What is TurtleCoin and why do I care?
Some weeks ago I stumbled across TurtleCoin, while researching new cryptocurrencies to mine, on cryptunit.com.
I rolled my eyes at the stupidity of the cryptogeeks, and moved on to mine some RavenCoin, which r/gpumining had told me was the new hotness.
As I returned to cryptounit over the next few days, I kept seeing TurtleCoin among the top 3-5 most profitable coins, and my curiosity got the better of me. I researched it, and found that it’s a “fun-first” cryptocurrency forked from ByteCoin, and so based on cryptonote, which means it’s a distant cousin of Monero, reigning king of the privacy coins. In every description however, the community was highlighted as the distinguishing feature of TurtleCoin.
This was borne out in my experience, as I started lurking in the discord chat, and listened to episode #3 of Kevin Rose’s BlockZero podcast, featuring TurtleCoin. Just a few days ago, TurtleCoin won the ‘Best Community’ award at the Crypto Influence summit, and it continues to build on its reputation for a user-friendly, welcoming community.
Aside: In my gamer days in South Africa, I was part of a “gaming clan” called CHKNHD (‘Chicken Head’, or “running around like headless chickens”), an irreverant bunch of gamers who (unlike most “clans”) were more interested in having fun (and drinking stroh rum, a process they termed “devolution“) than succeeding at any sort of competitive gaming. TurtleCoin seems to embody that same spirit - focusing on building a dev community rather than hyping yet-another cryptocurrency.
I soon discovered that there were no NZ (or AU) mining pools. So I mined elsewhere. But I’d been toying with the idea of running a mining pool for some time, and so this seemed like a good opportunity to (a) write a Geek’s Cookbook recipe re running a mining pool, and (b) learn more about blockchain tech by getting involved on the “ground floor”.
So, I started with a simple PR to correct a typo in the README for “turtle-pool”, a fork of forknote-pool. Wanting to test my pool in a “dev environment”, I started working on a Docker container to run a testnet swarm.
I ended up creating the first (and only, AFAIK) NZ/AU docker-swarm-based TurtleCoin mining pool, trtl.heigh-ho.funkypenguin.co.nz. After a few weeks, I was hit by the instable daemon issue, and forced to wait 18 hours while my daemon resynced. I built in an additional daemon for redundancy, plus another standby daemon which syncs-and-shuts-down once a hour, in case both daemons get hit with simultaneous “doomsday blocks”. (The daemon stability is an active developer focus)
So, now I’m a contributor, and a regular member of the discord chat. I’ve met some friendly geeks, and learned about blocks, nodes, daemons, wallets, testnets and pools.
Want to get involved with TurtleCoin? Jump into the discord chat and mention me (@funkypenguin), and I’ll tip you some TRTL to play with ;)
Want to mine some TRTLs, using your CPU (or GPU?) Come over to trtl.heigh-ho.funkypenguin.co.nz and mine with me!
Some links for further digestion:
- Official blog, with at least weekly dev roundups
- Interview with anonymous lead dev, “RockSteady”
- Kevin Rose’s interview with RockSteady