What is Merit?
"Merit, a currency and wallet startup, has been created to help evolve cryptocurrencies into that of traditional payment methods. Ultimately, their goal is to allow each and every individual to successfully split bills at a restaurant or make clothing purchases, just like having services like PayPal."
You can read more on its official site here:
https://www.merit.me/
How do I join?
You can join on the official site, scroll down to the bottom: https://www.merit.me/
How do I mine?
If you are a casual miner like me, you simply need to download the desktop wallet here: https://www.merit.me/get-started/#get-merit-desktop
After installation, you click the mining button on the left, choose how many cpu threads to use and gpu and it will do its magic!
How much can I earn?
You can do a simple calculation by looking at the Cycles Found per second located at the bottom of your mining page:
So currently I am getting about 0.54 cycles/s using a single 1080ti and 8 threads on my 8700k cpu. You can go to this page:
http://blockstats.merit.me/calculator and see how many Merits you get per day.
So I am getting around 7.5 Merit a day. Merit currently is not listed on any exchange but it is trading for 13k to 18k satoshi on its discord channel
Let's just say it's trading at 15k satoshi, that is $0.933 at the current bitcoin price
So 0.933x7.5 ~=$7USD
Not bad considering right now on nicehash I am getting only like $2USD.
It took me 10-15 minutes in total to get the whole thing setup, a great alternative for casual miner like myself.