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
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I am a little closer to understanding. But my brain still hurts!!
Haha, as with anything new, the set up is the hardest bit but once you get there, it's just plug and play (with a bit of ETH expenditure)!
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🤔🤔 I haven't checked it out. Should I?
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Aha, that's up to you if you wanted to! Personally, I'd say it's well worth trying out if only to dip your toes in the water and as long as you don't mind spending a bit of ETH on it, give it a go
(not financial advice 😃)
LOL Not even this tutorial is going to convince me the amount of hoops to jump through is worth it, will happily spend my ETH on Uniswap but good luck, hope you score some profits
Haha, ah man, it's not that tough to do.
If you can work out Hive-Engine, you can work out Koin in half the time. I just altered my frequency this morning and, instead of having only 22 hours left of mining at 50 Proofs/Day, I have 6 weeks left at 1 proof per day so will update the cost calculation. We'll see how it all pans out. Uniswap is a dark art to me haha!
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How to solve this : https://leofinance.io/hive-167922/@wongbraling/following-to-mining-koinos Do you have suggestion?
I already funded only 0.020 eth (because there was only that amount :)) and it turned out that from that amount I finally got the message: Returned error: insufficient funds for gas * price + value.
What do you think, if only with this amount, my mining will fail?
Thank you for your kind support and attention :)
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Hmm, it might be that you don't have enough ETH in - what is the Proof Frequency you have set up at the moment?
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Now I change the frequency from 4 perday as a standar aplication become 1 perday, I don't know is this gonna work out well. by the way thank you for your kindness and attention. I am sorry I am a new player in this game :) just a little player
Hey ditto man, I'm a small, new player as well but just sharing what worked for me and hope to make it even easier for everyone. Can you send me a screenshot of how your miner looks? Is it running ok now?
I know how you feel as I was waiting for that very first KOIN to appear in my wallet and had to play around with a lot of things to get it working smoothly now. I had the frequency up at 50/day just to try and speed things up to get my first KOIN. I did 4 transactions at this frequency and it ended up costing 0.0224 ETH (so about 0.0055 ETH per transaction on average). After changing to 1 per day frequency, the cost of transaction is now 0.0039 ETH so I think the first ones you mine will be most expensive, then it will get cheaper to mine after that.
You'll get there!
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Until now, this my mining after 2 hours of changed the Pof
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Ok, that's a good thing that it's kept going for a couple of hours. Leave it running and will keep our fingers crossed for good luck and good news later on when the KOIN balance is off 0.0!
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wow, for me there is no bright spot yet. regarding my mining whether it will fail or succeed
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Be patient mate, it will happen :)
If you're really stuck, please join their Discord server here - https://discord.gg/782SDxf - there's so many helpful people that will be able to get you sorted through the more technical issues!
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thank you very much
You got it man!
Congrats on a great start. Yes, it was fun yesterday evening :)
Ah man, I was getting serious FOMO seeing everyone else mining and sharing screenshots and I was trying everything. Then the eureka moment happened and I was like "YEAHHHHHHHHH!" - actually shouted it out loud too haha!
Very fun day yesterday, and today! Continuously checking out the miner now to see if anything else has happened but I know it hasn't because I have set my proof frequency to a lower amount... but it's still fun to look!!
Great work your side too! Really interested to see how Koin and KOINOS will all work together and build with HIVE
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Glad to hear you enjoyed it so much. Yes, it's the same with me. I keep checking the score although I know it will be hours till something changes :)
I installed the second miner to have double fun :)
Good luck!
Haha! Nice, double dipping! Thinking of doing the same with my other laptop actually, then my room would just be a sauna for the winter months!
Happy mining x2!
ha ha It was fun yesterday. I was racing against the time with my old mac put into the mining work.Scraping. I managed to mine a couple hundred. For the second proof, my ETH was taken out but there was an error saying they could not find something. So, ETH was gone but no KOIN in return. Let's see how this works. I am also one of the first time miners. Hive has pushed me into so many unknown cliffs 😇🤣
Haha yeah man! Great fun and frantic energy in the Discord as people were trying to get their miners up and running! Awesome work on mining a few hundred! I'm sure it will be more as time goes on!
I did have a similar error (it was in an orange colour) but the KOIN did appear a few moments later after the next proof was sent. I'm going to see what I can get over the next 6 months and who knows what it comes to! I know how you feel man - like a lost sheep in the wilderness here sometimes 😂
Exactly. I am not gonna fuss about it but will remain updated on what the team is up to. It seems you are spending your ETH to buy these coins. Let's see.
Yeah a couple of dollars worth of ETH each day if you have the Proof Frequency set to 1 per day
I am cheap. I now set it at 1 per week 🤣
Haha I may change mine as well to make my ETH last throughout the mining period. 6 months is a long time! Might not mine everyday just to give my pc some breathing space haha
That's what I thought. Once I settle after the initial FOMO, I would rather use my ETH for the long term. Nothing is being missed here. Six months is a long time.
I've been told that if the miner finds a valid hash, it tries to send it to Ethereum immediately. In fact, if someone were to modify the miner to try and optimize the timing of sending a proof and waits longer than 90 Ethereum blocks, the proof is not accepted by the contract on Ethereum because the proof contains header information from the head block of Ethereum at the time the proof was obtained. 90 blocks on Ethereum corresponds to a few minutes.
Proof Frequency is merely the expected frequency at which a proof is found and sent to the contract on Ethereum. The miner does not store the proofs and thus send them at any regularity.
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Thanks for the detail here about the way ETH works and how the miner interacts with it. I had a feeling there was more to it but the way I described was about as much detail as I knew from a total beginner point of view.
