16 / Crypto

Bring escudos

The event is free and stays free. Some parts of it run on CryptoEscudos, because paying with a coin you mined yourself teaches more in one afternoon than any talk about it. The grill on Saturday is the big one: meat and drinks are paid in CESC.

The coin

What CESC is worth

CryptoEscudo is the oldest Portuguese cryptocurrency there is. Two Portuguese programmers launched it on 25 March 2014 and the plan back then was that it would one day become valuable enough to pay off the national debt. Wikipedia has the story.

It stayed small. Treat what you mine as tokens for the week instead of savings and do not go buying hardware for it. If it ends up worth something one day, good for you. In either case you are now owning a special piece of Portuguese history right on your wallet.

Before you come

Mine 5000 CESC

Start well before October 31. Five thousand escudos is what we suggest you arrive with: enough for the grill, with some left to pay each other for whatever gets traded around the venue.

Nobody sells you the coins. You mine them, on the computer or the phone you already own, and what you mine is yours before you set foot in Coimbra.

Mining takes time, so a week of running it in the background beats an hour of panic on Friday.
Write your recovery words down on paper. Lose the phone with no words written, lose the escudos.
Short on coins when you get here? Ask around. Somebody who mined too many will send you some.

The software

minerfan

minerfan is one app that carries the miner, the node and the wallet together, so there is nothing else to install and no pool to sign up with. It mines CryptoEscudo on your graphics card with scrypt, and it can mine Monero on the processor at the same time if you feel like it.

Open it once and it makes your wallet and shows you the recovery words. Mining is solo, and the block reward lands in that wallet whole, with nobody in between.

Never type those words into a website, including this one. We will never ask for them, and we will never ask you to send coins anywhere before the event.

Android 7.0 or newer, or a 64 bit Linux, Windows or macOS 10.15 machine.
CESC mining wants a GPU with an OpenCL driver. On a laptop, check the driver before the week starts.
The effort limit keeps your share of the chain sane: turn it down if you brought a fast card.

The minerfan icon — Get minerfan Free and open source. Android, Linux, Windows, macOS.

At the event

Paying at the grill

From 17:00 on Saturday the grill is going at Edifício Embaixada. Meat, bread, drinks: the board says how many escudos each thing costs, you scan the address and send.

Bring the phone you mined with, or the wallet words if you mined on a machine at home.
Send the payment, show the screen, take the plate. Nobody goes hungry waiting for a block.
Other stands and stalls may take escudos as well. That is between you and them.

None of this is a fundraiser. The coins pay for nothing in euros, and the food is covered either way: it is there so people spend an evening actually using a currency instead of arguing about one.

The short version

Install minerfan, mine 5000 CESC before Saturday, bring the wallet, eat well. Questions go in the Crypto part of the forum.