To the Moon or BUrST! My Burst mining experience.

Hello friends! I've recently started mining Burst and I've received a lot of interest and questions from folks here and there. I am certainly no expert, just a novice myself, but I thought I would share my experience with the community and maybe help out someone who wanted to know but didn't want to do all the research.

Announced: August 10, 2014

More Info:

https://www.burst-team.us/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstcoin

Algo: Proof-of-Capacity

Mined with: Hard Drive Space

Avg Block time: 4 minutes

Current Block Reward: 1748.0 Decreasing 5% per month

Exchanges: Multiple

Mining:

Burstcoin uses a proof-of-capacity (POC) algorithm for mining. Miners pre-generate chunks of data known as 'plots' which are then saved to disk. The total size of the plots you store is effectively your mining speed. Every block the miner will skim through the saved plots, and come up with an amount of time it will take to mine that block if another block hasn't yet been found. After reading through the plots is complete, your hardware can idle until the next new block. This means that burstcoin mining uses very little system resources and electricity. You can run a burst miner while GPU mining another coin. I currently run both a cpu and a gpu miner while burst mining with no issues. I just leave one core open for burst and the system to run on.

As an example, I have 1TB of drive space mapped out or 'plotted' for burstcoin. When a new block is found by the network, my CPU briefly scans my plots looking for a deadline. The more space I have, the greater the chance of finding a deadline and the greater the chance that my deadline will be low. The miner who has found the soonest block deadline wins that block reward. Deadlines can range from a few seconds to a few years, although most pools have a limit where the pool will only accept deadlines earlier than a month or a week or even a few days on the larger pools.

Mining with a pool is interesting. The winner of the block receives a percentage, usually 40-60% of the block reward after the 1-3% pool fee. The rest of the block reward is distributed among the pool members who submitted shares on the winning block AND to a lesser degree, those pool members who have submitted shares over a number of past blocks. Its all very transparent and easy to follow once you get the pool interface down.

My favorite thing about mining burst is that even if you are mining with a pool, you get a percentage of the block reward when you win a block. This gives incentive to the little guy who might otherwise be discouraged with his 15 or 20 burst a day. He knows that at anytime he can win a block and receive 7 or 8 hundred Burstcoin or more.

Solo mining is pretty much out for me since it could take me 2 months to find a block. I'm the results oriented type so I need to see something happening on a daily basis. Allegedly there is no long term difference between the earnings you get from solo mining versus pool mining so it just depends on how you like to roll. I'd probably give it a shot at 20TB but I still probably wouldn't find a block everyday.

Granted, I'm not breaking any records over here with my 1TB drive, but since its not using a bunch of system resources and I already owned the drive, its like finding 'free' coin. After about a month, I haven't won my first block yet. That's normal for such a small amount of drive space, however, I could win two blocks tomorrow out of the blue. Its kind of like playing the lottery but you get paid a little bit for each ticket even if it doesn't win. I mine on a pool that only allows miners with 1TB or less so I don't feel like such a small fish (we're all minnows together!)

A pool list can be found here, there are quite a few options:

http://burstcoin.biz/pools

https://forums.burst-team.us/topic/1109/list-of-all-pools-overview

https://www.burstnation.com/wbb/index.php?thread/395-pool-list/

To start mining you simply download the AIO Wallet, plot the space you want to reserve for Burst mining, select a pool from a drop down list or enter the url and port, select a reward assignment (tells the network which pool you are using and where to send your burst), wait four blocks for the network to assign you to that pool and you're good to go. You pretty much let it run and forget about it.

You can find a great guide with links here: https://forums.burst-team.us/topic/179/quick-guide-to-the-aio-wallet-plotter-miner

FYI: Plotting takes FOREVER! If you interrupt the plotter it will not save your progress, you have to start over. It took a day to plot my 1TB drive. One issue I noticed is that if your computer shuts down while its plotting or if for some reason you 'thought' it was done but it really wasn't, there is no way to tell the plot file is bad except that you wont be getting any confirmations of found deadlines when you start mining. If you look at the actual plot file in %appdata% it will state that the size is correct when its not. I was plotting 500GB, i interrupted it almost immediately, checked the appdata file and it said the plot size was 500GB. Only when i put that file in the recycle bin was I able to see that the size was really 2mb. Its best to plot several smaller files rather than one large one in case something goes wrong. The miner sees no difference between how many plot files you have, it just cares about the total size of all of your plots together. Just remember, you only have to do this once. After the drive is plotted you are good to go.

Social Media/Community:

A quick run through the two biggest burst forums will clue you in pretty quick that there is some in-fighting and drama going on between a few of the major pool operators. Accusations of DDoS attacks, asset scams and an obvious dislike between the acting parties might give some pause. Personally, I view the 'discord' as a sign that the community is diverse and very active with some very passionate people involved, I see that as a positive sign for the future. When pools did go down, operators and developers seemed to go above and beyond to make things right and keep in touch with miners. This level of active support is sorely lacking with some cryptocurrencies. Drama aside, Burstcoin enjoys an active and supportive community that welcomes new miners and asset holders.

If it isn't already obvious, I'm a big fan of Burst and I've already ordered a 4tb drive to boost my potential.

I hope you found some useful information here. Best of luck and may all your coins become astronauts!