Exploits of a Burstcoin Miner

Mine Some Burst catalogs the adventure of becoming a Burstcoin Miner! Burstcoin or BURST is a cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin that uses a Proof of Capacity model, which is much more eco-friendly and makes a better case for decentralization.

A Year In The Life (of a Burstcoin Miner)

It’s been a little over a year now of mining burstcoin, so let’s see how I’ve done. Am I rich? Am I Lambo to the moon rich?? When I started, I invested $505 in hard drives. The calculator put me at 1159 days to turn a profit and I should have forged 11 blocks at this point, based on probabilities. The date that I pay off my investment was originally set at July 21, 2020,… Read more »

Compiling BRS 2.2.7 “Eschaton” From Source

There seems to still be some confusion and/or questions about the BRS 2.2.7 software and it’s trustworthiness since the PoCC decided to step away from their roles as the lead Burstcoin developers earlier this year, so below I’ve laid out some steps to test the software for yourself. It’s important to note, that this method is only reviewing the changes from 2.2.6 to 2.2.7. It is not a complete software review. Step 1: Review The… Read more »

The Bitcoin Hard Driver Debacle

It’s been a busy couple of months with my day job, so I haven’t had a lot of time and/or energy to focus on all the cool stuff going on with Burst, but as most of you reading this (does anyone read this?) has already heard.. here’s something that is extremely NOT cool. In August of this year (2018), a new coin named “Bitcoin Hard Driver” came online, which uses almost exactly the same Proof… Read more »

Compiling Scavenger From Source to add OpenCL Support

Now that I have Scavenger up and running on the ODROID-XU4, it’s time to do a little optimization to see how much I can really get out of it. For this I’m going to use 1.6.0 from the releases page. Download Source code(tar.gz). The development team has some really great information on all of the configuration options on the github wiki, so make sure to check that out if you’re going to try this on your… Read more »

Scavenger 1.6.0 vs. creepMiner 1.7.18 – 32 Bit Showdown

On October 8th, Scavenger 1.6 was announced, which is pretty exciting for us miners using Linux on a 32-bit ODROID-XU4! Not only does the 1.6 update add support for 32-bit machines using ARM7, but it also has NEON support! Scavenger 1.6 can be downloaded on the PoC-Consortium GitHub page here. Previously, I had started a little work on a few projects that might have sped up my mining rig, including porting Blago’s miner, adding NEON… Read more »

Norton Antivirus Flags Cryptocurrency Miners

It’s been a while since I’ve started up my Burst Wallet, and today I was in for a surprise! Norton 360 Firewall blocks all attempts to communicate! Poor wallet. All it wanted to do was requestType=getBlock. This is HIGHLY annoying since the Norton notification on Windows 10 pops up every 2 seconds as the wallet tries to keep updating. So what’s going on here? I’ve already added a rule for Norton to ignore BlagoMiner_AVX2 (which… Read more »

Burstcoin Mining on an ODROID-XU4 and creepMiner OpenCL

This post is a follow-up to a question posted by Anton on my earlier article about setting up the ODROID-XU4 as a Burstcoin mining rig. Anton asked if the ODROID-XU4 could handle running creepMiner with OpenCL, and as it turns out, yes it can! If you look at the ODROID specs on the Hardkernel site, you’ll see that it supports OpenCL 1.2 Full profile. This means I should be able to run creepMiner in that… Read more »

PoC1 to PoC2 Burst Plot Conversion Results

These results are from over a month ago at this point, but I thought it would be worth posting for anyone who is still converting (hopefully nobody) and those who read this blog (definitely nobody.) The Seagate conversion went MUCH better than expected and I absolutely recommend converting the SMR drives vs. re-plotting. The final result using Johnny’s converter was a little under 34 hours, which compared with the 190 hours to initially plot is… Read more »

Burstcoin PoC1 to PoC2 Conversion Speed Tests

Before converting my entire mining capacity, I wanted to do a few tests to see what might make the most sense. Would it be better to convert one drive at a time? Would it make more sense to convert all at once? Is converting faster than re-plotting? To get some results without taking hours or ruining perfectly good plot files, I started creating some 5GB plots with TurboPlotter 9000. From my previous 500GB conversion, I… Read more »

Adding a PoC2 Plot File to the Burst Mining Mix

The old 500GB Western Digital My Book (USB 2) finished converting from the PoC1 format to PoC2 in 7 hours, 24 minutes. I don’t know why exactly it took so long, but now it’s time to add it to the ODROID-XU4 Burstcoin miner that I have set up. The first step will be to download and compile the new creepMiner that’s compatible with PoC2 plot files. I’ll be using the 1.7.18 version, which can be… Read more »