TL;DR - Despite a rough launch, in my opinion the team has pulled through and released (most of) a great project! I'm looking forward to seeing what the price can do in the coming months!

Hello friends,

First, a quick update on myself: It's been some time since I've posted here. The reason being, we had a baby! A precious little baby girl, who shall be referred to henceforth on this blog as "Lil' K". She's doing great, and so is mom! Expect more updates to come!

And now for the meat and potatoes of this post:

Electroneum!

"ELECTRONEUM. THE MOBILE CRYPTOCURRENCY.
SIMPLE TO USE, POWERED BY AN APP."

source: http://electroneum.com

Let me start off by saying I am in no way affiliated with the Electroneum project. I've simply had a rewarding experience with their blockchain so far, and as such, would like to regale the Steemit world with my tale.

I first heard about Electroneum (ETN) sometime in mid-October. I didn't honestly think much of it at the time (except that they had picked a bit of an odd name), and so completely ignored their ICO. I simply set a reminder on my calendar for Oct 31 so I wouldn't miss the start of mining and promptly forgot about it.

Shaky launch

Fast-forward to Oct 31: I didn't realize the timezone they were launching in was so far ahead of my own, so I was lucky to be awake when the launch was scheduled to go down. To be frank, it was kind of a mess! I'll spare you the details, but the Electroneum thread on the BitcoinTalk ANN was rife with hordes of furious ignorami, most of whom were livid at the fact that the mobile miner wasn't ready to go, as had been promised.

To top it off, the team had discovered an issue with the two-factor authentication emails that many users had signed up for. They were part of a larger swath of compromised accounts! Rather than risk (according to their Facebook "over 2000") investors' Electroneum coins getting stolen, they decided to hold off on releasing the coins purchased in the ICO, until the problem could be rectified.

Naturally, this set off a wave of butthurt within the clueless masses, the likes of which I'd not seen before. I can understand the level of irritation they must have felt, but if I had purchased any coins in this ICO with my hard earned money I would have been extremely thankful that the team at Electroneum was looking out for my investment, rather than screaming "SCAM!!!!!!11" on the forums/Facebook, and them letting it all get stolen at the hands of some script kiddies who had gotten their hands on some leaked email credentials.

After all, account security should really be up to the individual when it comes down to it. There's a reason websites like https://haveibeenpwned.com exist!!!!

Early victories

Yes, the mobile miner still wasn't (and at the time of this writing, isn't) out. However, mining with a PC was working just fine. ETN recently switched to the Monero codebase, and as such, is mineable with most (all?) XMR-capable mining software. It just so happens I've recently completed my own mining rig (and have been too busy to make a post about it... I promise I'll get to it!). It's nothing too fancy, just 6x 1060s...

Suffice to say in those early moments of the blockchain being live, amidst all the chaos and confusion, I was able to mine extremely quickly! Initially, when I joined the main pool, I more than tripled the network hashrate, even with my lowly 1060 rig. Exciting moments to be sure!

Today the situation is more as one would expect: slow and steady mining for the masses. The price on Cryptopia in the early moments of being listed was (at least around the time I was able to check the exchange) approximately $ .40 USD. My paltry sum was worth almost an entire bitcoin! However, rather than take a quick and easy buck, I decided to "HODL" and have not sold a single ETN coin.

Moving forward

I am continuing to mine and hold ETN, as it is doing well for me, even with the massive influx of miners. The price plummeted down to the $ .03 USD range, where it held steady for a bit. It has recovered to over 4 cents, and I think things are looking up. The team has caught a lot of flak for the shaky launch, but to be fair they only expected 10,000 users. There were something in the ballpark of 400,000 (no source, just a comment I read on their Facebook that I can't seem to find now). Of course they had scalability problems!

I take this as an EXCELLENT sign of ETN moving ever-upward. I'm sure it will have another down-swing when the investors are able to panic-sell their coins, but I think we could easily see 50 cents by the end of the year!