Not enough Minerals? StarCraft & E-sports focused cryptocurrency doing cool things

Minerals is a cryptocurrency targeting the e-sports crowd, and themed heavily upon StarCraft. E-sports is the act of playing video games competitively and often in professional teams. StarCraft is a very complex real-time strategy game — often likened to chess — which focuses a lot on the collection of resources, one of which is called ‘minerals’.

Dota 2 pros play on-stage at The International 4

I know this because I’m both a fan of e-sports, and a terrible StarCraft player. That’s right, I sit for hours at a time and watch the very best in the world go against one another in a video game. It may sound odd, but a lot of others do it too. Just yesterday, gaming giant Valve announce that their recent Dota 2 tournament, The International, was watched by over 20 million unique viewers — with a peak concurrent viewer number of 20 million.

The grand final was also featured on ESPN, reportedly to much success. The Daily Dot reports that an anonymous source said:

ESPN have seen enough recent successes with e-sports and are about to double down.The numbers they hit with The International have only cemented the view that the time is right.

So e-sports is no joke, even though it may seem so to the uninitiated. Minerals is aligning itself with that world with some cool and unique ideas. They are getting involved with hosting tournaments, involving players with a large following. But most interestingly they have a platform by which you can bet Minerals on the outcome of an e-sports game that’s happening live. With their first Dota 2 betting coming up soon.

StarCraft and other PC game players are in general very much more knowledgeable about the digital world than the your average gamers. I believe there will be a fairly large demand for this betting feature among the e-sports community, and that the gaming demographic will ‘get’ how crypto works very quickly. Some of the e-sports world will have already been introduced to Bitcoin by way of some tournaments that had Bitcoin prize pools.

Starcraft 2: Why wouldn’t you watch a sport that looks like this?

There’s also the fact that a small percentage of all winnings can be set to go straight to the players themselves — in a community that is always willing to support their favourite players and teams when they can. Not to mention that the teams themselves are always looking for new and innovate revenue streams, for which Minerals or another cryptocurrency could perhaps play a part.

For those wanting coin specifications, it’s a proof-of-/proof-of-stake coin with an annual 2% interest on staked coins. It had no pre-mine, and was initially distributed via a 7 day proof-of-work period — using the X11 algorithm — which has now ended. A multipool is available now, though.

They also, somewhat controversially, decided to put limits on the initial distribution by controlling all of the pools and limiting workers to no more than 5% of the total network hashrate — something I don’t think is necessarily bad and could definitely have helped with a more even distribution of the initial 30 million coins to some degree.

From what I can make of it at this time, the developers involved with Minerals are not messing around; actively pushing the coin and its features forward in a very appealing way to somebody like me. Delivering that which is needed, right when it’s needed.

Anything else you’re wondering about Minerals can likely be found on their official website.

Oh, and if you were wondering… I play Zerg!

Tip the author with Minerals: MEkDZyUSNiML84Fa5fFs9TmxTNKapPTaXG