MINI Cryptocurrency: Low-Power Mining for Beginners and Builders
MINI is a low-power cryptocurrency project designed from the ground up for beginners, tinkerers and efficient hardware. Start with an ESP32, a Raspberry Pi, the CPU or GPU you already own, or build your own miner. Learn cryptocurrency by actually mining it.
Made for beginners. Open to everyone. Built for low power.
MINI LIVENET: A Blockchain Experience Before the Blockchain
MINI LIVENET is designed to look, feel and act like a cryptocurrency blockchain environment in virtually every way visible to its users while the real MINI blockchain is completed and hardened behind the scenes.
Mine MINI. Use wallet addresses. Send and receive it. Explore transactions. Watch mining rewards and issuance. Learn pools, wallets, explorers and cryptocurrency economics by actually using them.
But LIVENET is transparently not the MINI blockchain. Its backend remains centrally operated so that when real public use exposes cheating, attacks, bugs, scaling problems, economic problems and things we never anticipated, we can fix them before those mistakes become permanent Mainnet rules.
Closed Testnet: Does the technology work?
MINI LIVENET: What happens when the public actually uses, scales and attacks it?
MINI Mainnet: Commit the proven design to the independent blockchain.
Why MINI Exists
MINI was created for people who have always wanted to mine cryptocurrency but did not know how, did not want expensive mining hardware, or did not want to turn large amounts of electricity into heat just to participate.
Low-power mining is not a secondary feature of MINI. It is the reason MINI exists.
A tiny miner should be able to sit on a desk, run from a battery, become a solar experiment, or simply blink every time it finds a share. As the participant learns, that first blinking miner becomes an introduction to shares, difficulty, pools, rewards, wallets, transactions, explorers, seed phrases, self-custody, nodes and blockchain infrastructure.
ESP32-class miners are part of the design center, not novelty devices added to a network built for giant computers.
ESP32, CPU, GPU, Raspberry Pi and other supported hardware are welcome. Public software and firmware require no hardware purchase.
Mine, earn, use wallets, send transactions, explore the ledger, understand pools and eventually operate nodes.
Solar miners, battery experiments, custom boards, displays, Pi nodes, efficiency projects, community miners and software.
MiniPOW + Adaptive Difficulty
MINI uses MiniPOW1, a SHA-256-based proof-of-work algorithm with a 64 KiB per-attempt scratchpad and 512 state-dependent mixing rounds. The pool independently validates submitted shares.
Adaptive difficulty gives faster miners harder work and slower miners easier work. The current design targets frequent accepted shares so mining remains visible and interactive.
Adaptive difficulty addresses vertical scaling: making one miner dramatically faster should not produce a proportionally larger per-miner reward.
Miner registration and probation address horizontal scaling: one powerful computer, cloud system or botnet should not be able to instantly present itself as hundreds or thousands of independently rewarded miners.
MINI welcomes powerful computers. CPU and GPU miners are legitimate participants. MINI is not attempting to prove that every miner is an ESP32.
Free Software. Optional Hardware.
You do not need to buy a Mini Miner to participate. Public mining firmware and software are intended to be available for supported hardware.
For beginners who want the simplest route, Mini Miners plans to offer inexpensive ready-to-run ESP32 miners, including an approximately $20 cash option and a planned approximately $10 cash plus earned MINI option.
Official hardware provides convenience, testing, preconfiguration, automatic updates and support — not privileged network access.
No Premine. No Founder Allocation.
MINI is not intended to begin with a special reserve of coins allocated to its founder or development team.
The founder mines under the same LIVENET registration, probation, adaptive-difficulty and reward rules as other participants. There is no special founder mining rate, hidden reward multiplier or privileged miner class.
MINI earned by the founder must be earned through mining or normal economic activity just like MINI earned by other participants.
Fair Growth During LIVENET
A new verified LIVENET account begins with 2 miners. With sustained qualifying activity, additional miners may be registered progressively:
2 → 7 → 12 → 17 → 22 → continued earned expansion
A bad qualifying period does not remove miners already approved. It simply delays further expansion.
LIVENET is currently planned to have a maximum of 50 registered miners per account.
The 50-miner ceiling is a LIVENET security and issuance safeguard. It does not necessarily establish a permanent miner limit for MINI Mainnet.
The precise definition of qualifying activity and the longer-term LIVENET issuance rules are still being developed and will be published before those rules govern public participation.
A Public LIVENET Economy
LIVENET is intended to progressively provide familiar cryptocurrency operations including wallets, mining rewards, sending, receiving, person-to-person transfers, transaction history, explorers, buying, selling and merchant use as those systems become ready.
The purpose is both practical and educational. Participants learn cryptocurrency by actually participating in an economy rather than reading a simulation of one.
Visible and Auditable
LIVENET is intended to maintain publicly inspectable wallet, transaction, mining, issuance and ledger information through a MINI LIVENET Explorer.
Issuance should leave a persistent history from LIVENET itself rather than appearing for the first time as a database snapshot at Mainnet launch.
The explorer therefore serves two purposes: it teaches participants how cryptocurrency explorers work, and it gives the community visibility into what MINI is actually doing.
Open Pool Ecosystem
The official Mini Miners pool provides the initial infrastructure, but it is not intended to remain the only MINI pool.
MINI is designed toward a future in which independent third parties can operate compatible pools using published protocols and software.
Pool operators are intended to earn a defined percentage for providing legitimate mining infrastructure. The exact compensation and network-verification mechanism remains part of Mainnet engineering and will be specified before that architecture becomes active.
From LIVENET to Mainnet
When MINI is ready to transition to its independent blockchain, LIVENET mining and transactions will freeze.
The LIVENET Explorer will remain available in read-only form so participants can inspect the final state and history. Final balances, issuance information and cryptographic verification data are intended to be published for independent examination.
Eligible LIVENET balances are intended to transition 1:1 into MINI Mainnet through the Alpha Block.
The detailed transition, eligibility, audit and verification rules have not yet been finalized. They will be developed during LIVENET, tested publicly, and published well before the Alpha Block transition.
Low-Power Mainnet
MINI's low-power goal does not stop at mining. Raspberry Pi-class full-node operation is an explicit Mainnet design target.
Multiple nodes and multiple pools should allow the network to operate without dependence on one founder-controlled server or physical location.
Mainnet consensus, final supply and emission policy, block timing, staking/masternode design, pool-to-chain accounting and final node resource limits remain engineering decisions to be specified and tested rather than invented in advance.
Education Is a Permanent MINI Feature
MINI is intended to become a functioning cryptocurrency with an economy, utility, merchant activity and an independent blockchain — not an educational simulation.
The project hopes to develop sufficient adoption, liquidity and infrastructure to pursue cryptocurrency exchange listings in the future, although listing and future market value cannot be guaranteed.
The educational mission continues on Mainnet. Someone can begin by watching a tiny miner blink when it finds a share and eventually understand mining, wallets, transactions, explorers, self-custody, pools, nodes and the blockchain behind that blinking light.
That knowledge also gives participants the foundation to understand and explore other cryptocurrency systems.