MintCoin is a Community maintained coin since 2014 the original code base was NovaCoin. It's ownership is passed from developer to developer throughout the years and as you know or maybe don't know is that the current MintCoin admin and dev team has been formed on July 2018. If you are intrested in the history and vision of MintCoin then hear it directly from our head developer Shane in this podcast Live Q&A with MintCoin on YourCryptoDaily
The wallet
Being an old coin also means having a large blockchain and the original wallet didn't handle that well. If you search for "MintCoin Wallet" you find a lot of hits confirming it's instability. It has been 2 years since an update has been published and we decided that we need to improve the stability before we can build on MintCoin. And that is exactly what we did with the release V2.1.0 MintCoin Development Update 2018-09-01. We also added dns seeding inside the wallets functionality to improve it's connectivity.
The next challenge was to get users up and running with a fresh installed wallet and a bootstrap to avoid the 5 weeks of syncing that comes due to the size of the MintCoin blockchain. Therefore we publish a MintTorrent file every month to get users up and running fast and they only need to synchronize with a maximum of 4 weeks.
Our own managed blockexplorer was also a piece missing for our coin setup and has been setup in the mean while. At the moment of writing it is still synchronizing on the network
The whitepaper ( and we wouldn't be MintCoin if we didn't call it greenpaper internally :-) ) as everyone calls it, states the vision and perspective of every coin, and that works out for most coins that are corporate based. They have a single goal in the expertise field that they are working in and you can describe that perfectly. Unfortunatly that doesn't work out for MintCoin as the community is the actual driver of the coins future and direction and that is what we call a "Living Roadmap" MintCoin's roadmap changes when the community that drives it changes. That is also the main reason why we took our previous whitepaper offline as the current team wasn't 100% confident of what was stated in that roadmap was 100% what the community initended.
Release: Living Roadmap
The ‘Living Roadmap’ is arguably the flagship feature of MintCoin, and what will ensure the Mint vision is preserved for decades to come. The direction of MintCoin is decided by a global democratic mechanism. Millions of coin holders will determine the altruistic, green causes for MintCoin to pursue. The people powered nature of the ‘Living Roadmap’ will foster a stability and legitimacy the likes of which as yet unseen in cryptocurrency. Today MintCoin has one of the fastest-growing and most vibrant communities in cryptocurrency. The idea of the coin is that if mass adoption occurred, it would transform efforts to fight global environmental issues.
And we made a minty one-pager for this
The idea for the ‘Living Roadmap’ is simple, but the process complex. In all, each Living Roadmap cycle will take 4 weeks from submission to project start. The community can submit projects in the form of crowdfunding projects. These can range from environmental projects (for example funding the construction of a specific wind energy plant) to blockchain-related ideas (for example improving transaction speeds) to media-related plans (for example developing a simple Mint-game, or mobile app for MintCoin).
Living Roadmap process
When submissions are done, a MintCoin committee has 4 weeks to assess each proposal with a difficulty rating and suggested cost. When this is done, the project will be published for the MintCoin Community to vote. MintCoin holders donate to the wallet address of each idea/project they want to see executed by the project owner. After the voting process is complete, the money from all the losing projects will be returned to the Sender except for anonymous votes they will be send to the MintCoin Developer Fund. One High Difficulty, Three Medium Difficulty, Five Low Difficulty Ideas will be selected as winners by the community. These are the goals that MINT will seek to accomplish for the next year depending on the project plan for larger projects.
Press Room preview
We've unlocked the "Living Roadmap" features for the press on our platform for you to review.
Access the "Living Roadmap" clicking on the following buttons.
This will display a list of projects that are available for voting/funding
Drag and drop the QR code to cast an anonymous vote/funding to a project
In the first 3 months only the MintCoin team can add projects to the Living Roadmap. After this staging period it will be possible for every community member to add a project and use the existing MintCoin infrastructure and investor network, to expose their idea and to share it on social networks, friends and investors to source funds.
