Easy to Mine Cryptocurrency Series – Volume 2: Vote Coin

This little known easy to mine cryptocurrency is new and offers a great oppertunity for mining with little competition from larger mining pools. It is also a utility based coin, which will grow heavily from token network effects. If you are not familiar with the concept of token networks, it is basically a new way to monetize a service or product through cryptocurrency.


As we discuss this coin, think of it like a tech startup which makes a voting software. It does not make money selling this software through licensing or making you directly pay. Instead, the business model is designed make money as the
software gains users and is utilized by those users. This is a very important distinction to understand for anyone involved in cryptocurrency. The token network model is capable of growth beyond that of a traditional tech start up because there is an exponentially larger market when utilizing a token network for non financial utility. Everyone new to cryptocurrency will group all coins within a single group, only grouping them as privacy coins, or coins vs. tokens, etc. Even most of those who have been involved in cryptocurrency investment and mining have this narrow view. 


To keep it simple for now lets break all cryptocurrencies into two classes.

1. A financial cryptocurrency would be something like Bitcoin, Litecoin,
   Ripple, Omise GO, Bitcoin Private, ZCash, Monero, etc. From now on we
   will call these non utility cryptocurrencies.
   
   
   
2. Cryptocurrencies which are utility based do not have the sole pupose of
   disintermediating banks and financial institutions. Instead they are
   more like a tech startup which is solving a problem. Instead of making
   money by charging for using their product or selling your data, they
   make money by growing the token network on which their software lives.
   One of the key foundational concepts for these cryptocurrencies is that
   they must align all involved within the token network in a fair way or
   it will stop growing.
   
   
   What is this cryptocurrency called?
   
   
   

   VOTE COIN (VOT)

   
   
   

Vote Coin was created by a developer named, Tomas Matejicek, from the Czech Republic. He has a lengthy history as a developer and most importantly is not hiding as an anonymous developer. It is based off of the ZCash, but like most ZCash clones there is no founders reward, no slow start period, and multi platform wallet support. Its purpose in a sentence is to act as a decentralized anonymous platform for elections and voting purposes.Some example use cases would be public polls, surveys and crowd funding campaigns and create their process more flexible and easily trackable.

Here is a quick overview of the coin, followed by a more in depth analysis.

Ticker Symbol: VOT
VOT Total Supply: 220 Million
Circulating supply: 16,474,625
Block Reward: 125 VOT
Block Size: 2 MB
Block Time: 2.5 minutes
Proof Type: Proof of Work
Hashing algo: Equihash (ASIC Resistant to date)

Price as of March 8th, 2018 (Coinmarket Cap):
BTC: 0.00000122 (122 Satoshi's)
USD: $0.011994

SEE LINKS AT END

Vote Coin Mining Oppertunity

The network hashrate took a small dip recently from the value of the coin itself dropping with the rest of the market. Additionally, when Bitcoin Private went live it seems some hashing power was moved over there also. To put into perspective how little competition there is on this network look at it this way. BitcoinZ (BTCZ) currently has a 11 Msol network hashrate, is roughly 15,000+ GTX 1080 TI’s mining on the network. . While 200 Ksols is roughly 300 GTX 1080 Ti’s mining on the network. For those of you unfamiliar with BTCZ, it is also a fairly new coin.
 Keep in mind the focus of this series of posts is low difficulty coins which have chance for an explosive increase in value. Unlike most miners the goal of the coins covered in this series is to hold the coin long term (HODL) and sell it for a lot more money. Many miners, esspecially the big farms, will mine coins based on their current value and sell them immediately. If your a smaller operation or just getting into cryptocurrency mining, then it will be impossible for you to ever really make a profit in the long run like this. When you are mining with the intent of immediately selling then the network hashrate is not important to you. This is because it doesn't matter if you have more compeition because when there is more competition it means the coin is worth more so you make the same amount of money regardless.
For example:
If you are able to mine 10 coins per day of an imaginary cryptocurrency and it is worth $1 per coin. You are making $10 per day.

After a few months the price of the coin increases to $10 per coin. Now many other people start mining the coin because it makes them immediate profit buy selling what is mined right away. Because of the increased mining competition you are now only mining 1 coin per day, because theres 10 times as many people mining it now compared to before.

Are you making less money per day now? No, you still make $10 per day, because the coin is worth more. The difference is that you have mined only 1 coin now.

You do not want to look at the current price of the coin, but the competition on the network currently and the future potential for the coin. We are looking for coins that may increase 10 times to 100 times in the long run if they take off  and are normally newer coins. This also allows you to spread your risk by being able to mine many coins and have a decent amount of each one you mined. The beauty of this is that you only need one of these coins to take off to have incredible profits.

