BASIC KNOWLEDGE [1]: Overview of the Duinocoin

What is the Duinocoin (DUCO)? What do you need for it? How do you mine it?

The Duinocoin is an open-source, centralised and environmentally friendly cryptocurrency for microcontrollers and other low-power computers.

The Duinocoin (DUCO) was originally developed for the Arduino UNO. Its aim is to be a unique cryptocurrency for mining on low-power, low-cost microcontrollers and simple computers. A Raspberry Pi, an Arduino UNO or an ESP8266/ESP32 are all you need to start mining.

Overview

The following four articles give a first and rough overview of the whole Duinocoin project:

  1. BASIC KNOWLEDGE [1]: Overview of the Duinocoin
  2. BASIC KNOWLEDGE [2]: Set up Duinocoin wallet
  3. BASIC KNOWLEDGE [3]: Hardware for the Duinocoin
  4. BASIC KNOWLEDGE [4]: Software for Duinocoin mining

Other articles on duinocoin.com go into detail about the individual aspects of the Duinocoin (DUCO) and, for example, the construction of mining rigs.

What is the Duinocoin (DUCO)?

Duinocoin Explorer

The Duinocoin (DUCO) was designed on the premise of being able to mine a cryptocurrency on a microcontroller such as the Arduino UNO/Nano. For this reason, the mining process is kept very simple. Central servers assign tasks (jobs for the so-called DUCO-S1 algorithm) to the miners, which they must solve correctly in order to receive a reward (share). The task is to find a number (nonce) that adds a given first hash to a given second hash. The size of the range from which this number comes is determined by the difficulty. The faster a miner works, the higher the Difficulty. With an Arduino UNO/Nano, for example, it is 6, with a fast PC it can rise to well over 100,000.

The Difficulty and the amount of the reward is regulated by the Kolka system, which was developed especially for the Duinocoin. Kolka rewards slow and thus power-saving devices far more than fast systems. An Arduino UNO/Nano mines almost as much Duinocoin (DUCO) per hour as a high-performance PC - at a tiny fraction of the cost of hardware and energy (electricity).

What do you need for the Duinocoin?

Duinocoin Explorer

A Duinocoin/DUCO-Wallet is mandatory. This wallet is set up online and holds all the DUCO that your own miners generate. DUCO can also be sent from wallet to wallet. Basically, you could also just set up a wallet, buy a few DUCO and speculate on rising prices.

For mining you need an Arduino UNO or another microcontroller and usually also a PC or Raspberry Pi. The PC handles the communication between the Arduino miner and the pool servers that distribute the jobs. It is also used to program the microcontroller via the Arduino IDE (development environment).

How do you mine the Duinocoin?

Duinocoin Explorer

Once you have created a wallet and programmed the Arduino UNO and connected it to the PC via USB, you can start the AVR-Miner.py script from the Duinocoin software package. The Python3 script installs a few libraries and asks for some basic data, such as the name of the wallet. Then it starts: The PC fetches jobs from the pool servers, forwards them to the Arduino UNO and waits for its response. The PC sends this back to the pool server and receives a confirmation of the result from it (or a rejection if it is not correct). Then the process starts again. Every 1-3 seconds, a job lands on the Arduino UNO and shares are accepted for the wallet (the account), which are credited in DUCO (the currency name of the Duinocoin). A single Arduino UNO can produce between 5 and 10 DUCO per day, a 100 DUCO is currently (summer 2022) worth between 0.5 and 2 euro cents.

Some statistical data about the Duinocoin project (number and distribution of miners, price of the DUCO, total hashrate of the network and so on) and info about all transactions can be found on the internet on the page of the Duinocoin-Explorer:

Screenshot Duinocoin-Explorer

Those who don't have a microcontroller or don't want to program can also mine the Duincoin without Arduino & Co: Using a Python3 script, any PC - whether server, high-end workstation, notebook, Raspberry Pi or whatever with Windows, GNU/Linux or Mac OS X - can also be converted into a miner. This is also very inefficient because all these systems require more or less energy.