I admit, I started mining Bytecoin on a bit of a whim.
After the NiceHash fiasco a few months back, I was looking for an alternative mining solution and a friend directed me towards MinerGate. I was primarily focused on mining Ethereum, as my interest in diversifying my altcoin portfolio had been increasing lately. As I was examining the hashrate and profitability calculator to determine what my GTX 970 was capable of, I couldn’t help but notice this smaller coin on the list. This “Bytecoin” had pretty low value, but full coins could be mined in a short period of time compared to the more valuable, but significantly smaller fragments of Bitcoin or Ethereum. This prospect was music to my ears as a relative newcomer to the crypto scene and after doing some more research, I’ve decided I’m going to keep mining Bytecoin and I’ll be watching very closely as it continues to develop throughout 2018.
A little background: Bytecoin has been around since 2012 and it was the first cryptocurrency to utilize the open-source CryptoNote technology, making this a very attractive coin option for the privacy-focused. The CryptoNote protocol ensures that transactions are unlinkable and keeps information about your wallet’s balance private from potentially peering eyes. As users of technology in this modern age, I believe that a reasonable right to privacy is a principle that we should hold onto going forward and any cryptocurrency that shares that value will keep itself on my radar. Fortunately, other coins such as Monero and Dash also utilize CryptoNote, so the future of cryptocurrency privacy looks good thus far.
At the time this article was written, Bytecoin’s value was around $0.007CAD, so obviously not that much overall. But I simply can’t get the notion of “Bitcoin was worth almost nothing not THAT long ago” out of my head. With faster processing times and general anonymity among the general public, Bytecoin seems like a good option to get in on while the value and relative ease-of-mining remains low. While I certainly don’t expect to “get rich quick” or anything with this coin, it’s still interesting to potentially get in on the ground floor with an up-and-coming coin that I feel has a lot of long-term potential.
Overall, Bytecoin seems like a good fit for me and it can be for you, keeping in mind:
• It can be mined relatively quickly with a solid CPU/GPU setup
• The CryptoNote protocol helps to ensure your personal information will be kept safe
• The processing times are low, with transactions occurring almost instantly
• Due to its relatively low value right now, it tends to fly under people’s radar
Thanks for reading and let me know what you think about Bytecoin and smaller altcoins like it. More to come!
My BCN address: 2A9D3KqR5eABd12JYeCS9jFQGoHMFnRcT29HeZAirheGFY9hXkcXR6DfNCezqRpKfLJf5dmANoy6uA2bGtZ3uT5fJKQVdhx
O.N.