Today we're releasing a couple of new features, most notably support for mining Ethereum and support for Blake algorithms. There are some important notes about the new features, therefore please take some time and read the rest of the news below.

The feature for mining Ethereum is only for sellers/providers (miners), and not for buying Ethereum based hashing power. Unfortunately Ethereum is quite different from all other algorithms. Most notably there is the need of DAG file and lack of official stratum protocol support. There have been some partial and non-standard third-party stratum implementations, however for NiceHash to support an algorithm, there has to be full stratum implementation in mining software as well as target mining pools. The Ethereum mining ecosystem would have to make some consensus and add stratum support in the full ecosystem - only this way we might be able to implement the support for buying Ethereum based hashing power. Nevertheless mining Ethereum can be profitable, therefore we did implement mining Ethereum with auto-exchange to Bitcoin. This makes mining Ethereum very simple for all existing users - all you have to do is follow the instructions below. Please also note that due to separate systems, the earnings are not merged with other algorithms, however payouts follow the same scheme as for other algorithms.

Download ethminer, build by Genoil with AMD (OpenCL) and NVIDIA (CUDA) support here.

Connection settings for ethminer using AMD GPUs

ethminer.exe -G -F http://ethereum.LOCATION.nicehash.com:3500/n1c3-YOUR-BITCOIN-ADDRESS.WORKER-NAME/WORKER-SPEED

Connection settings for ethminer using NVIDIA GPUs

ethminer.exe -U -F http://ethereum.LOCATION.nicehash.com:3500/n1c3-YOUR-BITCOIN-ADDRESS.WORKER-NAME/WORKER-SPEED

Where LOCATION is "eu", "usa" or "asia", YOUR-BITCOIN-ADDRESS is your Bitcoin address, used for mining, WORKER-NAME is optional to name your rig and WORKER-SPEED is the expected speed of your rig.

Examples

Mining with 2x AMD 280X GPUs on EU location

ethminer.exe -G -F http://ethereum.eu.nicehash.com:3500/n1c3-1DQ4bZpFTDiSNk2CWLEFWK9K96rBFP2Hv.amdrig/44

Mining with 1x NVIDIA GTX 970 GPU on USA location

ethminer.exe -U -F http://ethereum.usa.nicehash.com:3500/n1c3-1DQ4bZpFTDiSNk2CWLEFWK9K96rBFP2Hv.gtx970/19

Additionally we added full support for Blake256r8, Blake256r14 and modified Blake256r8vnl (Vanillacoin) algorithms. Therefore selling and buying hashing power, based on these algorithms is now available. However please note, that selling and buying hashing power for Decred is not yet possible. Once again, Decred is different from other coins and once again the developers decided not to implement the standard stratum support for mining, which is somehow disappointing. If stratum support will be added later on and accepted by the mining ecosystem (mining software and target mining pools) we might be able to add support for Decred in the future system updates.

The support for mining Ethereum as well as all Blake256 algorithms in NiceHash Miner will be added in the coming week. Enjoy all the new features and keep on mining!

Best regards,
NiceHash team