We believe that with our "Living Roadmap" MintCoin will become one of the first successfull Community driven coins where the future of the coin is not decided by a management or a dev-team but by the community itself.
eurocentiem-dev
If you require more information contact us through the contact form or on our Telegram channel
I want to make a call for action to our investors and MintCoin holders.
I would like you all, to at least cancel your 3 and 4 satoshi sell orders at all the Exchanges. The MintCoin team is planning some exciting releases in November 2018. And i would ask you all to give back your confidence in MintCoin again for a couple of weeks. The team is working extremely hard to prepare for release in November. But the steadily rising of our sell wall is a bit discouraging.
Also if you are a member of the press or owner of a social media channel check out our press room at https://news.mintcoinofficial.eu under the ABOUT section.
We are proud to announce that as of today we are listed on a brand new and promising exchange. We will be trading there with 3 pairs, $BTC $ETH and $BCH. Give @BoaExchange some love!
It's been over a month since the last update, so I'm sure you are all eager for the latest MintCoin news. This month one of the other MintCoin team members has helped me write the update. I think that it is nice to have more voices updating the MintCoin world, and hopefully you will too.
MintCoin Conference Call
The current team working on MintCoin chats every day via Telegram, but we have never spoken to each other. We had our first conference call on 2018-09-19. While a short call, it was nice to hear the voices of the people that have been dedicating time to MintCoin. We intend to have them more frequently to help coordinate our efforts.
New New New Website (news from EuroCentiem)
You've probably noticed that last month we have lost control of our main website and basically all our media channels. This was due to the fact that one of our oldest and most appreciated MintCoin member MintyAllDay stopped running the site.
We are still trying to get in touch with him but in the meantime we have started a new website, https://www.mintcoinofficial.eu, and other social media channels. We also have volunteers posting news into those channels to improve the public's MintCoin awareness. So please share, like and follow these social media channels amongst your friends and cryptogroups, this will help us to spread the news faster and wider.
Although we like our fresh and Minty main website we also noticed that it is not very SEO friendly meaning that it is hard to find through search engines, it is also time consuming to add new content and/or news.
So we are in the background preparing an additional informational MintCoin information website where we will post news and updates in the future and by doing this improving our SEO and visibility on the web.
The Great MintCoin Information Cleanup
With a shiny new web site and Twitter account, we decided to get references fixed everywhere. We've had pretty pretty good progress, with a semi-official versions of:
For Facebook and Twitter there are old sites or accounts that do not reflect current MintCoin work, but we are still hopeful we can eventually get everything fixed.
We also managed to get information updated in a lot of sites that are run by other people, like Coin Market Cap, Coingecko, CryptoPanic, and the Cryptos and Coins Wiki. Additionally we are working with exchanges that carry MintCoin to get their information about MintCoin up to date.
There are sadly sites which we may never be able to get fixed, such as old GitHub repositories, YouTube channels, and so on. If you know people who were around years ago on MintCoin please ask them to contact us so we can either administer the site for them or just give them the current correct MintCoin information.
Finally, if you find a site that has an outdated or in any other way incorrect information about MintCoin, please let us know and we'll try to get it fixed as best we can.
MintCoin Code of Conduct
We would like MintCoin and the MintCoin community to be as welcoming as possible. One tool used to help in this is a Code of Conduct. This is a document which writes down how we expect to treat each other, and what happens if someone acts in a way that we do not accept, such as by harassing someone or with other unacceptable behavior.
I took an example policy from the Geek Feminism wiki and modified it slightly. A draft is available here:
This is not final, and needs to be updated to make it more minty (it feels very legalistic and American in tone, which is probably not appropriate for a relaxed and friendly community like MintCoin). I also need to make sure all of the administrators are happy to help with enforcement. And most importantly, we need to make sure that the community is willing to accept whatever code we end up with.
We have had times in the past where people crossed the line from vigorous disagreement into personal attacks, which doesn't feel minty at all to me. A Code of Conduct should help us all remember to stay nice.
