Is Verium the New Best AltCoin to Mine? Updated Review
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2012 is long gone and cryptocurrency mining now requires GPU rigs and/or ASIC’s to be profitable. There was a time when Bitcoin could be mined using a PC, but now it is impossible to mine BTC without investing at least $ 1100 USD into the Antminer S4. Same happens with any other profitable altcoin as well.
The only two exceptions to the rule are the Storjcoin and the Verium. Storjcoin can be mined by renting free HDD space as explained here, while Verium is an altcoin that was designed to be mined by PC CPU’s only.
Verium – the Only Profitable CPU Mining Alternative Left
Verium isn’t a new altcoin. It is almost three years old; however, it had its share of crises, modifications and improvements. As for today, Verium endured the test of time; it came to a point where all the major issues were fixed and I believe that now is the right time to revisit this altcoin and start profiting from it.
Verium is rather a unique project and in this article I will briefly explain why it is so interesting, as well as how to start mining it right now. In fact, you can configure your mining software first, and mine a couple of Verium tokens on your PC while you read the rest of the article 🙂
A Brief Introduction to Verium
Verium is not a cryptocurrency per se – it is not meant to be used in day to day transactions. According to its developers, Verium it is a digital reserve. It can be compared to real life gold – it does have a lot of financial value, but we don’t really use it in day to day transactions.
So What Does It Do, Exactly?
Verium was made to be a complement for an already existing coin, the VeriCoin. VeriCoin started as any other altcoin. Just like most altcoins, it would eventually die one day if it wouldn’t be for Verium.
You see, developers always struggle to find the balance between mining speed, safety and transaction speed for their cryptocurrencies. Other factors like volatility and decentralization play an important role too. While some cryptocoins have been settled on some optimal middle ground, it is still impossible to combine all of the good features in one single coin.
In order to solve this issue, the developers of VeriCoin created Verium – a digital commodity designed to add value to a certain cryptocoin rather than being a cryptocoin on its own. This is really innovative in the world of cryptocurrencies, but the innovation does not stop there – as a miner, you will be mining the commodity (the gold), rather than the currency. This adds a whole new layer of possibilities and benefits for those mining and using VeriCoin, and it makes this duo (VeriCoin and Verium) more stable, decentralized and secure than Bitcoin.
VeriCoin and Verium
Let me briefly list the benefits I talked about earlier. Hopefully, it will give you a better idea on why so many people – me included – find this altcoin interesting:
- High fees of Verium enable secure mining in PoWT
- By mining Verium you automatically get VeriCoin
- Verium can be used for speculation
- It allows VeriCoin to have the lowest fees and fastest block times, as well as it makes it way more decentralized that Bitcoin
- The Verium and VeriCoin duo has great prospects and has the potential to replace Bitcoin
- Verium is easy to mine – just assign the desired number of CPU cores to it and start mining
How to mine Verium – CPU Mining
The last benefit is worth a closer look. It is a game changer – it enhances cooperation and lowers competition in the market.
The Verium algorithm is designed on a way that it cannot be mined using anything else than CPU’s. Verium developers spent more than three years working on a set of algorithms that would prevent brute mining power from taking on the global hashrate. Long story short – if you decide to mine Verium you can rest assured that the mining pools won’t be plagued by huge ASIC miner farms owned by big companies.
This makes Verium the most miner-friendly modern coin. It is also a great coin for beginners.
You don’t really have to have any previous mining experience to be able to mine this coin. All you have to do is to complete a couple of steps and you’re set. This process is so ridiculously easy that it’s almost a crime to not try it out 🙂 If you don’t believe me, here are the steps on how to start mine Verium right now.
Mining Verium – A Quick Step-by-Step Guide
- Step 1 Go to http://www.vericoin.info/ and download the wallet for your operative system
- Step 2 Install the wallet by going through the simple setup wizard. Once installed, it will ask you whether you want to import an existing wallet. If you have none to import, just click on “No”
- Step 3 Launch the wallet. It will take a while to initialize. Once there, it will ask you to create a password. Make sure you write it down somewhere because there is no way to recover it if lost!
- Step 4. Once done, you will have to wait about a minute again for the walled to be loaded. It will also ask you to insert the password you just created to unlock your wallet.
