Mining Electroneum for fun and... well, fun.
A friend of mine recently told me that he was trying to mine Electroneum but not having luck with getting the software to run and deposit into his wallet. Electroneum is supposed to be the cryptocurrency that's accessible for everyone, allows you to mine on your phone, and it holds the distinction of being the first major crypto project out of the UK, I believe.
I visited their download page, poked around, and was eventually able to compile and run a CPU miner.
There's my laptop hashing away and submitting up to the US mining pool. A calculator online suggests that my ~50 hashes/second might be worth a penny per hour. Nice! I left it running and fell asleep.
In the morning, I wanted to check my wallet balance to see if I'd gotten my first payout yet. After searching a bit, I found a page that displays stats for the mining pool and for your participation in it.
After the miner continued to run all day long, my pool still hasn't found a block! The average time for the pool to mine a block is 6 hours, but this one has taken over 24!
Then I found something else: the minimum payout is 20 ETN. I estimate I might get half an ETN for each block the pool mines. So to achieve my dream of actually mining some cryptocurrency, I'm going to have to leave this thing running for a while!
Anyway, this is just for fun. It would be really fun if it were possible to get in on mining a coin early with modest hardware but actually receive a meaningful gain when the price goes up. Mining shitcoins in the cloud for profit? Hehe.
I really enjoy your posts. The content is honestly above my knowledge base a bit, like the WordPress Plugin you wrote about, but I gotta say I appreciate you diving in and testing these new technologies and sharing your findings. More than anything, your writing has a tone of humor that I would put in the same category of "contagious laughter".
I look forward to reading more of your informative and lighthearted work!
Steem On!
Thanks!
I've tried to keep things somewhat balanced between the really nerdy stuff and some more accessible musings. Glad that you appreciated the humor—I wonder sometimes if anyone gets it :)
It may be good to look at energy cost to mining ratios, which seems feasible here.
In the states, energy is about $0.12/kWh.
If your laptop uses roughly 200W... is that $0.02/hour? Somebody check my math, but you might be losing money.
When I first fired this up, I was pretty sure I would be losing money, which is why "profit" doesn't appear in the title of this piece :) But, you've inspired me to take another look.
Here's a mining calculator: https://whattomine.com/coins/213-etn-cryptonight?utf8=%E2%9C%93&hr=50&p=40&fee=1&cost=0.0816&hcost=0.0&commit=Calculate
That's filled with values that I think are pretty accurate. Our power here only costs $.08/kWh and my laptop's charger puts out 45W (actual power consumption of the machine is less). That works out to about a kWh/day or $.08.
I found a better mining pool that only charges 1% pool fee. Their calculator says ~2 ETN/day at my current hashing rate. So, at $.17/ETN that's $.34/day, which matches what the mining calculator says. My profit then is $.27/day.
This is mostly an exercise in mining because I can and meeting the challenge posed to get this working. However, the really interesting possibility is that the value of these coins could go up. If you started mining really early, you did really well, no matter what the calculations said about how much money you were losing at the time.
A couple more considerations I left out:
Just got my first payout of 9 ETN earlier today. As interesting as the economic calculations are, there's something special about getting paid for running a program on your computer, and I'd say that's priceless!