I thought it might be useful to add my experience of mining UTC so people new to the thread can make up their own opinion
DisclosureTo start I am not a stakeholder, developer or have any links to UTC. I just decided to mine a new coin on top of those I've done in the past (LTC, MEC, WDC, FST, DOGE & BTC) I also have investments in MEOW, NXT and a sharehold of Crypto-trade
I started following the thread seriously on Thursday when the pre-registration was originally planned for announcement. Unfortunately this pre-registration came and went but Bumface updated the thread to inform followers.
Some confusion occurred on Saturday, 1st February due to the timezone that the coin was to be launched. Again Bumface setup a new site and confimed release time of 07:00PM GMT. During the day updates came and went from Bumface about problems continuing with the launch of an official pool. The miner software was made availabe around about midday, I have a download timestamp of 12:29PM (so well before launch time)
Before launch, 07:00PM GMT, Bumface made an announcement that it was unlikely the official pool would be available at launch but the Wallet would be available as reported and miners could go solo until pools became available.
I'm not sure exactly when Bumface made the announcement in the thread but it was around 07:00PM GMT, I refreshed the official site and followed the link to Wallets
http://www.ultracoin.net/wallet.html Windows was available and I'm pretty sure so where clients for Mac, Linux and the source on Github. The Windows wallet downloaded from
mega.co.nz I downloaded and have a timestamp of 07:06PM for the file.
Now I've never solo mined before and information was a bit hard to come by, especially considering this is Scrypt-Jane rather than Scrypt which is much more common for alt-coins. I did manage to figure out from posts in the thread the rpc conf settings for the wallet and the miner. I started to solo mine around 19:30 to 20:00. I was getting what I thought were "errors" but on reading the web were not and common when solo mining. I learnt, but should have found out earlier, how to solo mine for the first time. Solo-mining is all or nothing you find a block or you don't find a block so no accepts or rejects like you would get with a pool (something else I learnt). Even if you find a block it could still be orphaned which again is greater risk when solo mining because you could find a block just after someone else but before the network can confirm.
Soon after launching the wallet a couple of pools kept appearing, but also some "false" pool URLs were being posted. I signed up to
utc.pool.pm and started pool mining successfully, it then crashed after a few minutes. The owner was posting in the thread so we knew what was going on. Shortly later another pool claimed stability,
ultra.nitro.org so I signed up and mined with them. I'm guessing that was about 10:00PM, I then mined all night long although noted the hash rate was around 540 as opposed to scrypt mining on the same rig of about 570.
This morning it appeared lots had signed up to nitro.org and I'm accumulated 100 coins and received a pay-out to my wallet. The forums continued to indicate other pools becoming available and the owner of
ultra.Leetpools.com was giving lots of helpful miner config info so I decided to sign-up and join this smaller pool as it seemed more friendly. I've now mined a further 50 UTC on
ultra.leetpools.com with a four HIS 7970 card rig which is achieveing a stable hash of 540 per card or around 2,100 in total.
Observations - The launch didn't go quite as smoothly as expected but this was mainly due to the official pool not becoming available
- Information provided by Bumface was accurate, timely and honest
- Every alt-coin has its committed followers and those who want to kill it
- The language some people were using on the threads was intolerable and unacceptable, I thought more of the crypto-community
- Lots of people were lazy and obviously hadn't read the first page of the thread or any subsequent posts as the same questions were being asked over and over again on the thread
- Some posters were posting mis-information (some genuine mistakes, some deliberate) and some "pools" were scams
- Ultracoin was pre-mined, it states this on page one, it had an IPO for a number of stakeholders, it states this on page one. The IPO appears to have been oversubcribed and many people missed out
- No-one knows for sure if the coin will make any money on 7th February, the 8th Feb. the summer, next year or ever. That is why all crypto's are high risk. But with high risk you also get high return if it proves to be successful
I hope this maybe useful as a balanced observation of my own experience and help others to make up their own minds about this coinKC