- Step 5. After you enter the password, the miner screen will pop-up. All you have to do now is to (a) assign a certain amount of CPU cores to the miner and (b) click on the big fancy button to start mining.
Now you can relax and watch your wallet fill up with VRM.
Optionally, you can convert Verium to VeriCoin using the same app – simply click on the “Send” tab.
Now, you might notice that it takes time for VRM tokens to appear in your wallet. This only happens when you do solo mining – it takes time to find and mine a block. Once done, the reward is quite big.
The other alternative is pool mining. It usually gives you almost immediate results; however the overall income might be slightly lower than with solo mining since pools apply some transaction fees.
It’s up to you to decide whether you should focus on Solo mining or Pool mining. If you are okay with having your VRM balance on zero for some days and then get a big chunk of tokens, then Solo mining is for you. Otherwise, you might try Pool mining just to see that the system works and that you start to get VRM almost straight away.
Other Mining Options
According to this post [https://steemit.com/verium/@birty/cpu-mining-is-back-a-complete-how-to-guide-and-profit-analysis-for-verium-mining-on-a-farm-of-single-board-computers-part-1], it is also possible to assemble a specialized CPU mining rig using ODROID XU4 or Raspberry Pi 3 controllers.
According to the post author this setup is cheaper than assembling a PC from zero. The two downsides are however that (a) a PC has less power consumption than any of the two mentioned options and (b) you probably have a PC already and the whole idea behind this coin is to be able to mine it with the hardware you already have.
The guide on how to assemble your own Verium mining rig using Odroid XU4 controllers is there, though. It’s up to you whether you want to get serious about it and try to make your own rig. While the hashrate might get higher, the ROI of this kind of rigs will still be between 20 and 28 months (according to user reviews).
So it might be a better idea to just use your existing PC to mine Verium in the spare time (say, at night or while you are at work). You can also assign three or four of your cores to the mining process if you do not require the full power of your PC – for instance, if you use it to run MS Office and so on.
In Conclusion
I’ve been researching about this new altcoin for a while now. There is a lot of information about Verium on the web, however most of it is either outdated or extremely biased.
The developers of the coin created a white paper explaining in detail why and how Verium enhances VeriCoin, as well as why this duo is so powerful. While it is a great read, the white paper contains a lot of tech slang. In this article, I’ve tried to resume it all in simple words. If you want more, here’s the link to the document: http://www.vericoin.info/downloads/VeriCoinPoSTWhitePaper10May2015.pdf
Final Thoughts on VRM Mining
From what I know so far, it is probably not worth mining VRM for the ROI. While the expected difficulty increase won’t be as steep as in Bitcoin, it still might be not a good idea to assemble a mining rig with a ROI of 20-28 months. DASH and Monero miners have way better ROI, so you might want to check those out if you’re interested in faster return on investment.
On the other hand, mining Verium has its pros too:
- No special hardware or investment needed to start mining
- No previous experience or knowledge required
- You mine a digital commodity that might become way more valuable in the future. (Here’s something you might want to check; while this article is about Bitcoin, it is a great example on how mind-blowing cryptocurrencies might be: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/09/bitcoin-forgotten-currency-norway-oslo-home )
- You support a new-gen cryptocurrency (VeriCoin) that might replace Bitcoin one day
- You can save the mined tokens for later, in case their price go up as it happened to Bitcoin
Note: According to the developers, new Verium miner software will be released soon. The hashrate of that miner is expected to be 60% more than the one we have now.
I invite you to join the Slack chat by using this link: https://vericoinandverium.slack.com/
There you can talk to the developers directly and keep updated about the latest news.
Thank you for this! 🙂
BTW there is 2 downloads:
EARN INTEREST IN THE VERICOIN WALLET
MINE IN THE VERIUM VAULT
with first one there is no Mine section at all. Second one have it and I able to chose cpu number and start mining, but all things in Network section is zero (0).
Is there any difference between this apps? which one I should use? On you screenshot first one is used.
ps. I am on MacOS
Hi,
Sorry my mistake, to mine with the wallet you have to install the Verium one, not Vericoin.
Sorry 😀
Hey! Fantastic article. Really well done.
Just wanted to point out a few things. VeriCoin and Verium are the first dual blockchain system. A big part of that is economic, long term stability but there are very important technical and security reasons as well. If explaining one blockchain wasn’t difficult enough. 🙂
VeriCoin is the currency that you stake and earn interest on what you own while helping secure the network and spend. Verium is the commodity that you mine with a CPU and hold as a store of value.