MintTorrent (news from EuroCentiem)
Another topic that we frequently heard from our community is the availability/location of the bootstrap to get synchronized with the blockchain and start minting.
Hence we have launched a torrent with a bootstrap of the last blockchain of our own wallets. We will update the torrent more frequently (we are committed to once a month). We recommend that you only download the torrent file through https://www.mintcoinofficial.eu and not by links handed over by other sources.
The dev team is also looking into possibility of implementing that functionality directly into the MintCoin Wallet.
Clicking on the "MintCoin Bootstrap Torrent" button should open your favourite Torrent downloader. Just let it run until you received the complete file and follow the installation instructions.
We would also appreciate if you keep "seeding" this file in your Torrent Client for 45 days to support the other MintCoin users that download the bootstrap you can limit in most clients the bandwidth upload. Don't worry this download will be automatically be invalid after 45 days when a new a bootstrap is published.
MintCoin Origami (news from EuroCentiem)
Then an older topic whether or not there existed a MintCoin paper wallet like the project that we have on GitHub. It has always existed and was online at:
We are now looking into on hosting it onto our own servers and domain so that we can guarantee that there is no sneakpeaking during online usage and creation of the paper wallets keys.
Wallet Updates
With all the other work going on, only a few minor updates to the wallet have been made since the last MintCoin development update:
We also have a 8 new issues reported on GitHub. This is a lot, and we will look into them. The good news is that this means that there are people using the new wallet and they have found out how to report problems so we can fix them!
Some research into how to download torrents has been done, but it is far from complete. It is possible that we may be able to speed up syncing in other ways and not need to do this in the wallet itself, but more investigation is needed.
Orange Pi with a sprig of Mint
After weeks of synchronizing, we finally have an Orange Pi running the MintCoin wallet! This is a relatively cheap SBC (single-board computer), like the Raspberry Pi. What allows it to run MintCoin while the Raspberry Pi cannot is that it has 2 GByte of RAM. It seems like a nice solution for low-power minting, with something like 1 to 3 watts of power needed.
It can receive and send MintCoin without any problems. It is currently holding some MintCoin that will mature in 16 more days, and then we can confirm that minting also works.
Once we have verified that the wallet works, we will provide information on how to set up your own. If there is interest we may sell these with the MintCoin wallet pre-installed so you can transfer your MintCoin there and let it quietly mint for you.
The Best Way to Buy MintCoin
When MintCoin was selling for 2 satoshi recently, I wanted to convert some of my other altcoin to MintCoin. I was unsure whether I should first convert to Bitcoin, or Litecoin, and so on. Also, which exchange would give the best rates?
I wrote a tool which would help predict this for me, which you can use here:
It connects to the three exchanges that carry MintCoin and have an API that works from your browser. (Using the API from your browser is handy for me because it means I don't have to set up a backend server somewhere, and it is nice for you because nobody has to see what conversions you are doing except the exchanges themselves.)
It actually looks at the order books and figures out how much each transaction would give you, including exchange fees. So, for example, imagine that you wanted to convert Bitcoin Cash (BCH) into MintCoin (MINT). This makes a lot of sense because Bitcoin Cash is Proof-of-Work (PoW) and therefore not really sustainable in the same way that MintCoin is. 🍃
So, using the took you can see that right now if have 0.1 BCH and you convert first to Bitcoin (BTC) you will end up with about 260k MINT, whereas if you convert first to Dogecoin (DOGE) you will end up with about 285k MINT, and if you convert first to Litecoin (LTC) you will end up with about 350k MINT. That's about ⅓ more MINT!
Markets change all the time, so you would benefit from using the tool whenever you are thinking of buying MINT.
While I wrote the tool for MintCoin, it supports all of the crypto-currencies at all exchanges. I don't recommend using it for anything other than buying more MintCoin, but feel free to experiment if you ever need to use any other currencies. 😉