I heard about a new coin called Electroneum. The interesting thing was that this was the first coin that could be mined on a cellphone (the mining is simulated). I was too late to buy any coins in the ICO, but they had already raised $40 million so I wouldn’t have been able to buy much anyway. Besides it seemed like the perfect opportunity to try mining some coins.
I had set up 4 devices in total - 2 android tv boxes, my samsung tablet and my huawei cellphone. I was really interested to check out the performance differences between the devices. I wanted to be as prepared as possible so I duly loaded up the software onto each device, with a delay to reset my email password, which I’d forgotten.
As I got each device working, I realised there was a possible opportunity. The timers weren’t synchronised. I was determined to make sure I was one of the first miners to maximise my earnings and I figured that many would miss the first few minutes of mining because of the faulty timers.
However, things did not work out the way I’d imagined. I kept a close eye on the clock and at 2am, I checked the software but the timers had gone straight past zero and into the negatives. I checked the telegram group but it was in absolute chaos. At the time there were about 25,000 members so there were hundreds of new messages every minute.
The developer was organised though and he started posting periodic messages. First he noted that he couldn’t answer any private messages - no surprises there. Most importantly, he announced that the mobile miner and wallet would be delayed. The only way to mine was on a computer with a paper wallet.
I abandoned all my android devices in the living room and got to work on my laptop. The website was jammed, but eventually I managed to create my wallet and download the mining software. All the while I was watching the telegram group for updates. Shortly after 3am the announcements changed to show that the European mining pool was online. I clicked the “start mining” button and the display showed “Retrying in 10secs…”. I stopped the mining and tried again.
This time the miner output sprang to life and soon after, the total shares counter started to go up. I had no idea what the coins were worth or how much a share was at this point, but I was elated. Finally I’d mined my first coins!
The next day I was able to evaluate my earnings. Staying up all night had paid off in the end. I earned 1000 coins in the first 10 minutes, then another thousand in the next 20 minutes. After that I only received 100 at a time, after an hour each for the first two payments, then two hours, then five.
So at the end of my first mining experience, I’d earned about 2500 coins. The price was only $0.01 during the ICO and at time of writing the coins are worth about $0.05 although they're not available on a lot of exchanges yet, so I've decided to hold them and see what happens.
It's been more than a week since launch and the mobile miner is still not running. This is because of a security threat, which I can fully understand - I've developed for Android before and there are far more security risks than with Windows or Mac. I'm still very eager to see how it all works, but I'd rather they make the wallets as secure as possible, so I'm happy to be patient.
Thanks for reading
@deimus