I rarely join the first day release of things, especially apps, given all the bugs and the frustration of queing up for maxed out servers. But with all the buzz surrounding Electroneum smartphone mining, I decided to go forward with this whole thing on day one, and so far it's been a pretty crypto-newbie friendly experience!
Last time I did the whole wait until midnight thing for an app was probably back on the night Pokemon Go came out. I joined a buggy, free-for-all battle in the middle of the night at a park in St Herblain in Nantes, France, with whoever was geeky enough to have downloaded the APK anticipating a late Euro release.. Anyway, I'll save that story for some other time.
Setup
So I downloaded the Electroneum miner app from Google Play. Then I went to the site, went through all the steps for creating an account and so on. It's pretty straightforward, but maybe I'll post a guide later. Basically you create an account, are given an offline wallet to print out, an online wallet that you can start mining on immediately, and off you go.
The security seems pretty good, you have a password and a PIN as well. When you log in a new ip/device it prompts the PIN and also a email verification. In terms of cybersecurity they seem to have their shit together, so that is encouraging.
How the App works
So it's an app that runs in the background, like any other, with minimal interference or push notifications (except to notify you it's in the background!). Once installed, log in, click the miner and off you go!
As of now it's only available for Android but the iOS version is set to be released later this week.
Basically the catch with this whole thing, in case you didn't know, is that the smartphone isn't actually mining, but rather "simulating" mining. Many people were freaking out, with reason, that it would shorten the lifespan of their phones, drain battery and so on. They call it a "mining experience", which will probably help them get through the Apple App Store approval process given it won't be burning up any iPhones anywhere.
The way it works is it calculates what your hash rate WOULD BE if the phone was ACTUALLY mining. So a Galaxy S8 will mine much faster than my puny S3, It consumes very little data and cpu power, and just sits there mining coins for you in the background.
This all gets stored in your online wallet, which then can be used to trade into Bitcoin or another Altcoin, then into euros, dollars, etc. Alternatively you can transfer your Electroneum (ETN) to your offline wallet or another ETN wallet as you would any other cryptocoin.
I ran the app on my Galaxy S3 and it was pumping out a crappy hashrate of 2 h/s, which amounted to maybe a few cents of ETN per day...Of course I tested it on my friends phone, and after confirmed reports of 20 h/s + on better phones, I realized it's time for an phone upgrade :)
Issues with the App
The app itself is still running rather buggy on my S3, which I still haven't fully figured out why. It may simply be related to my phone being old/too much crap installed on it, but I was having an issue with the miner stopping randomnly as well.
Sometimes it seemed the miner was offline, which they did report at moments on their twitter/facebook, but at times it would just randomnly crash. Oddly that would happen, and when I logged back in my coins had updated, so maybe it that triggered it.
Either way, the miner goes into offline mode, and the button becomes unclickable. Restarting the app just makes it hang on the intro screen, so the only work around I found was to re-install the app, and re-login and it works..
So aside from that frustrating little bit of having to re-install the app a few times a day, it seems to be mining perfectly fine. And mind this issue happened on my S3, my friend's S8 ran smoothly for the most part, and experienced only the miner offline thing a few times.
There wre also about 50,000 people right of the batf the first few days, which went up to nearly 55,000 by the time I'm writing this, so that's a bit of traffic. They've also doubled the miner rewards which is pretty cool, since it seemed like it was taking forever to mine. There is also a hardcap on the hashing, I'm not sure but I think I heard it was 100 h/s or so, as well as a IP limit per account to keep things fair.
Overall the app is working well and to be fair after one week of launch I'd say it's pretty stable, and the experience of mining a cryptocoin for the first time has been pretty cool!! I decided to try my hand at actually setting up an old pc to mine Electroneum as well, and I will talk about that in my guide for newbies in the next post!
Why Electroneum?
I'll stop here to address why this cryptocurrency in particular, like Steem, are what I'm going with in 2018, since I believe they share some parallels in terms of the opportunity they offer. Mainly, the chance for people in developing and low-income countries to earn a small amount of cryptocoin. When your ruthless government steals most of your income in taxes anyway, at least you have a way to earn income on your own terms! :)
Bring on Steemit and of course Electroneum as well! The whole pitch about making the cryptocurrency accessible all over the world, to help pay off mobile bills, and trade into Bitcoin makes it pretty damn cool coin to invest just based on purpose and intent. Realistically, I'm not sure how it's all going to go down, but for the most part I'm going with intuition on this one..
A Coin for Travellers and Digital Nomads
I also see another potential benefit for travellers and digital nomads from Electroneum. If most of us do travel/live between 3rd world nations, Electroneum could become the best currency to load up on before you travel anywhere in the world. It might be hopeful to expect to check in to a hotel or Mcdonald's by QR scanning your Electroneum bitwallet, but technology has made stranger things happen!
So this reason is more of my far-fetched projection of what this could become and why I'm choosing to support it, just like Steem, which I covered in another article..and if I didn't I will! eventually :)
Gotta mine'em all, all 21bn!
While on the topic of far-fetched projections, something else I learned during my tireless week of Electroneum education/research. Apparently there are limited ETN, and right now they are valued at $0.05 to the dollar more or less. Which seems pretty shitty right?
But given the cap, these coins can go up to a max value of $11 dollars or something like (unverified source). So in a way, going into this thinking it will balloon into something like Bitcoin, nah, that ain't gonna happen!
On the other hand, even if these things hit $5 dollars in the next few years, those of us early adopters can be in for a big pay day!
Which is ironic, given that this concept was made to help those that have low income in developing countries to have access to coins, and now people are wiring up huge machines to mine the crap out of this...but at the same time you have people like myself and others, who might actually spend a good portion of those massive earnings, if they ever do come, in those countries, helping their economies, going full-cycle, and essentially making Electroneum work as intended :)
I always encourage open discussion, if anyone has any comments, tips, suggestions or would like to mention their experience please comment!
Thanks for reading!
P.S:
In case you do decide to join the revolution or whatever, sign up here with my QR CODE/Ref number!!!!!!!!
***Note that this is not a referral affiliate commision type code where you earn some kind of pyramid scheme commision for people signing up.. It's simply a weekly raffle for a chance to earn 5000 ETN, for both the referrer and referree, or however you'd say it. Here is a link with the full explanation of how it works :
https://electroneum101.com/electroneum-referral-system/
Happy Mining _