With all these new cryto-currencies popping up, I just had to try it. I figured I'd try to use all the extra CPU power in my arsenal of extra unused laptops, servers, unused VPS's, ect, to mine some altcoin (alternative cryto-currency coin). What's the worst thing that could happen?
I really wanted to mine Litecoin, because it's the most valuable second to Bitcoin. Well, it did not take long to figure out that the difficulty on the LTC network is just way too high to ever bother with CPU's again. Next I tried Dogecoin, which is one of the newer ones, and is not worth much. It started as a joke and for some reason got popular and is worth like $0.00002 per coin. I put my really powerful 8 core VPS server to work, along with my unused compaq laptop (dual core amd, useless Nvidia card), and a couple 2ghz cheap VPS servers. I mined in a pool for 2 days and accumulated 30 dogecoin, which is approximately equal to $0.00... (10,000 doge is worth about a $1). During that time the plastic on the bottom of my cheap compaq started to melt from heat, so I had to put it next to my window fan. Then I received an angry email from one of my VPS providers complaining that my CPU had been at 100% for 3 days straight, and told me to stop mining. I pulled the plug on that one and installed cpulimit on my other two VPS's, and set it to only use 75% of the CPU so maybe they would not notice. After two more days of this nonsense, I realized I could trade .005 BTC (worth about $2 or $3) for 21,500 dogecoin. I did that, and shut down all my miners. All in all, I mined about 40 dogecoin, and then realized that the pool would only let me cash out at least 150 at a time, and charge a "50 doge 'transaction' fee." ... pointless.
Well, hopefully the price of dogecoin skyrockets (dubious, but possible). What will I do with them in the meantime? Well, they can be used as bounty rewards for getting answers to questions on Reddit! I don't know, I just had to buy them so I could stop compulsively burning out CPU's for nothing.
What next? Well there's this new really interesting coin, Darkcoin, which is supposed to be an anonymous coin, claims it's 'darksend' feauture fixes some of the problems that Bitcoin has with transactions being easily traced on the blockchain. Not to say that you can't be anonymous with bitcoin, you can be with ease, but it does take some effort and knowledge. Anyway, I'm trying to figure out to mine that. It's supposed to be a good CPU candadite, and if darksend is what it's supposed to be, that coin could have a future. Who knows.
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