DAEMON TECHNOLOGIES STX MINING CHALLENGE

The first part of the STX Mining Challenge will test your ability to mine on the Krypton infrastructure of the Stacks 2.0 Testnet. The challenge will be a mad dash to win as many mining rewards as possible, while spending the least amount of BTC. Every participant who successfully mines a block will receive some amount of reward.

STX Mining is easy and doesn't require any special hardware. Miners simply spend testnet Bitcoin to compete to mine.

This piece aims to guide people who would like an opportunity to test the experience themselves. A chance to get your hands dirty during the test phase of this technology without any risk or downside. In fact, there is only upside here. Zero risk and the potential for what could turn out to be a huuuuuuge reward. For people unfamiliar with the world of Blockstack and cryptocurrency in general, this is the perfect opportunity to gain some first hand experience while contributing to the continued development of this exciting project. You’ll be rewarded with STX tokens once you complete the challenge, which for some may be their first venture into the world of Crypto.

This challenge focuses on the PoX aspect rather than stacking. It is being run by Daemon Technologies and you can register here: https://daemontechnologies.co/minestx-challenge.

To register you need to provide four things:

1. Email Address

2. Name

3. Testnet Bitcoin (BTC) Address

4. Testnet Stacks (STX) Address

The first two are obviously straightforward but number 3 and 4 are a bit trickier. For the non-technical like myself they may seem daunting but they are in fact quite straightforward also. The very helpful and talented Jason Schrader has uploaded this youtube video to guide people through the process.

If you’re inexperienced in this area it may mean exploring some unchartered territory. This was all new to me before I registered but I was genuinely impressed by how simple it was given the right guidance. The above youtube video explains it all far better than I ever could but I’ll leave you with a very brief rundown of the process.

1. Download the Node.js source code if you haven’t got it already.

2. Open your terminal (Mac)/Command Prompt (Windows)

3. Generate a keychain. Enter this command in your terminal: npx @stacks/cli make_keychain -t 2>/dev/null

4. Get testnet BTC to mine with. Enter a command in your terminal like this: curl -sS -X POST "https://stacks-node-api.krypton.blockstack.org/extended/v1/faucets/btc?address=BTCADDR" and replace BTCADDR with your actual BTC address.

5. If you get a message that says "success:true" at the end then it was successful and you should get 0.5 BTC* sent to your testnet address

   *this is testnet BTC. Sorry folks, it’s not THAT easy or cheap to acquire actual bitcoin.

6. Ensure you have received the testnet BTC. Enter this command in your terminal: curl -sS "https://stacks-node-api.krypton.blockstack.org/extended/v1/faucets/btc/BTCADDR*

   *again replace BTCADDR with your actual BTC address.

Once you follow these steps successfully you should be able to enter the Daemon Technologies STX mining challenge. In this challenge you’ll be using testnet BTC to mine STX tokens. The purpose of the challenge is to test and prepare the system for mainnet launch next year. Hopefully, it will have the additional affect of educating and introducing people to this new form of mining which doesn’t require any specialised equipment or overly technical knowledge.

I hope this article was useful to anyone who came across it but I will reiterate what I have explained here is explained far more thoroughly in Jason’s youtube video.

Good luck and happy mining!

DAEMON TECHNOLOGIES STX MINING CHALLENGE