My advice to everyone: if an altcoin pops up, mine it for a day or two. Place the funds in a private wallet. Backup the wallet on a USB key and two hard drives. Do not access it for 2-3 years. Early on, farming a block takes no effort at all. Later on, if the altcoin succeeds, you hit a random lotto. Otherwise, you have a few encrypted wallets and probably wasted 15 minutes setting up the miner per altcoin. Be wary of the altcoins.
My advice to everyone: Existing cryptocurrencies and especially all the "i made a coin too" are a shady, complicated and potentially completely useless things. Consider them all schemes to lure money into the creator's wallets. That's the whole purpose. Now make the ethical decision if you want to support that for a chance on a questionable gain in $YourLocalRealMoney through shady exchanges. And if you feel stressed already that you missed the opportunity to be a fantastillionaire with bitcoin, you will probably get addicted to mining and feel miserable overall. Do you want to feel stressed and perhaps evil for a tiny chance of money or do you rather have a constant flow of secure meatspace money by working?
>Consider them all schemes to lure money into the creator's wallets
Some launches, like Dogecoin's, are done ethically with no pre-mining. Look at the coin creator's launch plan and if they violate (as the recent Coinye coin did) take them to task for it (Coiye crashed and burned).
It's effectively the same thing, except that the set of people at the top of the pyramid is larger. It's still most lucrative for the creators, it's just also highly rewarding for the earliest adopters.
I can see how my post left room for misinterpretation; my intention was to express that the creators are in the set {people for whom it's most lucrative}. The earliest adopters are in the set too, obviously.
Put differently, my point is that "ethical" launches are simply good marketing, and are quite compatible with the sentiment expressed upthread that "[altcoins] are schemes to lure money into the creator's wallets". If a given coin becomes popular, the creator is going to profit immensely from it whether or not they engaged in pre-mining. By doing an "ethical" launch, they're making it more likely that the coin gains significant adoption, albeit probably decreasing the expected size of their payout. That seems like a smart play, given diminishing marginal utility of money, etc.
>Do you want to feel stressed
and perhaps evil for a tiny chance of
money or do you rather have a
constant flow of secure meatspace
money by working?
Ignoring the "evil" bit, this sounds like a false dilemma. Running a mining "rig" is not a full-time job; the people I've talked to who are into mining treat it as either a hobby or a passive income-type side project.
Multiply those 15 minutes by the number of altcoins popping up every week. Then add the time spent in looking for altcoins early on. There are several who'd like to jump on it from day 1. They make their living by selling them on ebay.
Not to mention that your computer is unusable while it's mining. My point being, it's not a get rich quick scheme for everyone.
If you assume crypt coins are going to be pressed into wide-spread use, then it is akin to a land rush. Automating the process can be done quite easily by using something like Multipool's list of currencies and just running through the list with a script. Way less than 15 minutes per.
>Not to mention that your computer is unusable while it's mining.
Depends on your computer. I mine 42 coin and code/watch movies and there's no noticeable performance hit other than my computer being warmer than usual.
Thanks for supporting 42.. I stumbled upon this thread via Google Search. I am maco from the official 42 coin team. I want to know if anyone has questions about 42 coin so I can answer them! Yes, I hear that a lot of people do mine 42 while multi-tasking, it really depends on the graphics card you got. After all, 42 coin is still the highest valued crypto currency to date... and we increased the crypto communities average from $13 USD to $250,000 USD.
I'd rather advice on spending $20 on an Altcoin. Much less effort and more potential return, since several days of mining will probably return a few dollars of current value.
I wouldn't underestimate the effort of buying new Altcoins, especially with dollars. If you already own bitcoin it is easier, but buying new altcoins requires that you go through potentially untrustworthy channels on smaller exchanges as new exchanges generally won't have them available.