The current oppertunity with Vote Coin is a rare one. Since it is new it is not really listed in many places and as a result you don't find it in places like http://whattomine.com. Within 6 months it will likely have a much higher network hashrate similar to where BitcoinZ is. For those of you familiar with BTCZ, this would be like having mined it when it was 5 to 10 satoshis.

Not much!
Even a weak GPU like a GT 210 will be able to mine this coin, CPU's will also be able to mine this coin.

If you were mining with the goal of selling immediately, then it would probably be unprofitable after electricity for a cheap card like a Ge Force 210 or a CPU (processor). Since the plan is to hold the coin hoping for a 10x or 100x increase this is not a problem. For those of you tight on money you can do this and if one of the coins you mines increases in value a lot you will be able to sell half of what was mined or all of it and then invest in something like GTX 1070's or GTX 1080 Ti's.

The only thing to keep in mind is that mining does make your computer run hotter and the increased work it is doing 24/7 can decrease its life span. It is impossible to know exactly how it is decreased compared to not mining. For example you could have cards which have died after 1-2 years and other cards which have been running for 3+ years mining non stop.

I do not recommend trying to mine Vote Coin solo, instead create your own wallet, then join a mining pool, which will make your mining rewards more consistent. Everything I mine is done through mining pools. It doesn't matter for the most part which pool you use, the only one which I don't really like is Supernova. Also if there are only 3-5 other people mining on a pool I would avoid it also. Look for a pool with 10 to 100 people mining Vote Coin.

There is no instructions on how to mine Votecoin within this post itself. I would suggest looking it up yourself and trying it, that is the best way to learn. If many of you are having problems, then make a post. If there are a lot of you having problems I will make a dTube video or a separate post with instructions.

NOTE: Mining causes additional heat to be generated by your computer. If your computer is dusty it will be even worse. Make sure that you keep it clean and also not backed up against a wall. One tip I can give you is keeping it near a ventilation intake in your home. This is free airflow to dissapate the heat. All of my rigs are open frames, but I do have a few older ones which are still in cases. If you have problems with overheating you may need to remove the side panel for the heat to be able to escape.

Vote Coin Outlook

What kind of returns could you hope for mining Vote Coin if it really takes off?

(Based on some things I will explain in more detail below)


 This would give it a market cap of roughly $220 Million, which is similar to other cryptocurrencies like ReddCoin, Factom, MonaCoin, etc. This is in the next 6 to 18 months.


A highly speculative upper limit is around $10 per coin. That would give it a market cap of roughly $2.2 Billion which would be something like TRON, if the cryptocurrency is adopted heavily, then this is not unrealistic. While it is possible for it to be worth more than $10 there is no point in speculating beyond that number.

GTX 1070 example
If it were to hit $1, then you would increase roughly 9 times from its present value. To put that in perspective if you have a single GTX 1070 running around 450 sol/s, you will mine roughly 100 coins per day or roughly 3,000 coins per month. At the $1 target you would have been making $100/day from that GTX 1070. A GTX 1070 even during the current shortage will cost you around $600 or maybe $700.


If it were to hit $1, then you would be mining roughly 2 to 3 coins per day. Which would end up being around $2 to $3 per day. While this doesn't seem like much, I can certainly tell you that trying to mine Ethereum or Bitcoin would be virtually useless. You would be looking at a profit of pennies if they increased drastically.

Weak GPU example ( HD 6670)
The ranges for lower end GPU's can vary based on if you got a good GPU or not. Identical cards from the same manufacturer can often have different mining rates. Your looking at between 20 sols and 80 sols, which is roughly 10 to 20 coins per day. If it were to hit $1 then that is not bad at all.

For those of you using CPU's and weak GPU's I would suggest investing in low end GPU's like GTX 750 Ti or a GTX 1050. You can sometimes pick these up for as little as $20 to $40 online. They will be much more efficient than your processor or weak GPU. I would not go as far as saying it is not worth mining for you, but your not going to make as much. Also, you should look for other oppertunities to mine other cryptocurreicies like Electroneum through your cell phone and earn by getting your friends and family do the same thing. While it may not be called mining when you post and curate on Steemit, you can think of it like you are mining. Look for other similar oppertunities where you don't have to invest money or have higher electricity bills by running mining software. A person who has no money to invest can still become rich by getting in early on the many oppertunities that cryptocurrency offers. Don't put all of your apples in one basket and think that by simply signing up for Electrneum you will be rich. Go find 20 other things where you can earn crypto without spending money. You just need a single one to take off to make a lot of money.

