Becoming a Prospector?

Welcome to Mine Some Burst! This website is dedicated to my adventures mining Burstcoin! What is Burstcoin/BURST? That’s a great question! Let’s find out together!

So this all started one weekend where I was laid up on the couch unable to do much of anything except watch some Netflix, Hulu, YouTube.. you get the picture. I came across this video by Linus Tech Tips and it got me thinking…

Back in 2009 while sitting at my day job, I thought about investing in some Bitcoin just for fun. I didn’t know if there was anything that I could do with it, but it seemed like this techy cool thing to do and it would be fun to have some funny money.. right? What was Bitcoin worth then? $0.10? $0.30? Today at the time of writing this, it’s around $8,000 (and it hit $20,000 not long ago)! If I’d purchased the $500 I had planned, that would be somewhere around $40,000,000 USD today. That’s enough to get one thinking about the future of the currency and where I fit in with this strange ethereal money.

If I’d purchased the $500 I had planned, that would be somewhere around $40,000,000 USD today

I spent days afterward looking into the viability of investing in Bitcoin, but there doesn’t seem to be a good way to get into that game without some huge investments at this point. Since I don’t have the available funds to just dump thousands of dollars into a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, I did quite a bit of research on how to mine it instead. Conclusion: there’s no way I can compete with China and the amount of ASIC miners already online. Spending $1,500 on an Bitmain Antminer S9 Bitcoin Miner (Amazon) wasn’t in the cards. Not only does the ROI on that look horrible, but I’d be setting up a machine that sounds like a vacuum cleaner in my basement where the kids play and running it 24/7! Not cool (literally.. apparently it runs pretty hot too)!

Enter BURST.  Burstcoin is a different type of cryptocurrency that uses hard drive space instead of specialized ASICs to mine. It still uses block chain technology, but instead of running through crazy algorithms for each block, it has them all mapped out on your drives instead. After that it’s essentially a lottery on who gets the payout for forging block, so you always have a chance! On top of that, while Bitcoin uses almost as much electricity as Switzerland, Burstcoin uses free hard drive space on a computer you might already be running! Perfect! I am a web developer, so my PC is on most of the time anyway.

So, to start my journey I went ahead and purchased a brand spankin new Seagate 8TB External USB 3.0 HD (Amazon). Stay tuned for updates on how this whole experiment goes.

Let the journey begin!