This post is about what playing RollerCoin for almost TWO YEARS (seriously?) has been like for me, a sort of lazy guy who likes crypto stuff but is not very savvy about making crypto work for me. I like what I like and hate to do anything I don't want to do, so for me, getting free crypto doing stuff I like is the best scenario. I can't accidentally buy the wrong NFT, or have my crypto get stranded on Celsius (though I do, $!&#!!), or have my crypto get stranded on BlockFi (that happened too! $&#!##$!$###!!!), or buy a whitelist pass to a game and then see that game implode, or move everything into LUNA (gd, I think ALL of that has happened to me!!!! &*$#$!!!). Well, you can see why I would like free stuff - less risk of me screwing up and throwing actual human world money away!
Right now, I am really only doing 3 "free crypto" projects of the many, many, many I started since about January, 2020: RollerCoin, Cointiply, and FreeBitCo.in
(referral links at the end, if you want to try these games and support me, too)
Oh sure, I still have accounts and will mess around every once in awhile with (in my opinion) clunkers like Gods Unchained, Pipeflare, or Doctor Who, and I suppose technically I have not given up on Crazy Defense Heroes or nutty funhouse that is Job Tribes, but I can't figure out how to really make any money out of any of them. The closest would be Dr. Who, where I have US $20 sitting there, but I don't want to do KYC for 20 Stinking Dollars. So there are only three that I count on to provide me with some fun money for my two true loves, Hive and Wax.
I will take a look at the other two in time, but today it is all about RollerCoin.
Here is the basic RollerCoin rundown:
- RollerCoin is a "vitual cryptominer" sim where you can gain mining power to earn a range of crypto, currently BTC, ETH, BNB (bsc), MATIC, TRX, SOL, DOGE, and LTC
- You can mine whatever crypto you want, mining power changes for each token over time, so if you are crypto-agnostic and just want to maximize "crypto" you can switch what you are mining to match what is paying out at the highest rate at any given week
- There are three ways to gain mining power: 1. obtain or buy miners, 2. add a variety of miners to your collection to gain mining power boosts, and 3. play retro arcade-style games for mining power
- Miners and the boosts attached to them give you stable mining power, as long as you check in every 5 days and "recharge"
- Games give you mining power that only lasts for a day or so. There are ways of extending that by playing consistently, but no matter what you do, mining power from playing games decays
- RollerCoin has introduced Seasons with several gamified features that rewards either playing lots of games, engaging with social media, inviting friends to play, or even doing stuff from a task wall.
- I have never done anything on the task wall because it seems like all of them ask for a level of permissions on my phone that I don't like, but they pay pretty well and I know I am leaving money on the table in the interests of privacy
- Mining earns you crypto, like I said above, but it also can earn you two in-game currencies, RLT (RollerCoin Token) and RST (Season Token) which can be used in their respective stores to get miners, or other items. RLT also can be used in the player market
- You can send crypto to RollerCoin where it gets converted to RLT. You can NOT withdraw RLT or RST from the game, they can only be used to buy stuff in-game
- You can buy and sell miners, miner crafting elements, and the racks you need to activate miners in the player market
- You also can get miners by crafting them during crafting events, or winning them from loot boxes
- There is more, but even I am tired of reading this list now. Suffice it to say there is a lot going on in RollerCoin!!
As a visual aid, this is a screenshot of the mining setup (with last year's Christmas skin!!) I have built over the past 22 months. I have spent absolutely NO MONEY on this, it all has been Free2Play2Earn (my favorite)!
There are a few things to note. First, my mining room is full of Large Racks (which can hold 8 cells worth of miners) and those racks are full of miners. At the top left of the mining racks you see "The Black Pearl" which is a ship in a bottle graphic and is a 2-cell miner. So it takes an entire row.
Sticking to the miners for now, you can see in the middle row two pairs of identical miners. One pair is a old-style undersea diver, the other pair is a pink blobfish. You can see that the divers both have a green square signifying they have been upgraded through blending. In fact, because they have the same green square, I can blend these to again to make a single undersea diver miner with extra mining power. When you look at the blobfish you can see that only one of theme has the green square. That one has been upgraded, the other has not. If I wanted I could buy another blobfish, blend that, and then blend the resulting upgraded blobfish with the other one and have a Level 3 blobfish. That is more exciting than it sounds!!
