Before we dive into the future lets take a look at the past. I remember a day before ASICs and factory style mining. Back in those days we could mine with just about anything we got our hands on. The difficulties for most alt-coins were extremely low even up to about 2011, allowing for people to collect good portions of a coin by participating and mining with a pool. Once asics came out and people started building GPU farms the size of garages, the individual chance to be able to mine became very slim, unless you had a a lot to invest in your set ups.
So with these drawbacks what kind of future can we have in crypto mining? I mean, the future for the individual exists on steemit and it's a great opportunity to share and create content. Steemit doesn't really offer and hobbyist mining with potential growth though, which is something I have been looking for. I think I have finally found it with Verium. The algorithms used by the coin make it very difficult for asics and gpus to take over, so for now it's all CPU. I have been looking into many different options for builds and I think I finally have something I am going to work for.
I have always like single board computers like the raspberry pi, and they are very good candidates for mining verium because of their low power consumption. The raspberry pi's aren't the greatest and there are quite a few single board computers that will work much better but for experimenting purposes I decided to set up my raspberry pi 3 to mine Verium. The single unit mines at a very slow rate, giving me about 0.01 and 0.02 / day running it 24/7.
The next plan for an actual investment if I decide to will be to use the Odroid MC1. It comes with 4 SBC's based off of the Odroid XU4. Each chip has 8 cores and can earn you quite a few Verium over time. The power consumption is very low and the MC1 comes with a large fan to keep the devices cool. The price is relatively low for investment considering the low amount of energy these sbc's actually use. My eventual plan is to purchase one of them and use my raspberry pi as the managing server and I will then add to the cluster over time. The eventual plan will look something like the picture below. (this is not my picture, just something I dug up to show you guys a concept). I have the total for the first MC1 unit that comes with the 4 computers, as well as all other peripherals and the investment will be about $350 including shipping costs. The ROI is long term, if the coin survives, but I have faith in this coin for now, since it is CPU only mining and even the little guys can join in on the fun. This could change if people find more efficient ways of mining besides using Single board computers. I also forgot to note that with my laptop cpu that is also low energy, is pulling in about 2000h/m which is turning into about .3 vrm/day. I have 0 energy cost right now, and judging by the heat that is coming from the laptop, its totally fine. The temp is almost not noticeable from the feeling of the desk. It's a gaming laptop and the gpu isn't running, so the massive heatsink and fans keep it very cool So that is another option in the future as well, low energy core i7s built for laptops. Well guys, let me know what you think and if you have any tips . I know we have some other VRM miners out there!
