Im feeling like this is a dumb method of 'mining' only 50 coins every 5 minutes.. it should be rewarded divided into how many people in those 5 minutes paid gas to mine the coins. This is more like a mining lottery. Doesnt matter what gas you use, ive tried it all. At this rate I've wasted a few dollars just to get 1 single BTCM coin. I cant auto-mine with geth as I use MetaMask and there is no keystore file you can export only private key. I was hoping this would be something worth while but trying to win a lotto every 5 minutes burning gas doesnt seem worth it. If the mining rewards were split into even for the number of people for the 5 minutes it would make a lot more sense.
Well first it's not every every 5 minutes, it's every 10 minutes (like bitcoin in normal conditions).
Second, you don't need to use your MetaMask account, you can create a new account on geth and then transfer your mined coins to your MetaMask or other address.
Third, the gas fees are important because it gives a non-constant cost to the transactions.
You can take more risk by sending a low fee but if you succeed you get them cheap, but you can also send a higher fee and you get them faster with less risk.