Last Night the Zcash team released an update to the Testnet, version “z8”. This new update has a number of improvements to the Equihash miner which greatly improves solve times and allows for more solutions to be found with multiple threads.
Z8 also includes a great benchmarking tool update. Previously you were able to measure your computers hashing performance by using the “solveequihash” command but it was only able to run on a single thread so it was not accurate for a multi-core machine. To benchmark your hashing power use
./zcash-cli zcbenchmark solveequihash 1
You need to re-download and re-compile Zcash to connect to the new Testnet server. I have also been hearing reports that the new version uses more memory when compiling so if you have compilation errors try increasing the memory allocated.
Full blog post below:
Simon Liu | Aug 06, 2016
Today, we deployed a new alpha release of the
Zcash reference implementation,
v0.11.2.z8, to the testnet. The new release includes the following changes :
- Equihash mining parameters have been adjusted to n=200, k=9 to reduce average solution search time to <45 seconds, and average time-to-first-solution to <30 seconds. (#856)
- The Equihash miner will now interrupt and cancel an existing solution search when a new valid block arrives. (#1055)
- The Equihash miner will now check solutions as soon as they are found. (#1143)
- Transaction malleability has been fixed so that valid transactions can not be modified in-flight. (#1144)
- The SIGHASH_SINGLE bug has been fixed. (#1078)
- Compilation flags have been updated to harden security. (#1064)
The zcraw* RPC commands are still available for use but will be deprecated in a future release.
This alpha release will reset our testnet, invalidating all previous coins and breaking backwards compatibility.
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