It's been a long time since I've made a hardcore shill post, so forgive me just this once!
Not months ago, my favorite pool (Yiimp) added support for a brand new coin (RVN), with a brand new algorythm (x16r) which claimed to be ASIC resistant.
After I had a look on their Bitcoin Talk page I was ferociously intrigued..
And that's putting it lightly.
For you see:
- It was only a week old when I found it! I am not the kind of person to get in on things early, never mind at their inception. I missed the early days of bitcoin, steem and EOS (well, everything really). So being given the opportunity to mine the fuck out of a brand new coin (that wasn't just another shitcoin) was important to me.
- No ICO, no presale and no premine! It was a supposedly fair launch, just like bitcoin back in the day.
- Bitcoin codebase: all the RVN code is based on the bitcoin code which has had over 400 developers work on it and has been proven to be secure. The catch being that raven is thousands of times more efficient than Bitcoin.
- Use case: deals with the problem of asset transfers over the blockchain, which will allow people to create their own assets on top of the raven blockchain in a similar way to ethereum. But, these tokens could represent shares in a business, real world or digital assets, virtual goods or credit. Neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum were designed for the transfer of assets from one party to another. The full whitepaper, which goes into far more detail can be found here.
- ASIC resistant: they developed a completely new algorithm that consists of 16 other algo's, and includes an element of randomisation to completely obliterate the chance of an ASIC ever being developed.
- Backing from overstock! Yep, CEO of Overstock, Patrick Byrne claims that Overstock has invested millions of dollars into Raven coin. He claims that it reminds him of bitcoin. However, this happened a while after I started mining.
For a nice summary, head over to their Medium article. Just remember to come back!
The Mining Story
My new beast of a card.
So, I'd recently just upgraded my card to the Nvidia GTX 980 from the GTX 760. So, I still had an out of date card, but at least it was far newer and far more powerful than the one I had before.
Excited to try out the cards mining capabilities I was testing out it's hashrate on different algo's when I stumbled across RVN and x16r as mentioned above.
Without any time to loose, I mined the fuck out of RVN day and night until the difficulty increased and I decided it wasn't worth mining anymore, due to it's value being largely speculative. I went back to mining BTX and XVG.
Not mining raven for longer was possibly one of the biggest mining mistakes I'd ever made.
I watched it's price break 20 satoshis. (This was before it was even listed on exchanges, people were doing OTC transactions in the telegram chat).
Then, next time I checked it was trading at 60 satoshis (still in telegram)
Then 150 sats ,
then 200,
then 300
(all still in telegram).
I didn't realise at the time, but that put me at about $70..
That's when I kinda forgot about my 2.5K Raven coins as I was starting to properly bash steemit.
Fast forward to now, RVN has reached highs of over 900 sats but is currently trading at ~550, putting me at $130 on two day's mining on a card that only cost me $200! (It's finally exchange listed now too).
I still have no intentions in selling for at least a few months as Raven coin is still in it's infancy and is growing rapidly (sometimes by 50% a day).
Mining is profitable, but you need to treat it as an investment rather than for pure, instant profit.
If I were to recommend a coin to speculatively buy or mine, it would be either Ravencoin for it's solid community, use case, dev team and public interest.
OR it's younger cousin Pigeoncoin (PGN) which is trading at just 20 satoshis - it has less attention and is seen as a knock off, but there's not much to loose and everything to gain at such a low price. I see PGN to RVN as LTC is to BTC; that's why I'm mining pigeon right now and hold over 10k at time of writing.
I am not a financial adviser, all investments have risk and I own both coins mentioned in the article yadder yadder yadder.
