What is Riecoin?
Riecoin is a decentralized and open source peer-to-peer digital currency, released in 2014. It is a fork of Bitcoin with an useful Proof of Work that aims to provide computational power to science as well as incentives to contribute to research, in addition to a borderless and widely accepted world currency.
You can learn more about Riecoin here and discuss about it in this Forum.
Why support Riecoin?
Bitcoin has been a revolutionary invention, that allows everyone to store money and pay to anywhere in the world without having to open an account in some bank or site nor relying on an intermediary. Anyone can set up a Bitcoin wallet and someone could for example easily send Bitcoins to family living in a poorer country in seconds, without passing by some company that usually takes large commissions and days to do the transfer. There is a lot of resources about Bitcoin, so if you want to learn more, you can research yourself about it.
The currency has been successful with more and more users and even countries adopting it as the official currency or considering to do so. As Riecoin is based on Bitcoin, it provides all the Bitcoin's features and advantages. But it also improves a fundamental aspect of Bitcoin, its PoW mechanism.
In the Bitcoin network, millions of machines over the world are constantly running to solve a problem defined by the Bitcoin’s PoW type, which is how the payments are securely validated. This process is called mining, and the machines doing this (or users owning them) are called miners. This is a heavy task, consuming a lot of energy. In the Bitcoin and other PoW altcoins cases, the problem is to find an hash that meets an arbitrary criteria. So, miners are continuously generating random hashes until they find one meeting the criteria. This does work to make a cryptocurrency functional, but this is also criticized a lot given the high power consumption and the climate crisis. Some politics even want to ban PoW cryptocurrencies!
Instead of looking for useless hashes that don't have any value, Riecoin miners are searching for prime constellations. These prime numbers are of interest to mathematicians and the scientific community, so Riecoin not only provides a secure payment network, but also valuable research data by making clever use of the computing power that is otherwise wasted. Additionally, work on its software may eventually lead to theoretical discoveries as developers and mathematicians improve it, for example by finding new algorithms for the miner. As the mining power increases, it is conceivable to see the project include additional useful PoW algorithms to provide to more fields valuable scientific data and incentives to contribute to research.
Researchers all over the world use computers to make scientific calculations, so we can imagine how far the use of Riecoin could go. Moreover, there are also hobbyists competing with each other to find large interesting prime numbers and beat world records, and Riecoin makes possible to anyone to join this competition and earn money in return. Check out the Constellation Explorer, rassembling the prime k-tuplets found so far, join us, and try to beat the current records!
One interesting property of the Riecoin's PoW is that it is currently possible to mine RIC only with CPUs. Everyone can join and mine with their own computers and even smartphones, in contrast to Bitcoin that requires ASICs to mine. No matter how clean the energy used to mine Bitcoins is, there will always be tonnes of valuable resources wasted to produce ASICs while one could simply use existing machines to mine. There are some altcoins that are also mined with CPUs and even more with GPUs, but their PoW is also hash-based with tweaks to prevent the design of ASICs, so they also just waste power for their own sake.
We also believe that PoS altcoins are not a good solution, these are currencies that fundamentally enrich the already rich. In PoW, the rich might indeed have access to more ressources, but they must also work like everyone else if they want to be richer. The value of PoS coins comes from thin air, while the value of PoW coins come from concrete work, and in the case of Riecoin, it is even backed by useful scientific results.
Mining RIC is a far superior option than mining any other of these PoW coins.
Riecoin is the currency of reason for a better world. Not a currency for quick bucks or jokes.
How to support Riecoin?
For too many years, Riecoin has been overlooked by major actors and medias despite providing a concrete solution to the power consumption issue. In articles blaming Bitcoin for its energy waste, there will often be someone proposing to change the PoW to solve useful problems in the comment section, which is exactly what Riecoin does! People only see it as yet another mineable coin for profits while Riecoin actually makes the existence of any hash altcoin an aberration, as they don't really care about how things work.
This is worsened by the fact that there are today thousands of altcoins, also based on or inspired from Bitcoin, that in most cases exist solely to enrich their creators and early adopters as it is easy to copy the Bitcoin code or generate ERC20/BEP20 tokens, make minor tweaks and market it to uneducated people; this draws attention away from truly interesting projects.
Thus, one can understand the vicious circle in which the project is, as it never met someone that both understands the potential of Riecoin and has a lot of resources to support the project. So Riecoin remains in the shadows, lessening the odds to met such person, and forcing the project to rely on benevolent contributors that often have other priorities in life, while drowning under the thousands of new absurd and useless tokens flooding the crypto world.
If you have a lot of resources, you could be the one to break this vicious circle and give Riecoin the attention it deserves. Due to the lack of interest in the project, very few people take the risk of buying and holding Riecoins, miners usually convert RIC to BTC as soon as possible, many cannot handle the risk and sell coins for any price. So, the price is way undervalued given the trillions injected in cryptocurrencies, and Riecoin has always been an excellent investment opportunity. It just takes a spark to make it realize its potential.
Otherwise, spread the word about Riecoin by writing good articles, making quality educating videos, sharing to your friends, producing quality Riecoin software... Buy and hold large amounts of RIC. Given that too many people sell their RIC at any price, it is a very interesting occasion to accumulate a lot of Riecoins, which also helps to render Riecoin mining profitable and attractive. Mine RIC and keep mining regardless of whether it is profitable, to make the network more secure and find interesting prime numbers. Let Riecoin Core running 24/7 if possible. Don't mine hash based cryptocurrencies nor support or use anything containing Doge/Shiba/Inu or similar, this is disrespecting all the hard work done by developers that actually care to make cryptocurrencies a great tool that advances humanity. If you own a store, accept RIC as payment option.