Mining that doesn't require a bank of GPUs
As a fun little project I recently began doing some Burstcoin mining at home to see what the results would be like. Burstcoin is only at a USD value of around 1.4 cents now and I'm not pushing Burst here by any means. What drove me to try this out was when I heard I didn't have to have a crazy powerful bank of GPUs in a special built box and all I needed was some extra hard drive space.
BurstCoin is a bit different when it comes to mining. Instead of powering through a bunch of calculations looking for a mathmatically appropriate solution, BurstCoin uses a method similar to a POS algorithm but instead it is called Proof of Capacity. The free space on your hard drives is what is used by Burst as your stake in the game.
Brief overview of how Burst mining works:
- Go to https://www.burst-team.us/index.php/wallets/ and click on the Download Wallet option
- After download run the executable file and then launch Burst
- Click to sign up for a new wallet, the passphrase it generates will be used to access your Wallet so secure it in multiple places!
- There is an online wallet in the program and a local wallet the latter of which will pull down the entirety of the blockchain
- On the bottom bar click on Plot Drives, this will then let you select the drive you want to use with free space
- Select the amount of free space to use by using the slider, make sure your Burst Address is listed in the address field and then click on Plot Device to begin the process (this can take a good amount of time to perform so be patient)
- Burst varies from other coins because what happened was that when you Plotted that free space it went through and created a large quantity of Nonces on that free space. Now instead of having to calculate a large number of mathmatical operations you are instead just comparing hashes from the nonces on your drive. To me this is a similar sounding process as using a rainbow table in cyber security where the idea is that comparing a hash value is quicker than calculating the hash itself on the fly.
- After plotting the device you are ready to mine so you will want to join a pool
Now for the last steps I want to give credit to the Steemit user who helped out when I was looking for the final steps and that is @jackmanmania
His post https://steemit.com/burst/@jackmanmania/how-to-mine-burst-coin goes into depth with images on this process so if you're considering it I would go through that to get more info if anything is not clear.
Now I don't plan to get rich on BurstCoin, but this gives me the option to do something cool that isn't going to destroy my electric bill or make me go buy a $10K mining rig (IF you can find the GPUs at this time!). If it sounds interesting to you as well you should check it out and watch a video from the Youtuber IMineBlocks where he shows off the amount of coin he received from using a 100 TB setup!
Disclaimer: Don't think that even though this says how much did "I" earn that this is me, just a link and shoutout to IMineBlocks!
If you enjoyed this or are thinking about trying it let me know in a comment and a follow or comment is always appreciated!
Until next time,
Doug