For the unfamiliar, XYO is yet another cryptocurrency venture. The basic premise is that users mine their coin (also called XYO) using the Coin app, which uses proof of location as the mining function (as opposed to proof of work for Bitcoin, or say proof of storage for Burst or Filecoin).
You wander about the world, which is divided into squares about 25 feet on a side. Each square you enter is worth a random amount between 0.02 and 0.1 XYO, which gets “geomined” when your phone enters that region. If you pay them $12.99, you can get a Sentinel – a bluetooth doodad that, as a reward for foolishly dropping 13 bucks on their technology, multiplies each geomine by a factor of 12.
This method of mining, however, is crap. As an average person who walks around casually (about 6 miles a day, much of it around the office), a daily haul is ~200 Coin (not 200 XYO; read on.). At that rate, it would take about 2 months before I could convert the minimum 10,000 Coin into 10,000 XYO, which as of this writing is worth about $2.95.
As in any good cock-and-bull crypto scheme, there are other ways to increase your rewards. One is a Premium subscription, starting at $24.99 a month, which multiplies all of your mining by various factors. Another is to hijack the mining of others by staking a Geoclaim – i.e. paying into a 25×25 mile region in exchange for a percentage of the coin mined therein. This comes with its own risks and rewards.
For funsies, I’ve decided to spend the next two months answering the question, Is it possible to actually generate any manner of money using XYO? I’ll wander about, rapidly draining the battery on the old Nexus 5X I’ve dedicated to the endeavor, do the math, and report back.
