I feel a bit bad about it but during this phase of my life, with a few things going on, I just want to take it easy with my computing time and play Bitcoin Miner. It feels a bit Pavlovian, a dumb search for satoshis. As Mike Skinner of The Streets once wrote, 'Watching the torrent. Like it'. Is there a way to do this? To completely sort of zone out and not feel bad about wasting time just playing games on a computer? I'm trying to give that a go.
Bitcoin Miner is a fun little mobile phone app game for Android or Apple phones. You sign up first with Zebedee, an interesting gaming and developer platform in this space. They provide a wallet too for you to store your earned satoshis. And many other games to choose to play instead. But with Bitcoin Miner the instructions are pretty self-explanatory. You basically tap the screens lots. Coins explode and you watch your in-game profits rise astronomically while you try to (not literally) dodge getting hit by adverts. In reality you get to collect a few satoshis. One satoshi equals one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin which is... I don't know; not a lot.
The stage does seem to be set for the shift to satoshis. Which might be a good thing. And might not. The Lightning Network is a layer 2 payment protocol running atop the Bitcoin blockchain. I don't understand the technicalities of it but it seems like a sort of off-chain system for adding batch payments to the Bitcoin network thereby easing the pressure on the Bitcoin mining framework. So satoshis are the currency which fly around in very fast transactions on the Lightning Network. And then the Lightning Network combines lots of these tiny fractional transactions (of satoshis) together to make a bulk transaction to the Bitcoin network.
I know a bit about this stuff from having signed up to Bitcoin Magazine a while back (lots of very well-written and pretty interesting, very pro-crypto, very pro-BTC articles). And I signed up to the 21 Days of Bitcoin quiz and passed with flying colours and earned, effectively, my first dollar in satoshis. Visionary advocate for the decentralised economy SirGerardThe1st has recently published a great article on the Lightning Network which references further applications and methods for seeking satoshis.
It was a bit easier back when Coinbase were giving you $2 or $3 worth of crypto for watching a few short adverts for new tokens. Those were the days; not very long ago really. So if Bitcoin is about to hit a new bull run what's going on with this shift to satoshis which does appear to be a sort of quite rapid de-scaling of potential free internet earnings of crypto? Well, I guess (or I read about it here a lot anyway) the freedom fighters of crypto are fighting the corporate forces of traditional wealth. And the status quo finds its magic money machine coming in for some criticism and banks have been folding. This sort of goings-on so times are hard kind of all round.
Anyway, I've been enjoying Bitcoin Miner. It's not real money. I'm looking just now at 5.61 billion to re-invest in GPUs (can't afford that) - this is with the in-game money which isn't real money. The odd satoshi rolls along and I grab it. Is this real money? I don't know. What's real money? Put it this way, the person who walks by a cent (US) or penny (UK) in the street and declines to pick it up is missing a free opportunity there somewhat in excess of the kind of finances I am talking about with these satoshis.
There are 100 cents in 1 dollar. 1 BTC = 28,000 dollars = 2,800,000 cents = 100,000,000 satoshis. I think 1 Satoshi currently is worth about 1/35th of a cent or about 1/3500th of a dollar. This isn't very clear but that makes sense in terms of my total satoshi yield in four weeks of chasing them through many avenues. I hope the math(s) is roughly correct here. Please put me right in the comments if not.
Probably the main thing that is going on here is that these are faucets. Bitcoin Miner is a game but a faucet - a free giveaway of something tiny. Airdrops I suppose come in many different sizes. Anyway, yeah it's a kind of fun game. I even quite like to focus on the adverts and work out what they are trying to sell me and what tricks they are using to sell me things. I can sort of get into a slightly reflective space. But yes my current chill-out sessions with this game won't last forever.
It's Banano's fifth birthday sometime soon (Bitcoin is fourteen years old!) but I've not really been getting anywhere with that recently. Free rice is a nice idea but somewhat boring to obtain through quiz questions. Maybe I can get out of this crypto space (swim out of the whale's belly) and back to trying to make some music or looking at other fields of intriguing study soon.
