My First Mine
I've been around crypto for nearly 3 years and have dived in to many things, such as buying at ATH (All Time High prices) like a sucker and seeing my portfolio vanish by 95%, getting involved with crypto based sites for musicians and music fans, as well as being hired for a week before a crypto travel site went under! However, one thing I have never done is get involved with "mining"! I had no idea what it involved or how to do it, until the Koinos project, headed up by Open Orchard CEO @andrarchy and the team of respected blockchain engineers, came to the fray.
What Is Mining?
This is where computers tries to solve complex equations which will provide the next block on the blockchain. Blocks are basically information containers - they have all the transactions of a chain from the first block (genesis block) to the current one.
When a new block is created by a computer solving these complex equations, the blockchain releases the currency as a form of payment for the work done to solve them. In this case, KOIN. This is called "Proof of Work" - the work done to create a block is proved by other computers on the network and rewarded with the token. Bitcoin works in much the same the way.
Koinos
More information about what Koinos is trying to achieve can be found on Koinos CEO Andrew Levine's post here but what pulled me in was the thought that went behind making mining accessible to those who aren't as technically minded or have the capability to run servers or things like that - in other words, someone like me.
As someone who has never mined a token before, I jumped straight in and downloaded the Koinos Miner for my Windows PC here - click on the .exe one if you run Windows and save/open/run once it's downloaded (not sure what you need to download if you use a different operating system).
What You'll Need
- Some Ethereum (I had 0.2 ETH knocking around and was told that would be more than enough to get started)
- An Ethereum Wallet
- A computer/laptop/mac with internet connection
The Miner
Once you have downloaded the miner, you will be greeted with the miner dashboard:
I did ask Andrew on the intro post about what the numbers in red above mean and he pointed me to this very helpful "how to" guide, which can be found here. Essentially, you need to set everything up first before you can start mining. Thankfully, there's only 5 things you need to worry about:
- Ethereum Endpoint - a url that is used to access the Ethereum network (I'll show you where you can get this link later on)
- Proof Frequency - a fancy way of saying how many times a day or week you want the miner to broadcast your proof of mining to the ethereum network
- Ether Balance - how much ETH (ethereum) you have available to mine for KOIN (it does cost money after all)
- Recipient Address - this is your ETH address that you want to send the KOIN to.
- Dev Tip (5%) - optional tipping of KOIN to the developers should you wish.
Ethereum Endpoint
As far as I know, this is the address/url you use as your entry point for the miner to "tap" into the ETH network so you can broadcast your proof of mining KOIN tokens.
When I first tried the default url (when you first open the miner) in the top left of the screenshot above, it caused an issue. Another url - http://mining.koinos.io/ - was shared in the Discord, which you paste in to the top left but I kept getting timeout errors (although this did work for others).
I was told I needed to create a "new node". I was like... say whaaaaat! How the heck...? Then, thanks to @cadawg, he shared this link which is a site called "Infura". It's basically a service that gives you a url that you can use and copy/paste in to the miner. You need to register on Infura first, create an account via email and then click the link on the activation email.
Once you sign in to Infura, you'll see something like "create new project" and you don't really need to do too much other than give your project a name. Then scroll down to the "Endpoint" bit, copy in the "https://..." address to the Ethereum endpoint in the miner and that's that.
Proof Frequency
This determines how many times the miner will send off transactions to the ETH chain. On the first attempts, you may want to just see if the thing works so what I did was set it to 50 per day and wait until the first few KOINs are mined. After that, you may want to reduce it to maybe once per day or week, depending on your financial situation (each transaction costs ETH and it will quickly add up)!
Ether Balance
This is where you will fund the transactions from the miner but you'll need to set this up first by pressing the key button - follow the on screen instructions and make sure you have a pen and paper ready - more info on this process can be found here. It's great that it shows you how much ETH you have remaining and how much mining time you have left before you need to top up your ETH balance.
Recipient Address
This is your ETH (Ethereum) address (usually starting 0x.....) that you will be sending the KOINs to. Make sure that it's correct otherwise you may not receive them! Or someone else will and they'll be grateful haha!
Let's Mine KOIN!
So once you have everything set up, you press the little red power button next to the recipient address, which will prompt you to type in the password you set up when you pressed the key button. Once you have done this, all being well, that power button will go green, you'll see a red line/graph appear under the KOIN balance and you should start mining!
When it's up and running, you will see the number increase and stabilise in the purple circle (also known as "hash power", which is another way of saying how many times you can mine in a given period). Depending on how powerful your PC or laptop/Mac is, this number will vary from a few hundred kH/s (kilohash per second) to 9MH/s (Megahash per second) and beyond! In any case, after some time (could be 5 minutes, could be a couple of hours depending on your Proof Frequency), you will see some KOIN appear:
To give you some rough guide, it's cost me about 0.004 ETH to get that 40 KOIN but I've been informed that it changes and reduces the more you mine - some clever thing running in the background automatically adjusts depending on your PC's capability. As mentioned above, there's an approximate countdown under the "Ether Balance" on how much longer you can mine at current rates so you can adjust your Proofing Frequency as necessary.
Conclusion
It can be a bit daunting some of this crypto stuff but the KOINOS team have really made an effort to make mining, something that you needed a PhD in cryptonomics for previously, really accessible to the "average user" and for me, it's really appreciated. I find the miner really easy to use now I overcame the usual, expected teething problems and the rush of seeing your first mined tokens... wow, it's exciting!
I just fired up the miner this morning, all I needed to do was click the red power button and away I went! Simple, just the way I like it! I'll probably continue going with the mining throughout the 6 month period and see how it goes, if nothing else, my PC is heating up my room very nicely, which, for winter, is an added bonus! Bear in mind, it will use up your computer's processing power but automatically adjusts depending on other applications that you run so things may be a bit slower.
So, who is already mining? Who's going to get their feet wet? Who the hell has 30% of the KOINS already mined? If you are and need some help, head over to the Open Orhcard/KOINOS Discord - loads of helpful people in there!
Take care
Nicky