First in a series highlighting some cool and interesting and mineable coins!

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Before I get started, here's a big disclaimer: THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. My electricity costs are off the charts, and I mostly mine for fun, not profit. I choose coins that I find innovative, or that are fun in some way, or that have good communities. I don't expect to make much money, and I usually don't. 🤣

Today I'm going to highlight the two main coins I've been mining in the last couple of weeks. One is Boid, which I wrote about in my post about coins that help with scientific research. (I promise to give you a different perspective on it in this post!) The other one is Epic Cash, a brand new Mimblewimble coin with some really exciting features.

Let's dive in!

Boid

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If you read the article I linked above, you already know that Boid is a research coin, meaning that "mining" Boid is actually getting rewards, in the form of BOID tokens, for running compute jobs on WorldCommunityGrid to help with cancer research.

That's a cool way to make some coin, but since I already wrote a bit about Boid as a research coin, let me tell you what I like about Boid.

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This is what mining Boid on Windows looks like (and sorry the screenshot is a little grainy). As you can see, it's really user friendly. The miner is telling me that I'm working on 16 different compute jobs for WorldCommunityGrid, that it's ready to start mining with my GPUs, and that you'll be able to earn Boid with your free hard drive space in a future release.

Boid wants to be the distributed computing coin--for all kinds of distributed computing--and even though it's in alpha, it's clearly on its way. I'm doing some real distributed computing now on my CPU, and until the devs get real computing tasks going on GPUs, I can mine RVN for Boid rewards, if I want, while the WCG jobs run on my CPU. It's a good beginning.

What I'm mining for is "Boid Power", or BP, and you can see that I have some on my CPU. You accumulate BP over time on each rig that runs the miner, until you hit the top BP for your hardware (like any coin, it all depends on your CPU/GPU speed, number of cores, and so on). It takes about 3 weeks to hit the maximum.

Every day, you get a payout of BOID tokens (which are an EOS token) based on your BP for that day. BOID tokens aren't worth a lot of money, but you get a ton of them, and they add up after a while.

What I really like about Boid is that it's a great CPU coin. If you have a decent processor, or even just an okay processor, you can get a lot of BP going pretty quickly. GPUs can contribute to your BP, but right now they don't contribute as much as CPU does, so you're better off mining something else with your GPUs while your CPU crunches WCG tasks. You can also scale down how much work the Boid miner is doing, and use your computer while continuing to mine.

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The real fun is on the Boid site. I wanted to grab the whole page, which is full of leaderboards, but I didn't want to get everyone on the leaderboards' permission to show their names and avatar, so I've settled for showing you my stats.

As you can see, I have a few CPU rigs running the Boid miner, and I've built up a bunch of BP. That's put me in "Power Tier 3", which is part of the leaderboard system, and I get a bonus to my payouts from that.

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When you mine Boid, you mine on a team, and most teams have prizes you can win, which is a great way to get some extra coin if you have enough BP to get to the top few spots on the team's leaderboard. If you don't have a lot of hardware, you can still win prizes; you just pick a team that doesn't have a lot of total BP. Cool, huh?

If you don't have a lot of CPU, you can also get BP by referring new users into Boid (that's the "From Social" field in my stats). When you refer a user, you get BP equal to 5% of that user's total BP. As you can see, I'm not a big referrer!

The last thing I want to mention about Boid is that you mine in "seasons". Each season lasts 2 months, and has its own set of teams and prizes. There's a month in between seasons, and you can stake your BOID tokens during the break (or start staking them for an entire season). That gets you even more rewards.

Boid is really well thought out, and has a great future ahead of it, if the devs can fulfill their promises. I'm planning on pointing some CPU at it for the long run, for the seasons and the prizes.

Epic Cash

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The other coin I've been mining a lot is Epic Cash. Epic is a Mimblewimble coin, like Grin, and Epic is actually based on an early fork of Grin's source code (with a lot of modifications).

Epic isn't a lazy coin fork, though. The devs started with an idea about a privacy coin, and found that Mimblewimble fit their needs. Then they changed things around to fit the rest of their vision. For example, where Grin will mint unlimited coins, Epic is deflationary, with the same halving schedule and total coin count as Bitcoin. For more on the economic vision, I recommend visiting their web site.

So what makes it cool for mining? Well, Epic has a really innovative PoW scheme. The devs gave a lot of thought to who they wanted as miners, ASIC resistance, and all that, and came up with an interesting idea.

Epic has three PoW algorithms: RandomX (for CPUs), ProgPow (for GPUs), and Cuckatoo31+ (for ASICs). Each block in the blockchain can only be mined with one of those algorithms. But, they're not equally distributed.

For Epic's first year, 60% of blocks will be RandomX, 38% will be ProgPow, and 2% will be Cuckatoo31+. In the second year, 30% will be RandomX, 65% will be ProgPow, and 5% will be C31+. And so on, making a gradual transition over the mining life of the coin from mostly CPU mining to mostly ASIC mining. You can see a table on the Epic web site.

This makes mining really interesting. You have some choices:

• Mine with your CPU, have a chance at more blocks, but go up against some big mining farms?
• Mine with your GPU, have a chance at a smaller number of blocks, but a more level playing field?
• Try to snag some Cuckatoo blocks with your CPU or GPU before the Cuckatoo ASICs come out?
• Or...try a mixed strategy of 2 or 3 of those?

I've been experimenting with different mining strategies, and haven't found the best one yet. For now, I'm mining Boid on CPU and Epic on GPU. But rumor has it that there are miners coming out that will mine two of the algorithms.

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The downside of Epic is that it is not user friendly. Epic's mainnet just went live a couple of weeks ago, and the project is still in early stages. There are a couple of pools, but they're still in beta, and I'm not gonna lie: it's not easy at all to set up solo mining. On the plus side, I've seen some previews of a GUI wallet, and I hear one of the pools is coming out of beta in the next few days...so stay tuned.

My take: if you want to get in early on a coin that could potentially shake things up, and have some fun mining it, I recommend Epic. I think it's going to get a lot harder to mine, very quickly.

You can mine Epic on your CPU or GPU using the official Epic Miner at https://epic.tech/downloads/, or on your GPU with TT-Miner.

As a bonus, there's a great Telegram group where the devs and a lot of miners hang out: https://t.me/EpicMiners -- Maybe I'll see you there.

That's it for this time!

Thanks for reading. Know of any cool coins to mine with CPUs/GPUs? Let me know!