So... GPU miner. Spent the last few days figuring out how to make one, and finally got it working. It's a real hackjob. Here's basically what I did:
1. Figured out how to get PascalCoin to compile in the latest version of Berlin/RAD Studio
2. Attempted to modify it to add some type of RPC, encountered way too many issues primarily due to me not knowing the Pascal language
3. Settled on having the pascalcoin wallet write out mining data to a file that an external miner could read, find a solution, and write that solution in a new file
4. Wrote a SHA-256D CUDA miner from scratch to accomodate PascalCoin's larger-than-80-byte header



Not going to quote all of the previous posts since that'll be really confusing, but here's the main questions + other stuff I think people'll be interested in:

1. Is there a GPU miner?
Yes.

2. Is it optimized?
Not really. Took advantage of low-hanging fruit like midstates (so it only does 1/2 the work that a naive implementation would do), but no architecture-specific optimizations.

3. How fast is it?
I'm getting about 270 MH/s on an overclocked GTX 1080, about 190 MH/s on an overclocked GTX 1070, and about 105 MH/s on half of a Tesla K80.

4. How much mining power are you running with?
About 1 GH/s.

5. Would a well-built OpenCL miner on an AMD card be faster than the CUDA miner on a similarly-priced card?
Almost certainly, the performance can be compared with SHA-256D GPU miners for Bitcoin.

6. Will you release the GPU miner?
Yes. Having one person with 90+% of the hashrate is obviously not healthy for the network itself or for the value of the coin.

People are panicking so I'm making this post short, more info to come in a few minutes.

Looking forward to more info Vork thanks for the reply. I have AMD cards and will be GPU mining as well once I can. I like that you are being fair and sharing your info and thanks for the hard work you did making a GPU miner.

Thanks for the info Vorsholk much appreciated.

Mad respect to be honest.
Being able to do such thing is really awesome.
I hope you have a well payed job and doing this now just for fun because you can.

Continued:

Want to chat in real-time? Head over to #pascalcoin on webchat.freenode.net!

The whole point of crypto is that it's decentralized and not under the control of one miner or party. That being said, there needs to be some sort of incentive for people to develop software for the community, etc. And putting up a donation address doesn't really work . It takes a lot of work/expertise to do this kind of thing.

7. Are you going to attack the network?
Absolutely not. There'd be no point.

8. What was the first GPU-mined block?
The first block I GPU-mined was 19751, about 3.5 hours ago.

9. Should I turn off my CPU miner?
Right now, mining is about 3x harder than it was before, since the difficulty is still adjusting to the GPU miner. Once it adjusts, it will be ~5x harder.

10. How do people normally get rewarded for making GPU/optimized mining software?
There's a few different ways:

• Sell it in exclusivity to a large farm
• Sell it to individual users
• Make it closed-source but free to download, with a miner subsidy built in (mines for the developer for a percentage of the time)
• Mine with it privately
• Run the only pool compatible with the miner, and take a percentage cut of the pool's production
• Release it for free/open source, and hope that someone donates to the donation address you post
• Make a public bounty that, when reached, the GPU miner is open-sourced and freely released

11. What are the limitations of the existing miner?
It doesn't do any self-tuning, it requires a miner name of exactly 10 characters, the output is disgusting, it doesn't seem to produce full GPU utilization. It's not user-friendly, and the code's an absolute mess. It's a hackjob.

12. Does the miner work with the default PascalCoin wallet?
No, I had to modify the PascalCoin wallet to make external mining possible.

13. Does the miner work on AMD cards at all?
Nope.

Probably the most profitable way for me to have used the GPU miner would have been low-scale mining for a long period of time, which I obviously didn't do (what's the fun in that?).

Some modifications to the wallet in Pascal, the miner itself is written in C++/CUDA.

info that should be studied for use pascal! thank you Vorksholk

Just choose whatever you reason will keep 1). valid.

Is it possible to setup a community run pool using the miner? I think this will strengthen the network and be really beneficial to pascal development.