IRON FISH: big buzz around this new PoW crypto! How to mine it on HiveOS?

Iron Fish had just moved from its testnet to its mainnet, 24 to 48 hours before this video was recorded, and it was already the talk of graphics card miners. In this video (in French), we present the project, look at the hype around it, then show you how to create a wallet and mine Iron Fish on HiveOS, with our settings for an RTX 3070.

Video from April 2023, recorded just after the mainnet launch: the figures and settings below date from that time. See "What about today?" at the end of the article.

Iron Fish, a privacy-focused PoW coin

Iron Fish is a proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency built around privacy: the project's artwork even shows the eye of "Big Brother" watching transactions. A bit like Monero, it aims to offer private transactions that make users hard to trace. The project also plans to offer a way to "encrypt" your crypto, whether Bitcoin, Ethereum or others, by transferring it to the Iron Fish network, where it takes the form of private transactions.

On the mining side, Iron Fish uses the Blake3 algorithm, the same as Alephium. It is an interesting algorithm because it draws little power: it mainly uses the GPU core, not the memory.

Why so much hype?

Many mining YouTubers published their Iron Fish tutorial at the same time, some just a few hours apart. We do not know whether there were affiliate campaigns, but everyone was talking about it at once.

The most striking thing is the turnout: on the main pool there were about 11,000 miners and a hashrate of 2.4 PH/s. For comparison, Ergo had roughly the same number of miners, Flux about 10,000 and Ravencoin, a bigger project, 28,000.

1. Create your wallet with a local node

To get a receiving address, you need to install an Iron Fish node locally. It is fairly simple:

1. Install Node.js, software that runs JavaScript applications, version 18 or later.
2. Install Iron Fish with the command npm install -g ironfish.
3. Run ironfish start, not "ironfish miners:start", which launches a miner.
4. The node then displays your wallet address: copy it to use in HiveOS.

2. Set up the flight sheet in HiveOS

The most interesting miners for Iron Fish are lolMiner and BzMiner. We use lolMiner:

• Wallet: add the Iron Fish address you got from the node;
• Pool: the main pool of the moment, or Flexpool, a pool we used a lot in the past;
• Miner: lolMiner. In "Setup Miner Config", the wallet format is %WAL%.%WORKER_NAME%, i.e. your address followed by a dot and the worker name.

Remember to update HiveOS so that you have the very latest version of lolMiner, released a few hours earlier.

3. Overclocking an RTX 3070

• Memory clock: at the minimum, 810 MHz, since Blake3 does not use the memory;
• Core clock: locked at 1,470 MHz, an average value for a 3070, to adjust depending on the power you want;
• Core offset: around 250;
• Power limit: 150 W, purely as a safety measure, since actual consumption is much lower.

Make sure you do not have other core clock or memory clock settings elsewhere: they could conflict. The result: just over 10 GH/s for 75 to 85 W, about 80 W, and it seemed stable. The expected values shown by hashrate.no for lolMiner were roughly the same.

What about profitability?

Iron Fish had just appeared on hashrate.no, but without showing up in the profitability rankings for lack of a price: the token did not have a value yet. At first, some people were announcing €10, €20 or even €30 per day for an RTX 3070, but those estimates were based on a much lower mining difficulty. So at that point there was no way to calculate actual profitability; we invited viewers to share their opinion in the comments.

What about today?

In April 2024, the Iron Fish network changed its algorithm from Blake3 to FishHash: the settings shown here no longer apply. More broadly, GPU mining has earned very little since Ethereum moved to proof of stake in 2022.

To set up a new coin in HiveOS, read our guide to setting up the next coins to mine in HiveOS and our HiveOS and Windows overclocking tutorial. Alephium, which uses the same Blake3 algorithm, can be mined with our Alephium miners, and all our guides are on the tutorials page.