side related to the upgrade of our database backends on the Callisto PPLNS server, some information related to the foundation blocks and submitted shares was not properly written to the database. This happened on June 4th, 2019 9:19 AM UTC and was completely resolved and mitigated by our DevOps team by 3:11 PM UTC on the same day.
Unfortunately, some information on the blocks found during this period for the amount of 337,000 CLO was not properly stored. We have distributed it among miners active during the period of the downtime manually according to this list.
The cause of the problem was through fully analyzed and we have taken additional steps to make sure it is properly taken care of and should not happen again.
Beam Mining Pool – Work In Progress
We are still working on the Beam mining pool implementation. This coin is expected to be added to 2Miners this summer.
ZelCash Hardfork in July
Tomorrow (on July 2nd) the ZelCash (ZEL) hard fork should be performed. ZEL will switch from Equihash 144,5 to a modified version of Equihash 125,4 on block 372,500. This hardfork should prevent the coin from future ASIC influence. Moreover, there would be changes to ZelNodes. Some Zcash improvements would be accepted too. The hardfork name is Kamiooka. Last week we’ve prepared a detailed article about this ZelCash Upcoming Hardfork and Mining Algorithm Change.
If you want to be the first to mine ZEL on the new algorithm we recommend you to install the Gminer. Download our Quick Start archive. The archive password is 2miners
Here is the basic setup:
miner.exe --algo 125_4 --server zel.2miners.com --port 9090 --user YOUR_ADDRESS.RIG_ID --pass x
Grin Hardfork in July
The first hardfork of Grin cryptocurrency is scheduled on block 262,080 (approx. July 17th).
The mining algorithm would be changed from Cuckaroo29 to Cuckarood29 and the node API would be completely rebuilt. Currently, we are preparing a detailed post for you about this upgrade of the Grin network.
