We’ve had a lot of queries about the amount of money a mobile miner can expect to earn.
We made a statement in our whitepaper about introducing the additional funds left over from the token sale to prop up mobile miners to $30 US to attempt to increase viral growth. To give you an idea of where we were at when we wrote that white paper – you must remember that at the time the largest ICO we’d seen was Tezos which had 22,000 contributors. We were expecting to get fewer contributors than the most popular ICO of all time (at that time) so we thought we might get around 10,000 contributors. As you all know –
Electroneum is now the largest token sale of all time by contributor number, with over 120,000 contributors and over 300,000 registrations of interest. We have a delivery rate of 277,000 on our Electroneum email list.
This huge number, and our overwhelming success have meant a few things.
Our support team are struggling! We can’t easily recruit new, trusted members, as the problems they are encountering are complex, and the trust level (ability to access our database pre-launch) is too sensitive. We’re answering support queries as fast as we can.
Our initial estimates of growth are wildly underestimated.
When we provided the $30 figure in the whitepaper we thought that in the first month we might have as many as 10,000 app users. The actual figure is likely to be around 10x to 20x that number, and possibly a lot more. The number of coins each miner will gain is directly proportional to the number of miners, this is even true of the additional pool of funds from the remainder of the token sale. Obviously, if there are more miners – the reward per miner is less. The difficulty comes with assigning a dollar value to that figure. Our whitepaper states that we will top up to $30, and I no longer believe that to be a prudent figure for the maximum growth of Electroneum. If we were to do that with the number of people we are likely to have on board now then the additional pool would be exhausted extremely quickly, and no benefit to the Electroneum brand would be gained. Imagine we gave away all the additional pool in the first week to a handful (in mass adoption terms) of mobile miners.
What we are unable to speculate on, for legal reasons, is the future price of Electroneum. Our figure in the white paper was based on a retail price of $0.01. If this price were to go up then miners would be earning more money – for the same number of coins. We are not legally allowed to predict a price increase because that is speculative and outside of our control. We do not know what the future value of Electroneum will be. The future price of Electroneum is now ENTIRELY in the hands of the holders of Electroneum – i.e. you. The price of Electroneum will be set by the rate at which someone is willing to sell being matched to a price that someone else is willing to pay.
In an interview I made a statement about “a few dollars per month” and this figure is now being compared to the $30 headline figure and remarked upon. Again, that figure was based upon a retail price of $0.01. What I can say is that according to our latest calculations, IF there are 75,000 mobile miners in week 1 they are likely to get approx. 70 ETN coins per day on a fast android phone (galaxy S8) if the app is in the foreground and running 24 hours per day. That equates to around $21 over 30 days with a retail price of $0.01. What I cannot do is guarantee that figure is going to happen because we don’t know how many miners there will be and we don’t know if the price will go down below 1 cent or rise above 1 cent. We will make use of the additional mobile mining pool judiciously and in the best interests of growing the number of Electroneum users. If we are getting enormous growth then we will slow the additional coin emission to perform tests to see what the maximum benefit can be.
I’m sorry I don’t have exact answers, but what I can say is remember that at the end of 2009 there were probably less than 1000 bitcoin miners in the world, a year after it launched. In 2009 you could mine 100 bitcoin per day with a CPU!
Electroneum will certainly be going live with 10s of thousands of miners – perhaps even more than 100,000. Who knows what the first MONTH will bring. Bitcoin is 8 years and Bitcoin today, 24th October 2017, has 10450 nodes live – these are full bitcoin miners, not pool miners (of which there are more, but nobody knows how many – perhaps 100,000 – 200,000).
The best way to find out how much Electroneum you can mine on your phone is to wait until the Electroneum blockchain is live – download the app and get mining!!