A friend of mine recently told me that he was trying to mine Electroneum but not having luck with getting the software to run and deposit into his wallet. Electroneum is supposed to be the cryptocurrency that's accessible for everyone, allows you to mine on your phone, and it holds the distinction of being the first major crypto project out of the UK, I believe.
I visited their download page, poked around, and was eventually able to compile and run a CPU miner.
There's my laptop hashing away and submitting up to the US mining pool. A calculator online suggests that my ~50 hashes/second might be worth a penny per hour. Nice! I left it running and fell asleep.
In the morning, I wanted to check my wallet balance to see if I'd gotten my first payout yet. After searching a bit, I found a page that displays stats for the mining pool and for your participation in it.
After the miner continued to run all day long, my pool still hasn't found a block! The average time for the pool to mine a block is 6 hours, but this one has taken over 24!
Then I found something else: the minimum payout is 20 ETN. I estimate I might get half an ETN for each block the pool mines. So to achieve my dream of actually mining some cryptocurrency, I'm going to have to leave this thing running for a while!
Anyway, this is just for fun. It would be really fun if it were possible to get in on mining a coin early with modest hardware but actually receive a meaningful gain when the price goes up. Mining shitcoins in the cloud for profit? Hehe.
