Electroneum network had the update today. Let’s dig a bit deeper before you start mining it.
There was a fork in the Monero code, referred to as V0.12.0 “Lithium Luna” on April 6th. As thus, the original CryptoNight algorithm (now referred to as CryptoNightV0) was altered to, among other things, neutralize all ASIC hardware mining the original Monero blockchain.
Shortly after the fork, Monero’s global hashrate dropped by almost 80%, due to a lot of miners who were utilizing ASICs, dropping out. CPU mining became extremely profitable (fewer miners = higher reward).
Electroneum followed Monero with the implementation of ASIC resistance, means fewer miners are left now. In addition to that, ETN has doubled reward, increased the block time and disabled RingCT & Mixin privacy features.
Yes, disabling RingCT & Mixin significantly reduce privacy, comparing to Monero, focused on privacy, but it’s still at a high level, comparing to Bitcoin or Ethereum. A new stealth wallet address for every blockchain transaction is still used, so ETN wallets are still private.
Disabling these features means more profit for miners, as significantly more transactions can fit in every block now. And miners earn on transactions.
All these changes applied should make ETN mining on CPUs significantly more profitable. And these calculations are already proved by the Monero example.
