When I first started mining Atoms at POWNFT.com a couple days ago, I just thought I might flip them on OpenSea for a profit.
I buy NFT art sometimes with the intention of keeping it, but collectibles I typically intend to flip for a profit.
Only today did I look at my collection on there and see the following:
As you can see, I've earned about .05 ETH per NFT of the ones I mined myself. The thing is, I only paid about .05 ETH gas included mining them. So all the future ETH earned is pure profit.
Even the last one, which I bought on OpenSea, is earning me ETH. How long it will be until I've earned enough to compensate myself for the Atom I'm not sure. I paid significantly more for that one because I chose it specifically. When you mine them, you get what you get.
The holders of the NFT are the ones who get the mining fees. Not the ETH mining fees, but the Atom mining fees built into the contract. They don't actually go to the creators of the contract. So when you buy one or mine one, you share in the ETH paid for future ones, and that amount keeps going up.
There is increasing difficulty (time to mine a new Atom) and increasing cost paid to current holders of Atoms as the project matures. Eventually there is a difficulty bomb at around 16k Atoms mined, so effectively no one will probably mine after that. It won't be cost effective.
We're at about 2k mined right now, so hitting 16k mined is probably at least a week or more away, depending on how many people participate in mining in the meantime.
Here's from the site:
The POW NFT website has an Atom miner built right into it, if you’re connected to the site with MetaMask, you can start the miner (it’s at the bottom of your screen).
The reason you need to MetaMask is because it uses your Ethereum address to mine an Atom specifically for you....The miner is designed to not use too much of your computer’s processing power. It will mine slower if resources are limited in order to prevent your browser from acting sluggishly.
Once an Atom has been found, the miner will prompt you to submit a transaction with MetaMask and mint the token. The cost of this transaction will be partially dependant on current gas prices (gas cost to mint is approx. 192,000 gas per token), and partially on the minting cost determined by the demand curve.
The cost to mint a new Atom is currently 0.092115 ETH.
Again, on Friday evening it was more like .03 ETH before gas fees of about .02 ETH, so you can see the fee paid to current Atom holders to mint a new one is increasing fairly rapidly. This will only accelerate over time, though the number of people fees are being split among will also increase, of course.
A few things to keep in mind:
This is pretty fun and doesn't take much processing power. Given that you pretty much get an income in ETH just for participating, it's pretty hard to justify not doing it. Unless of course you don't have the .1 ETH or so to even get started.
If you're into Chemistry, you may even enjoy simply having the Atoms. Some come with unique features, like free ions, which are pretty rare. The one I bought on OpenSea was like that. Rare Earths would probably also be pretty valuable and unique.