You also can see on the left hand side in the text under "My Power" that I am mining 6.745 Ph/S and that 48.19% of that mining power comes from various bonuses for having a variety of miners.
What does 6.745 Ph/S earn me? Weeeeelllllll.... I am not rich. But let's take a look.
So far, I have withdrawn .0017 BTC, .052 BSC, 5.9 MATIC, and 100 DOGE. I don't really know what that was worth when I withdrew it, but as of right now, it would be worth US $53.24.
And, I have exchanged US $113 in ETH for RLT, which I used to buy miners, probably. I can't honestly remember all those transactions.
I am not sure how to gauge if this past 22 months has been worth it. The potential beauty of RollerCoin is that it could be passive income. I have the miners, they are mining, and I ought to just be able to collect from time to time. But, in truth, I am always tempted to keep playing games to achieve targets and get in-game currencies and free miners to keep upgrading my mining power. And, because the total crypto pool is shared by whichever miners are still active of the 3,217,122 people who at one point signed up, there are incentives to keep working to try to increase mining power so that my share of the pool doesn't wither to nothing. So, I really am using RollerCoin as a Play2Earn game.
The marketplace is not quite as informative as it is in other environments, such as Wax markets or the many Splinterlands NFT markets. It is hard to know what game assets like miners would sell for. It probably is not that much, making it hard to know what the value of my account is. But maybe we can estimate something like $100. The current value of the cryptocurrency in my account is about $150, I think. That would mean that my time on RollerCoin has netted me something like $300 in value.
I mean, that is not nothing, right? But it is not an early retirement nest egg either.
I started this post thinking I would be telling the world that RollerCoin was a no-brainer way of stacking crypto. After looking at my holdings and what I have accomplished, I think I have a bit more of a reserved view.
Pros:
- Play2Earn is alive and well on RollerCoin. At least for me, it has beaten out most of the other faucet and either buggy (Crazy Defense Heroes) or high transaction fee (Gods Unchained) games I have tried. Other than ETH, the transaction fees on RollerCoin are negligible, I have never had a withdrawal dropped, there is no buggy rewards system that never seems to work or small amounts of crypto trapped on Layer 2 ETH systems by high transaction fees.
- It's pretty low stress, and pretty fun to play
- The selection of tokens is pretty appealing
- The gamification elements of the competitive seasons are rewarding, at least within the RollerCoin ecosystem...
Cons:
- I mean, 22 months and only making $300 or so after pretty consistent effort is not inspiring. It is free money, sort of, but it took a lot of time and I am not sure it was worth it
- The passive income element seems kind of speculative for me at this point. I have build reasonably high mining power, but it is not clear at all how long that power would hold up without me playing and making efforts to keep upgrading my power
- Even though there are many games to play, after 22 months, it is pretty repetitive - even for my favorite games
Hmmm...
I guess the choice for me is pretty clear. I will keep going, but stress a lot less about whether I am playing, getting enough wins, upgrading my miners, etc. I might give it a few weeks of purely passive earnings and see what kind of yield I get.
In the mean time, it is nice to know that I have a little pile of crypto that I can bring over to Hive! Sure, it is not the best time to flip BTC into HBD, but nothing is stopping me from powering up some Hive, right?
I would recommend that you give RollerCoing a try, but have expectations of a free to play2earn game, or even a faucet site, rather than imagining that your experience with RollerCoin will be like getting a Legendary Gold Foil Summoner in Splinterlands or something like that.
It IS possible to earn, withdrawals DO go through just fine, and the games themselves are retro, fun, and not too hard. So you get a sense of accomplishment and at least in my experience, I earned an amount greater than what I got out of a similar amount of time on FreeBitco.in and definitely less than I got out of a similar amount of time on Cointiply. I have included referral links if you would like to try any of these projects out.
Otherwise, thanks for reading, and I hope you have a clear view of expectations on RollerCoin!!
Referral for RollerCoin gives you 1000 BTC Satoshi - https://rollercoin.com/?r=kl4g3m6h
Referral for FreeBitco.in - https://freebitco.in/?r=41144131
Referral for Cointiply - http://cointiply.mobi/fnkF