Ultimately, I think most won't know how to modify the miner and just use it as it is so what you said in the final sentences will probably be enough
The contract is made so that it rejects old proofs. I think someone asked about it in Discord yesterday and a member of the team answered that old proofs are not accepted. The timing of submitting the proof matters because it varies how much KOIN you get for it.
Thank you so much for the additional info! So if I understand it as you've explained now, you can have the miner running and it will just submit the valid hash to the ETH network straight away, regardless of Proof Frequency. Then it will return KOIN to the miner depending on if the proofs are accepted by the network and the timing of them?
I found this pretty useful too actually, really well explained regarding Proof Frequency:
https://github.com/open-orchard/koinos-gui-miner#understanding-proof-frequency
Yes, when the miner finds a valid hash, it submits the hash (proof) to the mining contract on Ethereum immediately. The Proof Frequency is merely the expected frequency (the time interval that has the highest likelihood between found proofs) at which valid proofs are found at the particular difficulty associated with that Proof Frequency. What the contract on Ethereum does upon being provided a valid proof is that it mints an amount of KOIN ERC-20 tokens primarily depending on the difficulty of mining at the time when the proof was found and sends it to a wallet address specified by the user of the miner.
Perfect, thanks for clarifying all that 😃
If that's true, the frequency number doesn't really matter.
It doesn't except that you have to pay a transaction fee each time your miner sends a proof to the contract on Ethereum. For optimal results in the long term, it would probably be best to only try and solve the hardest problems at the lowest frequency because the mining period is about six months. If you mine at a difficulty level where you're most likely to find one proof per week, your results will still be quite predictable because the mining period is almost 26 weeks long.
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STOPDamn, that's a serious amount of comments haha!
I've got over double that and i've never used a bot, so I have to say you're a child! Get in them comments fam
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Lol, you've had an 8 month headstart though 😜
LOL that first 8 months no one spoke to me and only bots commented on my post so don't you dare, don't!Dare!Dare!DONT!Uh no buts, no! To your room! Now
Lol, no-one said you had to reply to those bots, yet you still did sister ☝️
And raising 🚀
I got errors all the time with all this sucks!
Head over to their Discord mate, they'll help you out. Give them screenshots of the error messages you're getting as well
Yes, I'll head over thanks!
No worries mate! Here's the Discord link:
https://discord.gg/782SDxf
Hope you get the issues sorted - it's pretty cool once you get through them. I was frustrated to begin with, spent a couple of hours sorting it but got there in the end! 💪
Great write up and I might just dip my toe in on this one...
Thanks mate, yeah why not? If you have a bit of excess ETH to throw at it that you don't mind spending... I'm doing it for the experience of mining and seeing how it all works and it's kinda cool although probably will be burning out my CPU in no time haha!
I downloaded this weeks ago and forgot about it. It fires up and lets me mine without adding ETH to it..., does that mean it's going to stay at 0.00 forever?
Haha, yeah I forgot about it too until one of my music mates told me it's about to go down! Hmm, sounds like when/if your miner does solve a complex calculation, it won't be able to send it to the ETH network as you have no ETH to spend so it might stay at 0.00 KOIN. You need to have some ETH but I just chucked £20 at it to see what gives.
I found my computer started whirring up like it did 2 years ago when I used to use NiceHash to mine. The question is.. is it worth the extra electric charges.., I could start using NiceHash again, and get BTC... something that has value for sure.
Haha, yeah lots of whirring going on here. I'll probably do one more hash with KOIN then let my PC have a bit of a breather! I'd never turn down BTC myself but I don't know if it's possible to get that much BTC unless you have a full on warehouse full of PCs these days?
NiceHash worked in a way where it switched algo's to mine the best altcoin depending on your hardware. Then they traded the spoils for BTC, took a cut and gave you the rest. I fired it up this morning but would be loss making now as my VC's are too ancient!
Ah that sounds like a good concept actually but I guess only if you have newer pcs! My one is getting on 5 years old now after being gutted out with new processors and GPU a few years ago... Starting to show signs of frailty so may just see how it gets on and hope there's one more big hash to find, then I'll just give it a break (or buy a new processor lol)
It's all about the video cards, the PC can be any old junk. Mine is low end as I don't use it for gaming.. got a PS4 for that.
I don't think I can mine Koinos as I only have a MAC, doesn't seem to be an option for that!
I think @gribbles has a Mac and he's managed to get some KOIN out of it but it looks like some bigger miners have caught wind of what's going on as I've not got anything in the last 24 hours so I may just burn the remaining ETH I have left on the miner and leave it at that. Wasn't expecting too much out of it but happy with 2k coins!
I've just got it working, isn't the whole idea that anyone can mine the coin so it's as widely distributed as possible?!? So it's large miner resistant?
Oh yeah, anyone can start mining but it's still based on "Proof of Work" so you're ultimately competing against other miners to discover "hashes" that you can trade for KOIN. If you have a lower hash rate compared to others (lower CPU capability), then you may need to increase your proof frequency in the miner.
Looking at the top 10 of the 393 total KOIN holders so far (minus the uniswap pool), they hold over 50% of the KOINs mined with the top 2 holding over 35%:
I've been mining since hour 1 and am well outside the top 100 so I think competition is stiffening up and I've heard it's a bit of a lottery about how many KOIN anyone will be able to mine - if you have ETH to spare then you might as well give it a crack for some experience of mining but I personally won't be spending more than I already have in the miner.
Well it's fired up, so let's see how it goes, I like a bit of a lottery!
Haha, you gotta be in it to win it!