A friend recently told me about Ravencoin, a new coin that is mined with the x16r algorithm, designed to be ASIC resistant. ASIC resistance, along with the fact that the devs didn't do any pre-mine or an ICO, piqued my interest.
This is from the ravencoin abstract:
"Ravencoin aims to implement a blockchain which is optimized specifically for the use case of transferring assets such as tokens from one holder to another. Based on the extensive development and testing of Bitcoin, Ravencoin is built on a fork of the Bitcoin code. Key changes include a faster block reward time and a change in the number, but not the weighed distribution schedule, of coins. Ravencoin is free and open source and will be issued and mined transparently with no pre-mine, developer allocation or any other similar set aside. Ravencoin is not designed to be cash. Ravencoin is intended to prioritize user control, privacy and censorship resistance and be jurisdiction agnostic, while allowing simple optional additional features for users based on need."
That all sounds pretty good to me.
Anyway, I wanted to get mining this new coin, and if you'd like to also, here is how you can do it.
You can use ccminer to mine ravencoin with your GPU, in my case an Nvidia GTX 1070
The latest version of ccminer can be found here:
https://github.com/tpruvot/ccminer/releases
Before you begin mining you'll want to download and install CUDA 9.1 from Nvidia:
https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads
You'll want to join a mining pool also, I used suprnova over at https://rvn.suprnova.cc
Create an account on suprnova, and then login to the account and create a worker and a password for the worker.
Extract all of the files from the ccminer archive to a folder on your PC.
In that same folder, create a new text file with notepad.
In the notepad file, type the following:
ccminer-x64 -a x16r -o stratum+tcp://rvn.suprnova.cc:6667 -u suprnovausername.workername -p workerpassword
At the risk of dumbing it down too much, you'll want to use your own suprnova username and workername in this line of text, as well as your own worker password that you created earlier.
save the text file, and rename it mineravencoin.bat
This creates a batch file that will begin mining with ccminer as soon as you run it!
There are more parameters you can play around with using ccminer, you can find more about these in the readme it comes with.
This should be enough to get you started, please comment below if you have any questions!
Happy mining!