My Skyminer Story
Late to the party:
I won’t pretend to be a crypto/bitcoin OG, I am definitely not. To be honest I was even rather late to the party joining crypto during 2017. I bought my first chunk of Bitcoin and Ethereum and since then found my self hooked to this technology. Although the bubble collapsed, which I think has been very healthy for the industry, I stuck around and dug deeper into all it has to offer…
Getting involved with Skycoin:
It turned out I never sold a single Bitcoin or any other cryptocurreny I bought in the past. Trading just doesn’t feel like the right thing to me, and fortunately, the coins I bought haven’t proven to be exit scams, which is nice. So I dollar cost averaged in my positions and here I was now with a bag full of PoW and PoS coins. But I was still looking for a deeper involvement into a project I am really convinced by. Just holding coins and waiting for the price to move didn’t satisfy me…
Mining:
As I said earlier I was late to the party and this, in combination with living in a country with one of the highest electricity costs worldwide, makes mining economically uninteresting. I did mine Monero at some point while having access to a machine I didn’t have to pay electricity for, but the outcome was ridiculous (approx. 1$ worth of $xmr within a month). But playing around with the mining software was still beneficial to get a better understanding of the PoW mechanics. However, I am not really convinced of PoW in general, no matter what the Bitcoin maximalists tell you. So I had to look further…
Staking / PoS:
From my point of view, PoS is definitely superior towards PoW in the long term. I started researching PoS projects during 2017 and got hooked on Cardano. The massive level of research and their academic approach convinced me and I started accumulating $ada over months resulting in a massive bag, alongside smaller bags for other PoS coins. As soon as PoS starts for Cardano (yes, it has been delayed several times) I am happy to contribute by staking my coins or maybe even running a staking node myself… time will tell! But still the staking process feels passive and your contribution towards the network is very limited.
Skycoin:
While I was late to the overall crypto party I definitely came even later to Skycoin. The first time I really heard about it was some Twitter reply in early 2019. Some guy was asking for the “Most undervalued projects?” and one of the replies was “Skycoin”. I found the name interesting and started research on the project. Everybody who has done that in the past was most likely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of different projects, or project branches, all combined under “Skycoin”. There is Fiber, CX, CXO, Skywire/Skyminer to just name a few. This definitely didn’t feel like the average “Shitcoin” to me. Looking at the GitHub activity for Skycoin showed it as a Top10 coin within the last 12 months on coincodecap — dead project? Definitely not!
Skyminer:
So there was this one thing within the Skycoin universe called the “Skyminer” and I was expecting it to be some performance and energy-hungry PoW miner. To my surprise, the device was running on a cluster of low power SoCs (Orange Pi Prime) which caught my interested. I did more research on the consensus used by Skycoin (Obelisk) and how the Skyminer would contribute to the Skycoin / Skywire network acting as a node for routing traffic on the mesh network. That was the moment I was sold to Skycoin. Their approach is groundbreaking in my eyes, and instead of building single elements on top of existing blockchain solutions they are building a whole ecosystem from scratch.
One side note from me is the naming “Skyminer” comes a bit confusing. Everybody being interested in crypto expects a miner to be a PoW device contributing to the consensus by their CPU/GPU power. The Skyminer is actually rather a node in a network, so e.g. “Skynode” would be more appropriate and cause less confusion. But maybe that’s just me…
Official vs. DIY Skyminer
There are currently two options to get your hands on a Skyminer. Either you buy an official one from the store or you build your own one with an SoC (Rapsberry Pi, Orange Pi, or similar) and install the software under Linux on your own. There are pros and cons for both ways but I ended up building my own miner with Rapsberry Pis. It has been years since I last operated Linux, but bringing back my Linux networking knowledge from high school times felt appealing to me. Furthermore, the initial investment for a DIY miner is much smaller than for the official one. On the other side, in the long run, the official ones are rewarded with more Skycoins during testnet and you even get a guaranteed ROI within 2 years — which is amazing. But you need to put $1.999.- on the table from the very beginning which I wasn’t willing to do…
So, in the end, I built an 8 node miner which has been running constantly ever since in my home location in Germany (Bavaria):
Outlook:
As we discussed earlier, the Skycoin project is massive and ambitious since it’s covering many different aspects, a lot of them have never been done before, or at least not in this way. There is proprietary hardware, their own turing complete programming language, a new consensus algorithm, the Skywire meshnet and many more. If Skycoin really delivers on all of these products, who knows!? But I am particularly interested in the Skywire Meshnet and proud to contribute towards a free and censorship-resistant internet with my Skyminer. I have high hopes in the project and strong confidence in the team. Now let’s get our boots on the ground and spread the word about Skycoin — I will do this in my city and region for sure! And who knows which city is the first one to have a running Skywire meshnet. Maybe it’s my home town… we will see!
Skycoin tip jar: 2kpqrSeUb7sdBHMZYQFD6krMYobB1YEYW8q
