With Bitcoin mining becoming highly centralized to miners who have expensive hardware, we certainly need new projects where people who don't have these expensive miners can still mine the coins. The thing I liked about coins like bitcoinR is that they allow you to quickly get started with mining and that too with your ordinary electronic gadgets. There is technically zero risks involved in mining such coins.
Hey ToothlessCoin,
Thanks for the note. We started with CPU mining in late March with little coordination, simply letting friends and family know via text message and Facebook posts that they could mine XBR with their hardware at home. At that time, difficulty was <1 and we proved that a 1.8GHz processor and as few as 4GB RAM worked well enough whether it was Mac or Windows. The announcement was met with varying interest and most people were plagued by short term thinking (how much is it worth, where is it traded) thinking that they could just flip out of it quickly. The allure of easy money has a very strong appeal; but, when you add the necessity for people to wait between investing effort and reaping reward the number of initial participants becomes vanishingly small.
bitcoinR is not unique in this way, all PoW coins go through this same adoption curve. Those who are early in (CPU/GPU and early ASIC) prior to a price being established are the obvious long run winners. This method has the disadvantage of zero immediate gratification, but then there are legitimate examples of those who achieved success by taking an early PoW risk for a subsequent, non-guaranteed payoff.
NS