Mining Cortex CTXC

How to mine CTXC

2022, September 6th (update 2023, April 3th) by Max Mustermann

In this post I will briefly describe Cortex blockchain, and will provide mining tips for those who want to participate.
There is also attached an example bash script, with will help you to manage temperatures of your NVIDIA cards during the mining.

What is Cortex AI?

Cortex is an open-source blockchain that supports Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to be uploaded and executed on a distributed network. The best way to get an overview of how it enhances the blockchain technology is to view this video, provided by Cortex Labs.

Mining CTXC

Cortex is using a variation of Cuckoo Cycle angorithm. Cuckoo Cycle is promising ASIC-resistant group of algorithm, used variety of blockchains. ASIC-resistance is needed to avoid centralization of mining. The decentralization that is so needed for resistance to censorship, and blockchain security. The variation of Cuckoo Cycle used in Cortex is Cuckoo30.

Mining software

At the moment this post is written, CTXC can be mined with few mining applications.

To start mining

Download the and unpack your selected miner. If your Windows suggest that the miners are "potentially unwanted" software, you may need to select "Allow on device" option in Windows Security settings.

Find the nearest server to your geographical area, and ping it. If the ping is done for less than 100ms, you can consider this server for mining.

$ ping nushypool.com

$ ./miner --algo cortex --devices 0 1 --ssl 1 --server https://nushypool.com:44002 --user [address].[workername]

You can quickly configure your command in our Cortex Page and tap "Start Mining" button.

Tips and tricks

Overclocking

There are many information in Internet with benchmark results for CTXC mining. Each card is unique, and the only way is to check each your card one by one. This is not an easy job, associated with a lot of nerves. Arm yourself with patience.

Challenges to solve

Happily, Cuckoo algorithm does not overheat the video cards. However, at the summer the ambient temperatures are high, and your card(s) can quickly reach 70+ degrees.
How to solve this?
Many miners are installing special ventilation systems. Others are adding air conditioning to cool the air.
One possible approach, is periodically to update the power of your video cards, so to keep them at constant temperature. This approach is applicable for Cortex miners. The electricity power has impact on the hashrate speed, but keeping low the video-card temperature have big impact on its life. If you are mining on Linux family OS, below is a bash script, that will help you to handle it.

#!/usr/bin/sudo bash
  # --------------- BEGIN: Check card temperatures ---------------------------------
  TEMP=62		    # max desired temperature
  MAX_POWER=300 # max power limit
  tmpt_list=`nvidia-smi --query-gpu=temperature.gpu --format=csv,noheader`
  mapfile -t StringArray <<< "$tmpt_list"
  length=${#StringArray[@]}
  for (( j=0; j<${length}; j++ ));
  do
      powr=`nvidia-smi -i $j --query-gpu=power.limit --format=csv,noheader`
      powr=${powr//[!0-9.]/}
      powr=${powr%.*}	
      if (( ${StringArray[$j]} > $TEMP )); then
          newpower="$(($powr - 1))" 
          # printf "Device #%d old power: %d decreased to: %s\n" $j $powr $newpower
          res=`nvidia-smi -i $j -pl $newpower` 
          # echo $res
      elif (( ${StringArray[$j]} < $TEMP )); then
          newpower="$(($powr + 1))" 
      if (( $newpower < $MAX_POWER )); then
        # printf "Device #%d old power: %d increased to: %s\n" $j $powr $newpower
        res=`nvidia-smi -i $j -pl $newpower` 
        # echo $res
      else
        printf "Device #%d max power riched\n" $j
      fi
      fi
  done
  # --------------- END: Check card temperatures ---------------------------------

TEMP=62	      # max desired temperature
MAX_POWER=300 # max power limit

Good luck!

Yours Max Mustermann
Developer, Miner