In my last post about mining alternative coins or new projects (not for profit but for educational purposes and helping the project itself) i received a comment about trying NIMIQ. It was supposed to be easy to mine and even mineable from the browser! The thing is that I tried it so you dont have to. Let's see what happened!
Miners
In this webpage https://miner.nimiq.com/ you can mine NIMIQ without the need of downloading any additional software. You can connect to your wallet, choose the mining pool you want (I went with AceMining because it had a lower fee), choose the number of threads to use and just start mining.
I think this idea is really nice and it helped me to get started. The interface showed which nodes you were connected to and where were located (quite impressive for a project i have never heard of) and was able to show you hashrate and how much you've made in the pool. I managed to mine at about 4kH/s using 4 threads (about 1kH/s/thread) The result of a mining test was not very satisfactory as I only managed to mine around 1 NIM in almost 8 hours. Obviously, in a project this small, this is absolutely not profitable (at the writing time, NIM exchanges at 0.000615€). This means i made less that a tenth of a cent in a whole working session. Yeah, not nice.
On the other hand, there is other software avaliable for mining that removes the restrictions of the browser. I tried 2.
Both of them are provided by NIM Pools Hub and we are goign to review them.
The first one is a visual miner that allows you to choose between CPU and GPU, tweak some setting and just press START. It is easy, it is convinient and it allows everyone to start mining without needing any prior knowledge. I got to mine at 10kH/s using the same 4 threads, thats 2.5x the amount i was mining in the browser with the same computing power. This means I totally recommend keeping away from these types of solutions.
The second one is a CMD program that uses NQ-miner. It supoprts NVIDIA cards, so i threw there my old gtx960 to test it. Even with an old GPU, i got almos 80kH/s, meaning that this coin is far better mined with GPU than with CPU. Even though, making quick maths, this translates into 20 NIM per 8 hours (depending on pool luck and share acceptance), so one cent of a euro every 8 hours... Also not very profitable.
Conclusions
This project really surprised me for the friendly interface and the easy to use mining software, other projects used plain CMD files that need a lot of tweaking and knowledge to get them to work while in this project you could something that simple as a web Browser. The hashrate is wildly affected by the complexity of the software used, making it much higher if using anything different from the browser. Also, mining on GPU seems far better.
I think I will make the same as with other projects, keep one portion of the mining power there and hold the earnings looking for a bump in price. This actions help small projects to grow. Even if you don't make a profit you can lend a helping hand on this situations and make a better crypto world.
What should I try next?
Also feel free to send some tips
- NIM: NQ74 061B 5APX UUAD B8B2 HKVN GN20 8ANP YGRD
- FNNC: FZ4y2i4m9P4nMwC4oF1obNFzik2GC2xrNi
- XMR: 46srigF2QEcM4bggmh3Zq8YAhqWGyWJYw9yhzKzYBjgB5Pacib84VwrYurmr9zRY8wJSFAFNycnF3e8C3RexMGqe5JrHv9y
