Prepping for Passive Incoming Mining with ScPrime

I’m a few months behind those in the know, but I’ve been watching a lot of videos about ScPrime today and am convinced that this is another great passive income opportunity, much like the Helium hotspots. ScPrime appears to be following a similar gameplan to Helium, which is to build a huge network (in this case, a file storage network, and not an IoT network) by enabling consumers to host their file storage devices at home or at their place of business.

I don’t understand what the costs of ScPrime are from a customer perspective, but it sounds like it is guaranteed to be a much more cost-effective option compared to other services like AWS. While the current network is fairly small at about 400ish nodes, they will quickly grow with the incentives and rebates currently in place.

You can register on the XA-Miner webpage to be notified when mining hardware is available for purchase. Although I don’t actually have a miner yet, there are steps that need to be taken ahead of time to ensure that I’m ready to mine as soon as it arrives. I’ve done the requisite research online to piece together a comprehensive set of instructions, and hopefully they will help you to get started as well!

First of all, you have to hold something called collateral. This is held in the form of SCP tokens for all data storage contracts you’re holding. The current pricing appears to be 10SCP / TB / month. Here’s more detailed information that I copied from the ScPrime discord, because it contains some details that I didn’t catch when I was trying to understand the concept of collateral:

How much SCP you need is the amount of Terabytes offered multiplied by the collateral amount per TB, then multiplied by contract duration (months), and finally multiplied by 2 (contract renewal period) — Calculator <https://bit.ly/3DDWKSD>

10TB Example — Storage pricing set to 10SCP/TB/Mo
10TB x 12.5 SCP (1.25x pricing) = 125
x 3 (~3 months) = 375
x 2 = 750SCP

Since the network is still very young, ScPrime doesn’t anticipate that you need to hold very much collateral. You will likely have low data loads, and therefore can hold a smaller amount of collateral. As you receive your rewards, you can “fill the coffers” to ensure that you are backing more data contracts as the network expands.

Therefore, this means that to start, we need to:
1. get a ScPrime wallet
2. get some ScPrime tokens

The ScPrime wallet is downloadable from their website and is as easy to install as any other crypto wallet. Once you download and launch it, click “Create new wallet”.

You’ll then be presented with your recovery seed. Please save this information somewhere secure! Maybe print it out and put it into your safe deposit box or fireproof safe. But don’t bypass this step in any way (i.e. saving the seed, verifying the missing seed words, and then deleting the file). After this, the network will sync up.

While it’s syncing, you can create a new wallet address for receiving funds. You need to do this because we’re going to visit an exchange (there’s only one — SouthXchange) to purchase SCP tokens, and we’ll eventually need to send them somewhere safe. Never leave your tokens on an exchange for an extended period of time, for fear of hackers.

You generate a wallet address by clicking “Go to Dashboard”, followed by clicking the Wallet button in the left pane, and then clicking the Receive tab.

Now click “Generate New Address”, and it will appear.

We’re ready to buy tokens from SouthXchange. Unfortunately, this is just about the only place you can purchase SCP from, and the only trading pairs are SCP/BTC, SCP/USDT, and SCP/ETH. If you don’t have BTC, USDT, or ETH, you’ll need to purchase enough of those tokens first, and then transfer them to SouthXchange. I refuse to trade BTC or ETH, so I ended up purchasing 1000 USDT from Coinbase.

Next, you have to create a new USDT wallet deposit address on SouthXchange. You do this by clicking the Wallets link in the upper right corner of the page:

In the Search texbox in the upper left, type “USDT”:

Click on the USDT search result to get to your USDT wallet, and then click “Get new address” to generate the address you’ll use to send your USDT from Coinbase (or wherever you purchased the USDT from).

Once you’ve sent the USDT to the exchange, wait a few minutes for it to arrive. Then you’ll want to search for the SCP/USDT trading pair so you can place your order. You can either set a limit order or a market order. I typically like to place limit orders for crypto that are trading in high volume, but for something like SCP, I just placed a market order since I didn’t want to have to wait around for someone to take my bid.

To place a market order using all of your available USDT, check Market Price, click USDT, and then click the amount under “Available”. Then click “Buy SCP with USDT”.

I try to keep my assets on exchanges as little as possible. Since we already set up the ScPrime wallet in the previous steps, I’m going to transfer all of my SCP over there for safe keeping. Go back to the Wallets page in SouthXchange and search for SCP. Copy and paste the deposit address from your ScPrime wallet into the Destination address in SouthXchange:

Finally, click the number under “Available” in the upper left corner of the page and then click the Withdraw button when it appears.

That’s it! Once you’ve received your email from xaminer for purchasing their turnkey miner hardware, you can purchase it knowing that you’ve got the required collateral all ready to go.

And as a side note — I just found out that you can run their open source software on any computer with a hard drive, including on NAS devices like those from Synology. I happen to have an old one that I’m not using, so while I’m waiting for my email, I am going to work on getting the ScPrime software running on it. I’ll document this process for you as well.