These two protocols PoST and PoWT will eventually be brought together via auxiliary merged mining where VeriCoin will accept Verium blocks and Verium miners will eventually get paid in BOTH Verium (VRM) and VeriCoin (VRC).
*Having both protocols running together will also SIGNIFICANTLY decrease vectors of attack further enhancing security.
But, maybe most importantly, it will speed up VeriCoin’s transaction times as more miners mine Verium’s blocks. (Decreasing Verium’s Proof of Work Time block-times). Which can take VeriCoin’s current 1 minute transaction time to ~30 seconds or theoretically even less. Verium’s variable block-time also means auto block size scalability.
Also wanted to point out that VeriCoin was launched on May 10th, 2014. Verium, however, was launched this past fall on September 1st, 2016.
The team has further practical, use-cases for each blockchain that they’re working on currently.
Hope this helps.
Again great work Ciprian.
Cheers!
Great adding @disqus_xBFFeomwzG:disqus, thank you!
Choose the Verium wallet to mine it..
im stuck in “waiting for a network connection” xD can some one help me? thanks in advance.
Just wait for couple of minutes, it will connect soon!
Does this project still work? Installed Verium and started mining 1h ago, CPU running hard but GUI still looks like this:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/151ced6d9976c2d97e06344c334a582b4bf68b68f6824bc0f833d1456c1c37e6.png
yes still does.. I’ll post soon an updated version of this article..
Hi i, if I try mining with Core i3 pc. How long b4 i make atleast 1coin. Must it be 24/7?
I’ve also been “waiting for network connection” about 8 hours. Could there be a firewall issue?
%appdata%/vericoin
change vericoin.conf
add nodes here
nodes: https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvericoinandverium.slack.com%2Ffiles%2Ftestbug%2FF5654AE75%2Fvericoin_nodes.txt%3AqeO_gLG5RoRn_tNDyMfOY0dtG9o&cuid=4137638
Thanks for your reply yocmen!! I’m not a member of slack and don’t know how to join. Can you post nodes here?
It worked! Fantastic. Thanks yocmen!!!
I had to paste the list of nodes in the verium.conf file for mining
Please, I installed the Vericoin wallet but it does not appear to choose the number of cores and start the mining !!!
Can you please come up with some solution? https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0fc6aae9888032f04dc34e326c1ec191a52e83508e450cd300e286549282665d.png
%appdata%/vericoin
change vericoin.conf
add nodes here
nodes: https://vericoinandverium.slack.com/files/testbug/F5654AE75/vericoin_nodes.txt
Dear friend, I’m not a member of slack time yet. Please send an invitation to [email protected]
Lucas, you have to be invited to slack. Here’s the invitation:
https://vericoinandveriuminvite.herokuapp.com/
yocmen, there are two folders in% Appdata% that contains the Verium folder: under Local and Roaming. In which folder do I put verium.conf ? How long does it take to synchronize?
please… there are two folders in% Appdata% that contains the Verium folder: under Local and Roaming. In which folder do I put verium.conf ? How long does it take to synchronize?
Hi, you should install the Verium wallet !
I’ve spent hours trying to get this working and still stuck with “waiting for a network connection”. I don’t particularly want to sign up for things just to get this working either. Looking around the forums and official site isn’t much use for newbies either trying to get this working or installed. I have to say it doesn’t exactly fulfil me with confidence so far.
FYI to future posters It has now miraculously started working just after I posted this! I did leave it an age that time.
Still think the support/info on this is very poor.
BTW this is a very nice article.
next time do this:
%appdata%/vericoin
change vericoin.conf add nodes here
nodes: https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvericoinandverium.slack.com%2Ffiles%2Ftestbug%2FF5654AE75%2Fvericoin_nodes.txt%3AqeO_gLG5RoRn_tNDyMfOY0dtG9o&cuid=4137638
Maybe I spoke too soon, 14 hours later the blockchain still hasn’t loaded and is still synching. It seemingly keeps pausing and is still sat at 60,000+. I am not a member of slack and, as others have said who also aren’t members, can these nodes not be posted here so we can change whatever needs to be changed.
