I have recently discovered BurstCoin, although it is by no means a new coin I don't think enough people know about the technology behind it and how easy it is to mine Burstcoin
It differs from other cryptocurrencies in that it is much greener. That means it consumes much less electricity to mine BurstCoin than with most other coins that use lots of CPU/GPU resources. For e.g. according to the information on their home page one transaction of bitcoin consumes 30kWh of energy. Compare that to Burstcoin which uses only 0.07kWh per transaction.
How does it do this? Upon install or setup of the wallet software, you allocate a specified amount of disk space for use. A plot file in then generated which uses some CPU resources to generate the file and do all the calculations up front. Thereafter the mining computer's CPU/GPU is idle for most of the time. Every few minutes it needs to access the file to check nonce's. Other than that even the HDD is idle and most of the electricity consumed is just due to the energy required to keep the hardware idle. This means that you can connect and use many external USB hard drives and internal ones. The more space you allocate the more you will mine. You can even allocate space on a drive that is already in use for other purposes.
I have two 2TB internal Sata III HDD's in my computer that were completely unused. After installing the wallet software I was able to create the Plot files using the same software and start mining after the plots were created(several hours later). You won't need any other software however I believe there is alternate software that can create the plots faster using the GPU however then you may need to go through a process to optimise those plots.
I have however run into the issue where the miner crashes every once in a while however I took care of this with a free piece of software called Restart On Crash where I just created to rule to restart the miner if it dies. The other issue I have is that their wallet software is a bit flacky and buggy however I don't really need the wallet software as there are online wallet options and the miner can be run independently from the wallet.
I order to start mining you need to join a pool and to join a pool you need 1 Burst which is not much really and you can get some free Burst from the Faucets built into the Wallet app. Personally, I ended up buying a small amount on an exchange since the faucets would not work for me.
If you are wondering how much you can make mining Burstcoin head over to this mining calculator at http://burstcoin.biz/calculator
At the current rates 8TB space will nett you 1686 Burstcoins per month. This is about $22.19 per month at the current difficulty. An 8TB USB 3.0 HDD can be had for about $179 on Amazon. So ignoring the cost of electricity and changes in difficulty you should recoup the investment in about 8 months. However, if you have space sitting around doing nothing that's free $$$ for almost no cost.
Giveaway
So much for the Burstcoin introduction, you must have thought I forgot about the giveaway. I decided to make this an ongoing giveaway and give away all the BurstCoins that I mine every time the mining pool pays out to my Wallet. At the current rate this seems to happen every 9 days or so where I receive a bit more than 250 Burstcoin's from the 4TB disk space I have allocated. I know it's not all that much so I decided to sweeten the pot and also give alway 100% of the SBD generated to me by this post. Rather than just write a post offering a reward I decided I would bundle the giveaway with an interesting post that contains some useful content such as this one.
For now I will give away my next burst payout + 100% SBD payout of this post to someone chosen randomly in the comments to this post. Only one entry per Steem Account.
Rules:
- Follow me
- Reply to this post mentioning Burstcoin
- One entry per Steem Account
- Resteem this post for an extra entry
The winner will be chosen after 7 days when this post has paid out however you may have to wait until the mining pool pays out before I transfer your Burst Coins to you. You will need a Burst Wallet address to receive your Burst Payout alternately I can convert it to Steem and send you Steem at the going exchange rates.
Upvoting is optional however it will increase the pool. In the future if this becomes popular I will spread the donation to more people.
The winner will be announced in a future post after payout.
You can monitor my mining and next payout at http://burst.lexitoshi.uk/
My Burst Payout address is C4SH-XVLR-YJYN-42TUP and it should be visible under pending payout.