There is a new and improved way to mine crypto in the cloud now. Even better, you can use a decentralized, crypto friendly cloud without fear of the major cloud operators taking your miner off-line. All completely non-custodial, without trusting cloud mining contracts with third party operators.
The Cloud is Akash, The first crypto is PKT Cash.
PKT - PKT cash is a mineable crypto describing itself as "The Worlds First Bandwidth-hard blockchain". To be honest, I don't really know what that means, but the team from Akash, with contributions from an eco-system validator Chandra Station published this guide to help people launch a cloud based PKT miner on Akash. I figured I'd give it a go.
The first thing I did was to select which PKT wallet to install. After looking at the options, I decided to try the wallet from PKT world. I chose this one as it seemed to be a suitable GUI wallet that would work for mining. Once it was set up, I looked around it and discovered I could start mining straight away, using my PC. I set that up and running, and the miner didn't even get snagged by my virus security. So I started mining this PKT on my PC. I'm doubtful that I'll use this long term, but for a little while it is fun to be mining crypto again, haven't done so in years.
The next step for me was to install the app from Akashlytics (the deploy tool) and figure it out. In my Keplr wallet, I created a new Akash address specific for deployments, and funded it with my days staking rewards. Funding secured (6.5 AKT), I then used the Deploy tool to create a certificate.
Next, I tried to copy the code for the miner from the Github link. It was at this point that my complete lack of ability in this regard kicked in. Silly me couldn't figure out how to cut and paste" into the blank template. Seriously. "Right click - copy, right click - paste" didn't work. So I retyped all the text, with my wallet address added in. Once I figured out that the formatting was important, I was ready to deploy.
Hit the deploy button, and nothing... It just spiraled away, telling me it was looking for provider bids. Nothing came up, so after about 15 minutes, I cancelled that first attempt.
Then restarted the deployer, and tried again. Had a similar experience, so I walked away for a bit to make coffee. Came back to see a list of expired bids, and the thing telling me to cancel the deployment and try again.
Third time lucky. For this attempt, I finally figured out that <ctrl - v> worked to paste the text over, so now I was sure I had all the details correct. The coffee and break had helped clear my fuzzy mind a bit. Deploy the miner (again). Providers popped up and I selected one. Started the lease and it all looked good. Then I went in and it said that the manifest sending didn't work (or words to that effect anyway). Retried the TX to send the manifest several times, all unsuccessfully.
Getting frustrated now.
After a few more tries, I gave up and closed that deployment (number 3). Regrouped and figured I'd give it one more go.
Through the process again, all looks good. Select a different provider to last time (in case the issue wasn't my fault, but theirs) and deployed.
It worked. After three failed attempts, two of which were almost definitely my fault, one which I am just not sure, I had a miner up and running. Wooooohooooo.
Here is what my Akashlytics deployment app looks like:
And here is what the PKT wallet looks like:
Is it worth it?
The learning experience, and small sense of being able to do something way outside of my comfort zone alone made this experience worth the effort. As for if it is worthwhile from a purely financial perspective, well that remains to be seen. Here is a little of the maths so far:
- Cost of deployment = 3.471 AKT per month = $9.37 approx (AKT = $2.70 currently)
- PKT mined = approx 2 PKT over 3 hours = 16 per day or 480 per month (rough estimate only)
- Cost of mined PKT = approx $0.02 each (again very rough numbers only)
- There is no exchange listing for PKT, the only way to sell it is via a telegram trading channel. Skimming through that it looks like prices range from $0.02 to $0.05. So, maybe worth it, maybe not from very early results.
The experience gained, however, you can't put a price on.
The thing to note is that as more people launch miners for this network, the difficulty will go up (I guess if it runs like any other POW chain) and rewards will diminish. Time will tell if this is worthwhile from a financial perspective. I will probably launch another deployment in a day or two, and try it with 2 cpus instead of the recommended 1, just to test the difference and see if more power works out more profitable.
Nothing in this post is financial advice. I don't know if PKT will amount to anything, and I don't know if paying for cloud miners will be worthwhile. These are just my personal experiences - DYOR.
Thanks for reading,
JK.