After setting the key feature, ASIC resistance cryptocurrencies and mixing it up with my CPU only mining results, I remember I could not sleep last night thinking of which currencies would satisfy my search. I gathered a list of famous, profitable and known CPU mineable coins -of course I only wanted the known ones, somehow this aspect offered me some confidence. Out of the list, I started to further understand the following four ones:
Monero (XMR): 2014
Electroneum: 2017
BiblePay: 2017
Webchain: 2018
Monero , my first newbie attempt, is highly famous and with a relatively high price, compared to those coins that could be mined with GPU or ASICs. Wikipedia suggested that this coin had only received an attack and it was mostly due to a failure on the algorithm it is based on “CryptoNote”. Everything was really fine until I found out that it was defined as a secure, private and untraceable currency system, which although sounds fancy and many people are interesting about it, I am not. Monero uses a special kind of cryptography to ensure that all of its transactions remain 100% unlinkable and untraceable. As a matter of fact, this was my first crypto broken heart, I was so into Monero XMR because of its confirmed CPU friendliness, but I couldn’t forget about my second point, I liked traceable coins, as I had mentioned the importance it represents when starting a new economic activity. Maybe this could change in time, but so far it’s a priority.
I then looked into my second option: electroneum, I confirmed it was a cpu mineable coin and I found out it offered a mobile mining app, it had a big and active community, their APP was available in 20 languages, meaning their support team was also available in 20 languages. By reading different articles I found out they had a very successful ICO – a concept I was not highly familiar with. They were able to gather USD 40 million during their ICO, which was absolutely fantastic. Sadly, electroneum was an exact fork of monero, their technicality was highly questioned on different forums, so with this one I had both and untraceable cryptocurrency and a non-technically supported coin. Yes, I also wondered what those $40M were for if not to hire devs and more qualified people. Why would a crypto project launch a crowdfunding campaign – as an ICO – if not to invest in new and qualified staff?
One thing I was sure at this point, marketing was another decisive aspect of a coin, mostly because it pretty much defined how the price would fluctuate in a short/long term. I came to check out Monero’s Development plan by having a look into their roadmap – let’s take a moment to point out that roadmaps have paramount importance, as in any other project, having a look at the roadmap allows us to foresee the future performance of this project and determine whether it is profitable to invest time and the processing power of your computer.
Summarizing, I had already learned about two new CPU minable and ASIC resistant coins, it wasn’t hard to discover that cryptocurrency mining for beginners was not an extraterrestrial topic, I could pretty much handle it. I now knew that besides ASIC resistance and CPU only mining, I had to care about two other important factors: ICO performance and marketing strategies. It was pretty much a fact that those CPU mineable cryptocurrencies always started with relatively low prices, so if these two stages of the project had not been successful, then the price was likely to drop in future. I am unable to describe how smart I felt.
I resumed my research and BiblePay was next on the list.
This is what google first told me:
BiblePay (BBP) is a Christian Charity Cryptocurrency. 10% of funds are donated to charities and nonprofits, and as of March 2018, over 200 orphans were being sponsored monthly. The project rewards contributing computing power to cancer research, writing letters to orphans and learning more about Christianity. A decentralized crypto-currency using a new proof of work algorithm based on the King James Bible, called Proof-Of-Bible-Hash. One of the goals employed is the prevention of hashing in ASIC devices or GPUs Proof of Bible Hash uses 31,101 verses from the text of the bible, making it impractical to port to an ASIC or GPU, due to multiple considerations including but not limited to: Chained verse logic, memory consumption, encryption, decryption, transaction ID lookups, blockindex lookups, Receiving address Lookups, Full Node business Logic, floating time parameters, and late block logic. In addition, the hashing algorithm requires AES512 encryption and decryption to restrict GPU execution.
Of course, I did not understand all those terms either, but although I knew they were important, they were not part of my research. I focused on what I cared the most about. It had the ASIC resistance tag and it was somehow GPU resistant as well, meaning it was a CPU only mineable cryptocurrency. It had no pre-mining and it did not have ICO either. Pre-mined coins are just coins that due to some settings on the crypto-currency code are brought into existence and with some special transactions are locked into some specific addresses – developers’.
But again, this coin failed to have the privacy settings that I was looking for. Based on Matthew 6:4, that claimed privacy in charity is especially encouraged, they covered the lack of transaction history.
I was about to give up, not even the bible was on my side – a reference to BiblePay. I started to think that maybe that traceability I was looking for was not a big deal to start trying, but at last I decided to google about Webchain, the most recent project I had among my options. By the way, I had discovered this blockchain based cryptocurrency thanks to their bitcointalk announcement, information on its site was easily understandable, I opened their whitepaper and I immediately confirmed it was a CPU mineable cryptocurrency that claimed to have ASIC resistance as one of its features. As I kept reading, as much as I could understand it was a fork of Ethereum Classic – which is not a CPU mineable cryptocurrency – but they had customized this blockchain protocol by using Cryptonight hashing algorithm – which made it be a sort of XMR CPU miner based on ETC that at the same time had been built believing that bitcoin's pseudo-anonymity was the solution from the beginning. Exactly, it was not another privacy-oriented blockchain.
So, webchain was by far the ASIC resistant cryptocurrency I was looking for, until I remembered the last two requirements I had added in order to achieve cryptocurrency mining profitability: checking the coin’s ICO performance and their Marketing Strategy. I went over their whitepaper and couldn’t find any reference to any of those, I started feeling kind of disappointed and it was the right moment when I remembered I had read their bitcointalk announcement and it showed the following image:
I also searched for their pre-mined condition which – in as much as I had understood – was fair enough. It seems like I found the cryptocurrency I was looking for. I was able to start mining, I checked their official pool and it was working fine and I planned to start researching some new parameters that might help me in future. A good aspect of Webchain is that they have a How to get started guide , which actually helped me a lot.
