Mining KOIN - first impressions

Even though I'm still a crypto newbie, I feel like I've come a long way. And tonight, I mined my first ever tokens.

I've been geeking out with various techie stuff since building my first IBM PC from odd parts and manuals I found in the warehouse when testing monitors for Opus Technology back in the day. 1990 to be approximately precise.

I remember the first kerfuffle around Bitcoin, and thinking it of passing interest. But my first real brush with crypto was the ill-fated Choon music project a couple of years back. Since then I dabbled in other bits and bobs, and though I eventually got on - with more than a little help from @nickyhavey, who is known to this parish, I understand ;) - I did tend to share the widely held opinion that crypto was 33% Voodoo, 33% technobabble and 33% Emperors New Clothes. With the remaining 1% perhaps being a bit I could grasp.

But it was fun. I enjoyed the voodoo technobabble as much as the Emperor's New Clothes waffle annoyed me.

But then Nicky put me on to hive.blog - and things fell into place. Here was an application that made good use of a crypto engine. I still don't use it as much as I would like, but it makes sense. And so, when I heard that some of the chaps behind Steem were cooking up something new, I was interested. Again, a lot of the detail went over my head, but I understood enough to see the opportunity - and the pedigree was solid. So (again from a tipoff from the inestimable Mr Havey) when I learned that they were not doing an ICO, but proposing a mining period that you didn't need a server farm half the size of Wales to be useful, I thought it'd be fun to have a go.

And completely expected to launch into the world of voodoo technobabble again.

I was wrong.

The miner software was a cinch to install. Like any other mac app - download a disk image, drag the app to the Applications folder. Run it.

Some trivial hoops to jump though in setting up an account and funds wallet, and linking it to my ETH wallet - Metamask.

And that was that. With the KOIN token being ETH based, some ETH needed to be sent to the funds wallet to cover gas fees of transferring the KOIN token to my wallet - so a bit of investment is needed, but it doesn't feel prohibitive.

But, barring a couple of hiccups that were solved by updating the endpoint, that was that. The mining app is functionally pretty and it Does What It Says On The Tin. Click start...wait...mine KOIN. Simples.

I know Nicky is writing a beginners guide for folk who want to have a go, but he encouraged me to drop my first impressions here - so here y'go. :)

tl;dr KOIN is crypto mining so easy, a newb like me can do it using a laptop and mac mini. And it's a nice buzz seeing those first coins appear. It'll be interesting to see if they accrue a value in the future...

Koinos web site: https://koinos.io/

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