Is this too good to be true?

It seems like there isn't a day that goes by without someone telling you about the "Next Greatest Thing on the market" - and by telling you I mean trying to sell you. This seems especially true in the cryptocurrency space. Almost every day a new ICO hits the market with the promise of being the next "[Insert popular Cryptocurrency here] killer" - here's a hint, it's probably not going to kill anything.

That being said, I'm still eager to at least glance over any new coin I see. I'm especially excited about opportunities where I'm able to mine or generate the tokens myself. Reason being that I don't feel all that comfortable throwing money at something that has a very small probability of succeeding. Also incidentally why I like STEEM so much.

So the day before yesterday I saw a 🚩comment in an unrelated post🚩 about this new cryptocurrency that will be mined from within browsers as a way for website developers and owners to monetise their sites. Allow me to introduce to you JSECoin.

Before I start...

Let me just point out that what I actually know about how cryptocurrency tokens are generated will barely fit onto a small pamphlet, so please don't take anything I say in this post as advice.

What I like about the idea

For one - you mine the token by placing a piece of what is claimed to be small and unobtrusive piece of javascript on a webpage you own. The token is then mined inside the browsers of your site's visitors. Seems easy enough.

I also like that they're splitting their blockchain to try and ensure that the platform stays performant and can scale - at least theoretically, we still have to wait and see if it delivers.

They have a pretty decent looking interface. I mean just look at it:

Pretty nice, eh.

There's also the option of mining from your own browser which they call self-mining.

The self-mined tokens are also taken from a different pool than the publisher-mined tokens, more details here.

They seem to be somewhat open about their development so far. They mention a few milestones on their blog and on their online forum. Except for...

The Red flags🚩 and the Risks

It's a bit concerning that their codebase isn't open source yet - according to their FAQ, this is going to happen before the ICO early 2018.

The next thing that gripes me is that all transactions seem - at least to me - to go through a CENTRAL SERVER. No guys, that's the whole point of cryptocurrencies. No central authority.

The whitepaper is also a bit... sparse in my opinion. Now I haven't really read other cryptocurrency whitepapers before, but at 9 pages and very little technical details or specifications, it looks a little lacking.

Then there's the hashing algorithm the coin is based on. They're using SHA256, the same algorithm used to mine bitcoin...

Wait... aren't bitcoins mined on ASICs - that maximise hashing throughput - and in huge server farms in china - for low cost electricity?

Yes, exactly my point. I'm not yet convinced on how secure they will be in preventing someone with a large amount of resources from completely taking over and making it prohibitively expensive for someone to start mining. They claim they will, but I haven't really seen concrete proof of these claims yet.

The Big Question...

Now the issue that you'll have to decide for yourself is whether or not you think the JSECoin team will be able to actually deliver on what they're setting to. That unfortunately you'll have to decide for yourself.

I personally have decided to at least sign up for an account and try out the mining on their platform every now and then - I'm at 0.5 JSE mined to date by the way. I'm also going to in time place the mining script on my hosted projects - I don't really have anything to lose by doing so.

If you happen to have experience with cryptocurrency mining, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this concept. Leave a comment below.

Oh and just as a disclaimer, some of the links I added above are the affiliate links I got from the platform.