Vote Coin Team

I am not going to go into all the things you can find through the links at the end of this post. Instead I will offer my insight into how to analyze the information that is there. While the developer is known and verifiablly a developer there is not a large team behind this project. That does not mean it has no hope, but the project will need to be monitored closely as it is at a greater risk of failure. What I really like about the team is that they are focused on developing. They are not instantly responding on every social platform when someone has a problem or question, they are not hyping the coin everywhere, and they are not aggressively trying to get it listed on as many exchanges as possible. This means that this coin will likely stay out of the general cryptocurrency communities radar until they have a more polished functional product. This is one thing which I value a lot because they are doing what is important for long term success and not just pumping up the price of the coin in the short term.

You will see angry people who think that a developer's main job is to reply on Bitcointalk (ANN), and they will then start posting FUD when they are not hand held or feel like the developer doesn't feel the need to immediately respond to them. News to those of you out there who behave like little children and do this sort of thing. While the business and marketing aspect is important to success down the road, what is important and urgent right now is that the developer is developing the product. What is important is that they are constantly and quickly iterating their product. This is what the team has done a fantastic job doing so far. Many people are used to stupid scam coins which really do nothing new other than have a new name and have a sole purpose of pumping up the price to dump it, then move onto doing the same thing by creating another coin. Don't get me wrong as the team is certainly more than competent socially and doing some nice things to keep the community engaged, but they have their priorities straight. What I care about is what I see happening on GitHub, that is all that matters right now.

One very impressive thing to note is the fact that the team is already preparing for the release of "Sapling", which I will cover in a separate post. It is basically a massive update for all ZCash based coins and not many of the other of the ZCash based coins with more resources have gotten to this yet. See https://github.com/zcash/zcash/blob/master/doc/release-notes/release-notes-1.0.15.md for more information. This means that they have gone through everything for the "Overwinter" update which was only recently announced and planned for it. Prop's to the Vote Coin team.



Some of my previous posts have gone over problems of using traditional methods such as the idea of market caps when looking at cryptocurrency. This is even more true when you are dealing with a cryptocurrency which has deeper utility behind it. The logic is something along these lines:

Assume Vote Coin's software was the same as a Silicon Valley startup.

The only difference between the two is the business structure, namely how the users are monetized. The Silicon Valley startup can either charge money for their software or offer it free and sell the users data. The limiting factor here will become the value of the users data removes many people around the world from being profitable users. For example a guy from the Phillapines who makes $2/day does not have much value to an advertiser who will buy the data and market products which are well beyond this persons reach.

Vote Coin is designed as a token network, which makes money by increasing the value of the cryptocurrency. All the users, investors, developers have a vested interest equally in seeing the project succeed. In the Silicon Valley start up this would not be the case. As the investors and the company itself would reap most of the reward from the network's growth.

An example would be something like Facebook. Think about who profits when more people use the network? Do you remember the days when Facebook wasn't spammed with advertising? Do you remember when Facebook didn't have commercials? Those are all things that will occur when all parties within a network are not aligned.

For a token based network that is well planned out and maintained there will not be problems like this. As a result that person from the Phillapines now has some value because his spending 1 penny on voting for something increases the value of the network, where for a company like Facebook he will not be as important. This means that cryptocurrencies which offer a utility have the oppertunity to actually add money that did not exist before to the market they are in. This is why current estimates of certain industries market caps will not be capable of understanding the future potential.

To put it simply every single person on the planet has a potential use for a product like this. It is not limited like certain niche cryptocurrencies out there. While my above projections are not based on an explosive global adoption of Vote Coin, you can only imagine what the price could be if that happened.



To put it simply we can really divide the use of Vote Coin into two groups:

1) Government voting or corporate voting (More formal types of voting)
2) Online polls and voting (More informal, like the typical polls on blogs or websites)

Vote Coin states they are looking to basically do both of these things. My interest in Vote Coin is heavily based on their ability to push this out to the regular user in the immediate future. From a practical stand point I think that going straight after more formal methods of voting like governments will only slow their long term growth. Even with a lot of financial resources it would be a handicap to tailor Vote Coin to a governments needs.What could see this coin sky rocket is if they are able to connect to websites for polling/voting, API’s and plugins can make the entry point for web developers very low.  If this can be easily used by the masses, then it can be really big. A key focus for them will need to be in making the adoption of the product so simple that anyone can do it. Something as simple as installing a new extension or plugin for example.

