Electroneum Update Thoughts
In one of my previous blogs I explained some of the goals that the team behind electroneum has set for themselves. I really like what they want to do with this coin and support them in their mission.
For a while I was experimenting with various other coins and what I could mine. I do not own mining specific rigs of any kind but I do have a 1080 TI and a Vega Founders Edition that I put toward my mining efforts. Plus my Ryzen 1800x does pretty well itself while the i7 7700 adds a little extra. During my playtime I figured out that some algorithms and their available mining software definitely favor some of the equipment over others. My Ryzen and Vega do significantly better than the i7 and 1080 TI on most cryptonight-esque coins, while the 1080 and i7 do better on some of the others.
About a month ago, I decided to basically go all in on electroneum. Even though I could split my hardware and probably make more overall, I just decided to go with my favorite coin. Things went pretty well. They upgraded to the new cryptonight7 algorithm and I found a great pool. We would find blocks about once a day and I was making a few hundred etn of those blocks. I currently have over 3000 etn mostly due to this month of mining.
The value of etn dropped below a penny during this time and other considerations also came up to the developers. This prompted an email that basically said we're going back to the old algorithm and welcoming the ASIC miners. This made me a little weary and then the switch happened. Instead of making 300 or so etn a day I was making about 30. The difficulty skyrocketed instantly and the total hashing power of the network grew 100 times what it was. The email and the immediate change in results definitely made it pretty clear that hobbyist miners could no longer make enough etn to even justify putting the electricity toward it.
I had kind of mixed feelings about their mining strategy from the beginning. It always seemed to conflict with their stated goals in my opinion. They are supposed to be a 'mobile cryptocurrency' and their main goal is 'mass adoption' but they allow regular mining to take place. And now that they have become ASIC friendly, this further deviates from that as far as I can tell. I still like the mobile miner and I think things could still work out, however, when the 'masses' adopt the coin and can mine at 30 h/s on their phone while the select few have ASIC farms pumping out Gh/s your goal is becoming more and more unlikely. If electroneum really wants to accomplish those goals, they would do well to take a look at phoneum and their 'proof of time' approach. Phoneum seems to have that part of things down, though I honestly have no idea what their goals for the coin are. It just seems like they are 'doing it to do it' so... who knows. I do feel like if the phoneum approach was combined with the electroneum ideas it could very well be a winner.
I still like electroneum and will always have the mobile miner going. But it just is not worth trying to mine with computer hardware anymore. And I'm not going to purchase expensive ASIC equipment for a coin that will make such rash changes in their ideology. I do wish them success however. If they can somehow even out what the heavy miners are gaining with what the masses that they are targeting will gain, they could still pull it off. I just think they are going in the wrong direction.
In any event, Since I do still plan to support them and run the mobile miner, I'll end this blog the same way I did the other.
If you do sign up and feel like it, you can use my referral number. It will give me 2% more on my mobile mining but it will also give you 1% more. So win-win! And thanks in advance if you do.