Disclaimer: I have taken part in the EasyMine ICO (Initial Coin Offering). My reasoning behind why I have done so is explained below. I am in no other way affiliated with the company but believe in the project and the opportunity it presents to individuals and to people like myself who lack the technical knowledge necessary to effectively mine. I am not a financial advisor and am merely presenting my opinion. Do your own research before investing into any ICO.
On a sidenote, if you agree with my thoughts on the prospects of this opportunity, please feel free to up-vote my post to help spread the word!
In the Beginning
In the beginning, there was Bitcoin, and all you needed was your Bitcoin client. By dint of being a node, you were a de-facto Bitcoin miner, and it was all good because you found lots of Bitcoin falling into your lap because there wasn't very many of you.
The problem later, however, was that Bitcoin got very popular. The hash rate jumped, and those who were ahead of the game set up their own dedicated mining rigs. These days no-one can expect to mine Bitcoin profitably - or anything else for that matter - unless they become a specialised miner. To be a specialised miner, however, means forking out on hardware and developing the specialised technical skills necessary to flash your BIOS (not that many of us actually know what that means exactly).
Once the mining farms became firmly established, the most practical way of acquiring Bitcoin has simply been to go through an exchange by paying for it with good old-fashioned fiat currency. That wasn't the intention of the original Bitcoin designers.
The Diminishing Returns of Mining Pools
Since mining rigs were slightly too complicated for the average Joe, a new idea then sprouted to keep the average Bitcoin stakeholder in with a chance of benefiting from the Bitcoin mining process. These were the so-called mining pools which were created to harnass the combined processing power of individual desktops.
Each participant in a pool would then be rewarded with a micro-share in the spoils when the mining pool managed to solve a block. The problem was, however, that it was becoming all too rare for these mining pools to solve blocks ahead of the Bitcoin-optimised chips of specialised mining farms.
The spoils, then, were much too small to act as any real incentive for the Bitcoin masses to take an interest in pool mining, and specialised mining was beyond the reach of most. Even for specialised miners, specialised mining isn't particularly fun because the processes involved are high maintenance. In the context of the new Blockchain revolution inspired by Ethereum, however, the people at EasyMINE believe they just may have a solution to democratise mining once more.
EasyMINE: The Advent of Click-and-Drag Mining
As the EasyMINE white-paper itself points out, mining is a complicated process and has become a profession in itself. Their solution, then, is to propose an autonomous module that manages the mining for you whilst serving up a front-end dashboard that provides the user with the ability to monitor reports on the mining process, generate statistics and apply configuration changes to the mining set-up.
Where things get really interesting, however, is with the adaptability that EasyMINE intends to bring to the table. EasyMINE aim to provide a single front-end for a whole plethora of cryptocurrencies. That appears to be the game-changer here. The miner can choose his own currency to mine or - even better -ask his module to go mining for the most profitable currency of the moment.
The only catch is that the list of currencies that can be mined by the EasyMINE solution need to be based on the Proof-of-Work protocol.
"A-ha," we say, "but isn't Ethereum moving over to Proof-of-Stake [PoS]? And aren't most tokens currently derived from Ethereum?"
We think, of course, that our observation puts an end to any vision of the long-term viability of the project. Ethereum's announcement of its medium-term intentions of moving over to PoS, and the implied knock-on effect for its derivate tokens (most new tokens are derived from Ethereum) seems to suggest that the EasyMINE project, whilst laudable, may be doomed for failure.
"Well," we are told, "easyMINE is predicated on the assumption that Proof of Work will continue to play an important role in the cryptocurrency business for at least another decade. What will happen after that is anyone’s guess. As an aside, it should be noted that Ethereum’s move to Proof of Stake does not affect the overwhelming majority of ETH-based tokens, since they are not mineable anyway."
Aaah, good point. It is another sign that the EasyMINE team has been applying the kind of due diligence that we find lacking a little bit too often in the general ICO space. These do not appear to be boys and girls jumping on the Blockchain band-wagon to make a quick buck before abandoning ship. But looking at the composition of the team behind EasyMine, one can't help but get the feeling that they are perhaps a bit too top-heavy with engineers. They have a team of one focusing purely on the marketing aspects of the project.
"Do you think this will be enough to get the message out there?" we ask.
"We have one designated marketing specialist, but that doesn’t mean we only have one person focused on the marketing aspect of the project," comes the reply.
Prospects for Adoption, Prospects for the Token
Some may remain sceptical about the EasyMINE proposition. The Proof-of-Work dependency will be seen by some as the most crucial question in this whole project. Aside from that, there is - as with any ICO, of course - lots of room for doubt about the prospects of this project to gain mass adoption.
EasyMINE, however, seem able to lay some aspects of this concern to bed - along with the vast army of individuals out there who have expressed an interesting in taking part in the Beta, specialised miners have also been reaching out to participate in what they hope will be a product where mining can become an activity where maintenance is now minimised and profitability maximised. The Beta adoption appears to be a promising sign.
Miners who purchase the EasyMINE software will then need to go to market separately to pick up the EasyMINE tokens with which to run their mini-rigs. Our concern here, however, is that the pricing distortions brought by the usual hoard of speculators attacking the currency in the hope of a quick buck could jeopardise a miner's ability to make a profit, particularly in the project's infancy, arguably its most critical phase.
EasyMine's retort is that they plan to lower their own fees if such scenarios do arise. As part of the business model, they take a commission on the mined currency from EasyMINE's subscribers. That commission will be adjusted downwards, they tell us, to ensure that profitability is maintained where necessary. That should reassure future EasyMINE miners who, in any case, do not pay any costs upfront.
The most reassuring aspect of this project, however, for me was the robustness and rapidity of EasyMINE's responses. Oh, and their demeanour - they have a nice sense of humour. We expected them to go on the defensive, as generally happens all too often in the cryptic minefield of Initial Coin Offerings, particularly when the team is, how you say, overloaded with engineers and under-resourced in the soft skills department. But EasyMINE went on the offensive with us. And we liked that.
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