Back in the good old days when Bitcoin was worth less than a buck and no one had heard of NFTs, mining was easy. Anyone could run a simple program on their computers and earn an occasional 50 BTC for processing transactions and building blocks. It was like SETI but for banking. 

As the popularity of Bitcoin increased, not only did the rewards halve but competition for those rewards tightened. Specialist rigs replaced home computers. The price of electricity became a serious factor. Individual rigs turned into mining farms that required huge investments in places with cheap energy and friendly regulations. At best, individuals could buy a share of a mining pool and hope for the occasional dividend. In practice, Bitcoin mining became the stuff of large corporations in places like China and Russia and subject to the whims of local government regulators.

Why Being an Active Community Member Should be Championed

What started as a way to reward community members for their contributions to a project they loved has become a dedicated and unstable big business.

Magic Dust Miners is showing one way in which the crypto industry might solve the problem.

The project is a collection of 11,111 generative art NFTs that drop on Ethereum on September 30. The miners are themselves attractive and valuable NFTs but holding a Magic Dust Miner in an NFT wallet also lets community members receive Dust every time they chat on Discord or Telegram. The more miners a community member holds, the bigger their rewards. They can collect those rewards in any NFT community on Discord that hosts a Magic Dust Miner bot.

Users can spend their Dust on digital and physical products that the project plans to sell. They can also burn it during project activities, such as breeding miners. They can sell it for other tokens, and of course, they can hold it and hope that its value increases over the years.

What users should find is that they’re able to receive real cryptocurrency rewards in return for contributing to the community. The cost of receiving those rewards is no more than the price of owning an NFT, a fee that’s much lower than the cost of building a mining farm. Instead of running expensive equipment and keeping a close eye on their electricity bills, they only need to chat with other Magic Dust Miner enthusiasts, an act that keeps the community alive and active.

Let’s Return to the Old Days of Bitcoin

As Bitcoin has developed, a project that started with ideas of decentralization has become increasingly centralized and specialized. Contributing to the project’s upkeep has become the preserve of IT companies with large pockets and tracts of real estate in places with lots of cheap electricity. Bitcoin enthusiasts themselves have become reduced to holders, speculators, or users. People make use of the currency but can play no part in the project’s upkeep.