Thanks
Ciprian – I’ve got the nodes and this seems to have started things again. Does this also need to be done in the verium.conf file? I’ve installed this on another PC, without the Vericoin wallet, so on that I don’t have the vericoin.conf file. This seems to be working fine however but just wondered if its better anyway to add the nodes.
Also what is slack? (Forgive my ignorance, just like to know hat I’m signing up to!!)
Thanks again for your help
You should join, slack is a chat room where everyone talks about Verium on all subjects.. https://mega.nz/#!Q0pDRDYZ!oBeIbMfP79dHW_hr3R7bya5cG8wq1r7cR7BQ8p6yPcU
Hey, i uploaded the file somewhere else, her it is:
https://mega.nz/#!Q0pDRDYZ!oBeIbMfP79dHW_hr3R7bya5cG8wq1r7cR7BQ8p6yPcU
Where can I exchange this coin for others?
Umm.. poloniex ?
Ciprian, do you think you could update the post with how to mine to a pool?
Thanks
Hi, yes.. i will be doing a separate tutorial for that..
Hi. Who is the admin to the slack team, so I can get an invitation? I got the message when trying to sign in to the slack channel:
Contact the team administrator for an invitation
syncing with the network takes lot of time so you can download the blockchain file and paste it………
u can download both vericoin and verium wallets,if u have problems with the wallets then follow these steps:
for vercoin wallet:
first download the blockchain file from
http://www.vericoin.info/downloads/bootstrap.zip
type run in windows search and paste %appdata%/vercoin
to open the appdata folder for vericoin
now upack the contents of the blockchain file downloaded from the link http://www.vericoin.info/downloads/bootstrap.zip and unpack the contents in vericoin folder in appdata and replace the files
for verium wallet:
first download the blockchain file from
http://www.vericoin.info/downloads/bootstrap_VRM.zip
type run in windows search and %appdata%/verium
to open the appdata folder for verium
now upack the contents of the blockchain file downloaded from the link http://www.vericoin.info/downloads/bootstrap_VRM.zip and unpack the contents in verium folder in appdata and replace the files
open vericoin.conf and verium.conf and add the nodes from this file to both of them
https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmega.nz%2F%23%21Q0pDRDYZ%21oBeIbMfP79dHW_hr3R7bya5cG8wq1r7cR7BQ8p6yPcU%3A8VklL12v6WwiY78tsXNpGTNWRF8&cuid=4137638
and save and run the wallets
thats it…..both wallets will run and sync flawlessly
Ciprian, great intro to Verium/Vericoin! Are there any other less well known, but promising, cryptocurrencies on your radar?
Hi, can anyone tell me the best cpu for mining verium.
Well.. i7, Ryzen, Odroid ?
Hi everybody, installed the verium wallet and did the thing with the appdata and nodes… When the wallet starts, it show me the message: Synchronizing with Nework — 40856 Blocks Remaining… What a I undestood was that if I do the verium.conf nodes aggreasgtion the wallet will sync faster, but five hours has past and nothing… Thanks in advance.
yeah but how many verieum people can get with hashrate 400 ?
Well, my PC with a modest yet good i5 4670k was sleeping lately (light browsing etc), and a friend told me about this today. Why not. It’s getting cold in here too, perhaps I can overclock it and get some warmth, as well as crypto warmth, in me lol. Thanks!
Welcome 🙂
Can anybody help with resolving this error when loading the program?
“Error loading blkindex.dat”
Hey Ciprian,
Your article is awesome, very detailed and good for beginners like me. I started mining 3 weeks ago (ZEC with one Asus Strix GTX 1070)
I discovered Verium 3 days ago and started first to mine it in a pool (before that I downloaded Verium wallet, exported a wallett address and used that one for the pool mining.)
I have an intel i7700k processor boosted from 4.2 to 4.5 Ghz (4.8 is not stable). In the last 3 days I mined paralel (ZEC + VRM together) but I think CPU mining only using a lot less power.
Today VRM price “skyrocketed” back to $6. Can you please update your article with your thoughts about mining VRM in the current situation? (Just because your article now older than 9 months and the markets changing really fast)
I plan to choose one or two altcoin and mine them for a year or more, then exchange it for example BTC or other popular coin. I don’t want to spend money on a rig. Thanks for your help and sorry for my english, I’m not native 🙂
I have plans to make a new article about how to min it and what is the best practice to do it 🙂