The first is always the hardest...

Welcome to the first ever mining update from Luxor. We plan to update the Luxor community on key industry news stories, provide some interesting educational reads, trading updates and any product developments. If you have any feedback on the layout, content we would love to hear it!

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Luxor Update

We just launched a unified global stratum endpoint for our miners. Ping stratum+tcp://btc.luxor.tech:700 to try it out.

The endpoint comes with additional resiliency features. More information on the update can be found here.

Trading Update

Commentary

1. SHA-256 Hashprice decreased as the lower network difficulty (-0.15%) couldn’t cover for the fall in coin price.
2. S17+ prices were reduced by 3%, as Bitmain faces heavy competition from MicroBT’s Whatsminer M20S and soon M30S.
3. After increasing more than 100% to $8 a share last week, Canaan (NASDAQ: CAN) has now fallen back down to $5 as they face both tough public equity and crypto market conditions. Canaan is now trading 44% below their IPO price of $9/share.

Mining News

A few updates the past couple of weeks in the world of mining:

• Bitmain's S19 Series has been announced. The S19Pro is an absolute monster at 110 TH/s and power efficiency of 29.5 J/TH (Release).
• Roger Ver is trying to separate himself from the Controversial Bitcoin Cash Proposal (Article). We do not run a mining pool for BCH, but we are still concerned that the pools that are supporting this are abusing their power as pool operators.
• Ethereum moving to ProgPOW is sparking huge debates on Twitter. Interesting to see how the Ethereum and Mining community is reacting to this (Article). We recommend listening to Hashr8’s podcast with Kristy-Leigh Minehan for more technical details on the topic (Podcast).
• A scathing research report came out on Canaan (NASDAQ: CAN) that accuses the company of misleading investors on some governance and structural issues (Article).
• Layer1 expands operations in Texas with the goal of capturing 30% of the network hash rate by 2022 (Article). This is a pretty aggressive target but we do think Alex is doing some pretty cool things over in Texas.
• Luxor comments on the state of North American mining, hardware and GPU vs ASIC mining in an interview with MinerUpdate (article). Hit us up with any thoughts on the topics we discussed!
• Bitmain announced the K5 miner for Nervos clocking in at 1,130 GH/s and 1,580 Watts (article). This follows Toddminer who also recently announced a miner for Nervos. We are following this project closely, we think the Nervos team is strong and the idea is solid.
• North Korea is scaling-up their Monero mining, potentially as a way to get around sanctions (Article).

Mining Educational Content

Do you actually know what your millions of dollars of hardware is actually doing?

We put together a guide that will walk you through the hash function your miner is performing and explain key concepts like Network and Share Difficulty.

Highly recommend going through this analysis to sharpen your knowledge on mining.

Read it here: Crypto Mining: Network Difficulty, Share Difficulty and Hash Functions

About Luxor

Luxor is a North American mining pool which supports multiple cryptocurrencies. Luxor currently supports the following cryptocurrency networks – Bitcoin, Zcash, Monero, Horizen, Decred, Sia, LBRY, Aion, Komodo, Pirate and Sia Prime.

We also operate a product that allows users of altcoin mining pools to receive payments in Bitcoin.

We can be found on Twitter or Discord.

Footnotes

* SHA-256 Hashprice based on weighted average of BTC, BCH, BSV, & DGB from whattomine

* Equihash Hashprice based on weighted average of ZEC, ZEN, ARRR, & KMD from whattomine

* Scrypt Hashprice based on weighted average of Litecoin, Dogecoin, & DGB (Scrypt) from whattomine

* Ethash Hashprice based on weighted average of ETH & ETC from whattomine

* S9 Prices from Kaboom Racks, M20s from MicroBT, S17+ from Bitmain, & Nvidia prices from Nvidia