The power to hit just your every day simple polls could see this coin sky rocket. So far the updates and release notes are indicating that they are going to hit the general market first. They have incorporated some nice features recently such as the power for the person who is creating the poll to make it anonymous or public. Another area which is fascinating to me is research into how voting or polling on a token network differs from just simply having software involved. There are many design concepts which are possible with token networks which are not possible for us today. I will not go into that stuff within this post, but it would be along the lines of being able to offer a dApp platform that allows for tokens to live on top of the Vote Coin technology where other proving algo's could be used like Proof of Brain or Proof of Stake Velocity to create voting set ups where the voters interaction with the network itself could be manipulated. For example it could be designed to incentize members of a Home Owners Association (HOA) to vote on things. People in a subdivision could be issued tokens that earn more coins by participating in the decision making for the community, and those who do not vote and help will have to pay higher dues if they end up wanting to vote. The HOA example is also an example of a situation a more immediate possible user as it provides transparency to the community when it comes to important votes like how the community funds will be spent.

On a side note, if you think about the new possibilities we have with token networks, what would the people who design these be called? They would not need to be highly technical as they are more like an artchitect or engineer dealing with very high level design concepts. It may be one of the most sought after skills when utility based cryptocurrencies become more understood by the general public. This is probably 5 years away, but it will be one of the most important skills to possess similar to being able to code for an actuary so they can manipulate the data they are working with. Currently, there is little emphasis being put on this part of the cryptocurrency development cycle.

Voting manipulation is a global problem from government elections to online polls. The problem is in my opinion even bigger online as the use of bots is rampant.  It also allows for validation of poll and voting results. An example would be if someone made a poll, then paid a person with a network of bots to manipulate the results, there is also a problem. How is this different with a token network? For one thing having the power to issue tokens on top of the Vote Coin platform could be an interesting solution. For example if you were a blogger and the polls on your blog were limited to only users who actively comment on your posts, then a token could be issued to your audience based on predetermined level of interaction or tips from the author. Note, there is nothing from the Vote Coin team about anything like this so another example of what is possible is security through financial disincentives. This simply means that people would not want to manipulate the system because it would cost money. While this is not perfect because someone with a lot of money would be able to manipulate polls. If your dealing with your standard unimportant web poll it would be a deterent as most those people would not want to waste money on a poll no one cares about.

In the short term the Vote Coin team's vision is certainly solving a big problem that makes almost anyone a potential user. The long term outlook with more complex offering could see this project explode if they are really innovative.





Due to the political and social climate surrounding voter fraud and manipulation this area will see massive growth in the near future. This is just a conicidence, but the team has a limited window where the this is fresh in the public's minds. Even if their solution doesn't do anything to fix government voter fraud the power to connect with the general public about the potential for their product could be huge. I am assuming that when the US election cycle comes around that it will again be aggressively used by one of the candidates or Trump. On the whole the amount of dissent from populations of authoritarian goverments is on the rise globally. The nature of the problem they are dealing with has the potential to personally touch a very broad array of people.





While my view of this coin is altered because I hold many Vote Coin's myself, I do truely belive that this is a hidden gem with more potential that many other projects out there. How much potential? Well compared to things like TRON, I would invest my money in Vote Coin all day compared to a project which is great in theory, but that is all they have so far. An ERC20 token with no working product or their own detailed plans is a much more speculative investment than something like Vote Coin.

What needs to be monitored is adoption of this coin and competitors. The biggest threat a project like Vote Coin faces is a situation where they prove the product has this enormous untapped market potential and a big fish comes in and does the same thing. If that were to happen Vote Coin will have to scale quickly to maintain its market share and reach a critical mass where they are unstoppable. One key area that will be vital about 18 months from now will be the team and communities ability to forge strategic relationships with other projects that will utilize Vote Coin. For example something as simple as having the BTCZ community votes utilize Vote Coin would be something small, attainable, but show large scale adoption is possible. On top of that as cryptocurrencies mature they may come with a standard toolbox. For example most coins have a messenger built into them from the start. There is a risk for Vote Coin if cryptocurrencies start using internal voting mechanisms for improvement protocol votes for example. The only way to really solidify their position will to be bring more complex things to the table.

Vote Coin is a high risk coin and everyone should invest in it understanding that. What I do belive is that it is in my top 3 high risk cryptocurrencies out there. While I belive it has rare oppertunity for massive returns, there is still a long road a head for the team to go down. If you choose to invest do it wisely. Check out my ZCL post for ideas on how to invest in high risk coins: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@byzantinehash/zclassic-zcl-should-you-invest

VOTE COIN LINKS

Disclosure: I have investments in Vote Coin and this post is not meant to act as investment advice.


Don't forget to follow @ByzantineHash for future easy to mine cryptocurrencies that are not well known.