Burstcoin is a completely different way to mine cryptocurrency. I’ve dabbled in Cryptocurrencies over the years. Usually by mining. One thing that has always been a drain on any profitability is the amount of electricity mining consumes. Most mining is done via GPU , CPU or ASIC. All of these are huge consumers of electricity.
Power Consumption by Traditional Mining
There are various statistics available that show that bitcoin mining consumes more electricity globally than some small countries. Although the source of most of these statistics might be questionable, I have no doubt that there is an element of truth to that claim. Here are a few links that reflect that.
Mining with a Gaming PC
I recently built a new gaming PC. Not the biggest and baddest, but fairly hefty. I don’t game that often but when I do, I want at least some power to play without lag. I gave mining coin a shot again. After mining for a few days, I concluded it wasn’t worth the effort. The energy cost and wear on the PC really made it a losing proposition.
Being the stubborn fool that I am, I searched the web for mining techniques that use less power. I stumbled on a coin that uses a completely different method of mining. Burst Coin. Rather than using processing power from a GPU, CPU or ASIC array, it uses available drive space to mine Burst coin.
BurstCoin – How Mining with Disk Storage works
Burstcoin is essentially a proof of capacity system rather than a proof of work. Proof of work systems are the traditional way to mine Crypto currencies. They consume large amounts of power to mine coins. In a proof of capacity system, you create plots on spare disk space. The act of creating the plots takes computational power and then caches the results on your drive. The mining occurs when your mining software reads through the cache on your drive.
It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. Here’s a link to their page that gives a better explanation.
There’s also a number of coin mining forums that go into more detail. The bottom line is that using drive space rather than processing consumes magnitudes of less power than mining conventional coins.
CryptoCurrency Wallets
If you’re new to Crypto coins, one of the things you will need to store coins is a wallet. There are various wallets for the different coins that are available. They can either be downloaded and run on your computer, or you can use an online wallet if that is your preference. The wallet does not actually store your coins. What it does is stores your public and private keys as well as the blockchain, which is a record of that coins transactions.
So of course I went ahead and downloaded a Burst coin wallet. One thing you’ll need to do when installing a new wallet on your pc is download the blockchain for that coin. The blockchain is what keeps track of all the transactions for that particular coin. Most wallets will automatically go out and get the blockchain. Unfortunately, this will be done one transaction at a time and can literally take days, if not weeks to bring a wallet up to date.
The BurstCoin Qbundle Wallet
I downloaded the Burstcoin Qbundle wallet and installed it. I had to fumble with it a few times to get it running. After finally getting it running, it started updating the Burst blockchain. It did this for a few hours, which is where I noticed that the last transaction it had updated was from sometime in 2016. So to speed things up, I downloaded the most current blockchain I could find and updated the wallet with it.
As of right now. I’m using the latest release of Qbundle 2.5.0 as a local wallet. Qbundle serves as a wrapper for several functionalities. It has an embedded miner and plotter to set up plots on your drive space for mining. Additionally, it serves it’s primary function as a wallet for Burst coin.
Getting the wallet up and running was at first, an exercise in futility. There are some tutorials out there but I found that they are either incomplete or missing a few key pointers. I finally got the QBundle wallet up and running. I had to change a few things to get it to run. Changing the blockchain database and getting an executable file to install, were a bit of a challenge. But I did get it running and synchronizing the blockchain.
There are a few caveats to watch for when installing Qbundle (see last paragraph). Watch for my next post and I’ll go through installing and running qbundle as well as how to get started mining.
