There's been a lot of disappointment in the Cointiply community after they discontinued the mining game, which included me as I had spent quite a few coins on it and now have to wait ages until I get them back:
At the current rate of about 3000 coins every Tuesday it will only take another 40 weeks or so for me to get the coins back.
For anyone who never used Cointiply or never played the mining game check out my old guide which obviously isn't up to date anymore.
Long story short: Cointiply realized that they're losing a lot of money on the mining game so they had to decide to discontinue it and pay back users slowly but surely from the revenues they are still making. This must've been really tough for them, but it's surely better than shutting down.
What we can learn from that is:
- Building economics for a game like this isn't easy
- "If you going to eat shit, don't nibble" (Ben Horowitz)
The alternative - Febbit
The best alternative I found to the Cointiply mining game, not Cointiply as a whole, is Febbit. Febbit is a simple mining game that from my point of view is even more fun than the Cointiply one, even though it's not as profitable.
How does it work?
It's basically an idle game. You run a funny creature called Feb who is mining for you, and all you need to do is reset him every now and then, and collect your "block rewards" at most once an hour. The mining rewards for each block consist of four resources:
- Credits - you need those to buy items and upgrade chips
- Satoshis - actual satoshis you can pay out
- Febbit - another currency like credits; scarcer, but also used to buy items
- Dust - used to fuse chips in a later stage of the game
Chips
You need to install chips in order to improve mining efficiency. The higher your PR shown in the left side menu, the higher the rewards will be per block. The chips you install will determine your PR, but will also influence on how often you have to reset Feb to keep mining or how long your boosts last. Higher mark chips (Mk) are always better than lower Mk ones of the same level, even if those might have a higher grade (the percentage).
You can see an Mk5 Thermal Regulator which increases the boost duration (a lot); you can level up the chip by paying credits and you can replace it with another chip.
You can only have at most 9 chips installed at a time.
Events
In the right menu, you can find your daily and weekly challenges / events. It pays off to fulfill them, especially at a later stage, where the rewards go up when you reach higher levels with your account.
Payouts
The biggest drawback of Febbit is that payouts only work with FaucetHub. You can cash out to FaucetHub once you've reached 1000 Satoshi (which you can reach in a few days), but from there it will take a while to reach the 20k Satoshi minimum payout if you don't have other sources of income into FaucetHub. Luckily, I could withdraw a few coins from Cointiply (minimum is 35000 coins to FaucetHub there), so I could withdraw a few Febbit payouts quite quickly.
Payouts to FaucetHub are really fast, they pretty much happen immediately.
How much you can expect to make
I probably make around 150-200 Satoshis per day by collecting mining rewards 2-3 times a day. I recommend actually watching the 15 seconds of ads when collecting rewards - the additional rewards are really worth it. So far, I've cashed out slightly above 10k Satoshis, with a lot more to come I hope as my chips are fairly advanced.
The total amount of Satoshis you can make also depends on the total revenue the game makes on ads. While this means you don't really have it under control, it also means that:
- The game will be able to pay out sustainably
- You can help yourselves and others by clicking some ads you find interesting
If anyone would like to discuss their strategies, I'd be happy to have them here. So far, I've been pretty happy with Febbit and can really recommend it, even if payouts aren't the greatest of all times. It's free BTC, and it actually helps keeping the demand for BTC up as Febbit needs to buy BTC from the ad revenues first.