Honeyminer 101

If you are following crypto-related accounts on Twitter you might have seen the ads of Honeyminer last summer. The accounts promoting this brand new mining platform presented Honeyminer as Nicehash/MinerGate killer. We are not going to speculate on whether this statement is right or wrong, let’s just observe what Honeyminer offers to miners and what’s special about this platform.

Honeyminer is an American company. The headquarters are located in Hoboken, New Jersey. The one-page website provides the basic info about the platform. On August Honeyminer already had 50,000 users signed up. The current number of users is unknown.

How Does It Work?

First off Honeyminer is a mining app. Currently, it’s available only for Windows, but iOS version will be added in future. Also, there is Linux-based Honeyminer Max but I’ll cover it at the end of the article.

Today the home mining is rather unprofitable because individuals can’t compete with incredible hashrates of industrial mining farms. Nevertheless, some solutions still exist. Mining pools combine the powers of individual miners and successfully find new blocks. The rewards get divided between the participants. Honeyminer operates with the CPU and GPU power that users consent to provide for mining. The process is extremely simple: you install the app, set the percentage of power you ready to sacrifice for mining and push the start button. The app is working while you still can use your device as usual. The main processes take place away from the eyes of users. All we can see is rewards in BTC coming to the user balance.

So what happens after we start the process? Honeyminer uses the GPU/CPU power to mine the most profitable currencies (the app switches from coin to coin automatically within approximately 10 minutes interval). It means that it mines numerous altcoins — allegedly always the ones that have better market value but low difficulty — so the process is meant to be as profitable as it possible.

The mined altcoins are mysteriously get converted to Bitcoin (probably Honeyminer has some amount of Bitcoin so they can send the “rewards” straight to users, collecting the altcoins mined by users instead). Considering the fact that Honeyminer is not an open-source platform and all the processes are not transparent (I’d said that users know nothing about what’s actually going on when they mine) we can assume that the computing power of Honeyminer users can be used for any purposes besides mining (for example it can be leased to third parties), but let’s believe that Honeyminer is an honest company that helps people to mine altcoins and receive the Bitcoin rewards.

On the Honeyminer website, you can find the following statement: “Our first goal was to create a ‘set it and forget it’ app for anyone to mine the most profitable coins.” That can be one of the reasons why the work of this app lacks transparency (details can make seem the presentation too complicated for those who don’t have mining experience). The entire design of the app and the mining process appeal to those who don’t want to learn much about mining and just want to tap on the start button and let the app do everything automatically. The company promises to widen its functionality to make Honeyminer more attractive for all sorts of miners including the experienced ones, but let’s see which options the platform provides today. Currently, users can’t even choose the currency they want to receive as a reward and forced to get Bitcoin.

How Much One Earn With Honeyminer?

Of course, everything depends on the user’s hardware. On average the daily profit fluctuates from $1 to $3 per GPU. It’s much better to use multiple GPUs with Honeyminer because of fees — the company holds 8% of earnings as a fee if you use a single GPU, and 2.5% if you use two GPUs. It’s not known how much Honeyminer takes if you use more than two GPUs. Anyway, we have to admit that the fees on Honeyminer are much higher than on other pools such as Suprnova (1%), MinerGate (1–1.5%) or others. There’s a calculator on the website but it’s not accurate, ’cause it’s based on average numbers. So, it’s kind of hard to understand why this calculator is even there. There’s no benchmark option on Honeyminer. You will earn as much as Honeyminer lets you. There’s no way to check anything because the platform is not transparent.

What About Security?

Security alongside accessibility is one of the good sides of Honeyminer. All the rewards waiting for withdrawal are kept in cold storage (it means that the coins you have earned are kept without the connection to the Internet). Honeyminer reports the suspicious log-ins and monitors the sessions. Conscious users have an opportunity to turn on 2-step verification in order to prevent their accounts from the log-ins of hackers. The strong passwords are required but outside the platform, Honeyminer cannot prevent users from becoming objects of phishing website, hacks, etc. That’s how hackers can obtain users’ passwords. In that case, 2-step verification is the only way to save coins. All the data is encrypted and protected by SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). Good!

Honeyminer Max & Honeyminer Pro

Honeyminer Max is a Linux-based mining app for BTC mining that withdraws rewards every 2 hours without fees (but there’s a nuance). The app is available only for owners of powerful processors. Nuance is that you get cash only if you manage to mine at least 0.005 BTC in 2 hours. If you fail then you have to start mining again. So, this offer might be profitable for a small group of people having a really huge computing power.

Honeyminer Pro is yet to be released. This version is free from all of the flaws of the basic version: users will have an opportunity to choose altcoins and will be allowed to have more control over the mining process, so it’s a step towards transparency.

How Can Honeyminer Be Utilized By Humankind?

I think the mission of Honeyminer (and many other miners with a user-friendly interface) is to attract more people to mining and the world of cryptocurrencies in general (we should remember that the entire civilized world will probably become the world of cryptocurrencies soon). People are scared of complexity, they afraid of something totally new and totally different from what they know. Honeyminer is not about mining because this app does all the job without user’s participation, it’s rather about the easiest way to receive some BTC. Honeyminer provides the ability to hold on to several Satoshis in your palm and realize that there’s nothing special in having some BTC, it’s a totally OK thing.

Those interested in a deeper understanding of blockchain and mining will barely be pleased by the current functionality of Honeyminer. You learn nothing from pushing the ON button and withdrawing the Bitcoin chunks to your BTC address. You can’t even prove that the mining takes place here and you cannot switch to a different currency.

So, basically, Honeyminer is a weapon of crypto propaganda. And a good one.