This past week I took a leap into Vertcoin which I have been interested in for a while and I am really happy I did. Vertcoin is very similar to Bitcoin and Litecoin. The main difference being the Lyra2v2 hashing algorithm which is more memory heavy making it asic resistant and more friendly for the average person with a gaming pc. Block times are also shorter and the difficulty adjusts every block.
I have a 1080Ti video card sitting in my PC and although my electricity is fairly expensive here in Germany compared to other parts of the world, I did calculate that I could make a small profit mining. However, for me it is not about money, it is really about learning and if I can make a small profit at the same time then I am really happy.
So why pick Vertcoin? Well, first of all I am able to mine it and since a lot of the concepts for Bitcoin also apply to Vertcoin I can use it for learning. I want to develop things that are useful and with a smaller blockchain size compared to Bitcoin's 150GB+ it is much easier to get started with Vertcoin. At the moment I want to learn how to parse the block dat files with a programming language like go or c++. If I can do this I would like to create a block explorer.
As of now I have learned how to start mining and I also created my own P2Pool for Vertcoin network 1 and 2 over at http://vtcpool.io. I also wrote my first guide related to this, the first guide of many, which shows you how to get started with Vertcoin mining in 10 minutes!
I hope you give this an upvote if you find my post helpful :)