How I mine Digital Note (XDN)

For most headline crypto currencies it doesn’t make sense to mine them on a home PC. This is because you require specialist hardware (called ASIC) and even with this hardware, the cost of electricity in the US and European countries generally means that it is an unprofitable activity.

There are two reasons why I mine Digital Note:

  1. The underlying algorithm that it uses is resistant to ASICs and so it is very suitable to mine on a home PC, even if you don’t have a dedicated GPU.
  2. The price of XDN is currently rather low. Therefore, even though I incur a cost of electricity, I expect the XDN that I mine to increase in value over time. In fact, over the past few weeks the XDN that I’ve mined have tripled in value ($0.02 to roughly $0.06)

    How do I actually mine it?

    1. Wallet. My first port of call was to download the standard wallet for Windows from the Digital Note team. This gives me the address that I need to collect the XDN that I’ve mined.  Interestingly the XDN wallet application also has a tab for mining, however I couldn’t get any of the standard pools to work or find any others online.

    2. Mining software. For this I use Minergate.  This is a simple to use tool that has a graphical interface and will let you mine Digital Note on both your CPU and GPU (and on your phone too.. but don’t expect great performance).  I have also successfully transferred the XDN that I’ve mined from Minergate to my XDN wallet which happens super fast (minutes).  When you use Minergate don’t use the default mode which sees the application selecting which currency to mine. You need to go to the next tab along and start XDN mining on your CPU & GPU (if you have one).

    I would really like to find a good, reliable mining pool for XDN so that I can use some other mining software that may give a better hashrate.  For now I’m on Minergate, but if I can find a good pool (or if you know of one, please comment on this post) I’ll write a new post and link to it here.

    How I buy Digital Note (XDN)

    Digital Note is really cheap at the moment – many expect this to be before the big gains that other cryptocurrencies have seen.  Due to this, there is a lot of interest in acquiring XDN. One route is mining, the other is to buy it.  I’m going to talk about how I buy XDN here.

    There are two routes to take depending upon your circumstances:

    1. You have a cryptocurrency (such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc) that you want to use to buy Digital Note. 

    If you already have some cryptocurrency I’d recommend using a service such as Changelly.  This is what I have used to turn my BTC and ETH into XDN.  The website is clear and pretty straightforward (it does list USD & GBP as currencies to pay in, but whenever I do this I always receive 0 XDN as the estimated amount).

    Once you have told the site how much you want to deposit, it will tell you how much XDN it estimates you’ll get (note this is not exact as the actual amount you get will vary depending on when the transaction actually take place).

    Following through the site you’ll be told where to deposit your BTC, ETH etc.  This is a standard transfer in your original currency to Changelly’s wallet.  You need to tell it where to put the resulting XDN (i.e. your Digital Note wallet address).

    After this it is all automatic – note this takes time, it can be hours.  When I have used it, the initial BTC transfer is done within an hour, but it took overnight to credit the XDN to my wallet.  Maybe I was unlucky, but I got the XDN reliably each time.

    2. You want to buy Digital Note with fiat currency (USD, GBP, EUR)

    This is a little harder (but not insurmountable)  Whilst Changelly states that you can deposit in USD or GBP, I’ve not been convinced by this (I hope this changes as it looks very convenient).

    The route I take (which is a little more expensive) is to buy BTC from fiat currency, then follow the process above for transferring cryptocurrency via Changelly.

    I use coinbase to buy my crypto currencies (if you follow this link we both get the BTC equivalent of $10 free when you buy $100 or equivalent in your currency).  I’d recommend coinbase as it’s simple to use.  If you want something more advanced try Bitmex (but it may be overkill), or paxful which is more of a peer to peer BTC trade platform.

    I’d really like to find a platform that enables me to buy XDN directly from fiat currency – if anyone knows of this please comment below…

     

    What is Digital Note (XDN)?

    Digital Note is an open & emerging cryptocurrency, with the first block coming into existence in May 2014.

    Unlike high profile cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, Digital Note has some pretty cool features built into it:

    1. It has privacy at its core.  Each of the transactions are completely anonymous, and all the messages sent across the network are encrypted.  Transactions are not traceable.
    2. Deposits.  It is possible to deposit your DigitalNotes (similar to a traditional savings account) for set periods of time and receive interest on those deposits.
    3. Miner friendly. The problem for mining a currency like bitcoin is that specific hardware, known as ASICS, are far superior than standard CPUs or GPUs.  The supply of these is restricted so bitcoin mining is only available to a select few (who in turn control the network).  Things are different with DigitalNote – the proof of work mining approach is resistant to ASICS and runs very well on home computers.
    4. Cheap.  Transaction fees are low – the minimum is 0.001 XDN.
    5. It is completely decentralised, open source, and fair.

    Under the hood, Digital Note uses Cryptonote (as does Monero (XMR), which is how some platforms such as MinerGate allow you to mine XDN and XMR at the same time).

    There is a lot of interest in XDN as an investment due to its relatively low price; many expect the price to increase in the future due to XDN’s unique properties – potentially as part of a wider crypto movement away from BTC.