Update VTC & MONA miner setup guide to use NiceHash excavator, as it's faster than ccminer

I think the error response handling is a bug in Excavator, I'm guessing NiceHash made it mainly to work with the pools first.

I've done some monitoring with Wireshark and the response from the pool is for example:

{"result":false,"error":{"code":21,"message":"job not found","data":null},"id":10}

Which as far as I can tell from the stratum specs I can find is correct, it should be an Object with those things not an array (like Excavator is complaining about).

That's not to say that the underlying cause of the "job not found" bug isn't on the pool side.   Given that ccminer enables a stale jobs workaround - potentially due to an underlying issue in miningcore?

i wonder why my hashrate on everypool i try is atleast on average 40 percent lower i also use the excavator miner. i want to mine vertcoin here but dont know if it will be worth yet haha because of the problems the pool is having and i am a single gpu miner

I've been using ccminer developed by tpruvot:

https://github.com/tpruvot/ccminer/releases

But also found another one fork:

https://github.com/KlausT/ccminer

Both of them compiled using olded version of Visual Studio, like 2013-2015, not 2017

I don't believe much it will give some visible boost in mining, but worth to try

Guess Excavator need to be updated to make it more stable on Lyra2rev2 algo, but won't get it updated anytime soon as all of NiceHash money were stolen, and miners mood not so optimistic.

Surely NiceHash will do the investigation, close that security bug, which caused money to be transferred to hacker's account, but people will think twice before returning back to them, or they need to decrease payout time from one a day to at least 4 times a day, so in case you loose, it won't be so much.

I use ccminer_nanashi which is included with Nicehash miner 1.8.1.5 and it gives me about 10% better hash rate than 2.2.3. with my 1080TI's

I'm reading that this fork of the miner is being flagged as malware by some antiviruses. False flag or not, it does make me nervous.

I don't recall it setting off the antivirus but it's possible I guess. It was included with the Nicehash install.

Spent time trying to download it from github and it was flagged by both Avast and Windows. Downloaded earlier versions instead but having trouble getting them to run right.

These days pretty much all miners get flagged by AV because some assholes keep modifying the executables to spread malware. The only solution is to get the miners from reputable sources and pre-configure a special download directory to off-limits for your AV.

Interestingly it doesn't updated since August 2016 and 2.2.3 was released just a couple of days ago

Thx for the reply Max, I'll try this one as well.

Yeah I thought I would try a newer version so I installed 2.2.3 just 2 days ago and it was at least a 10% drop in hash rate for me.  Now I'm not an expert and it's possible there is something else going on I haven't noticed but the configuration was identical both times.

Just tested myself (copied ccminer_nanashi from NiceHash folder) and get the same result as 2.2.3

Will try to recompile this week

Interesting. Thanks for sharing!