Trading Terabytes for Tokens

A few weeks into running this low-risk passive income play

About three weeks ago, I wrote about a crypto project called ScPrime that promises to offer Amazon S3-level performance and reliability at a fraction of the cost. In fact, they will likely offer S3 features at Amazon Glacier prices. Their network is GROWING. In my previous article, there were 400 providers (their term for the storage devices) online. As of today’s writing, there are 1762 providers, for a combined storage capacity of 26.6PB!

Initial Disappointment

About 2 weeks ago, I received the much-anticipated email — I was next in line to purchase their XA-Miner! However, I didn’t have the required BTC to purchase it. I could have traded it for fiat and then purchased, but I had a Crypto Earn term expiring in 3 days, so I decided to wait. I was told not to worry, since the order will be held for me for at least that long.

You can probably guess what happened. The XA-Miner wasn’t held, and when I went back to try to purchase it, I was told everything was out of stock.

Normally, I would be a little upset about this, but honestly it wasn’t a big deal because I had an extra Synology NAS, and it was probably the most ideal non-XA-miner solution available, because it wouldn’t need to be built from a PC, would run quietly and fairly cool, and there are already packages available to install their software.

Installation on the Synology NAS

Fortunately, I upgraded the RAM in my DS1513+ a while back. The minimum to run the ScPrime software is 4GB. Installation is extremely easy, too. First, install the Docker application from the Synology Package Center.

Next download their helpful Synology installation guide. It was just updated on 1/3/2022 and can be downloaded here.

There’s almost nothing for me to add to the installation instructions, as they are quite clear and explain every step, with the exception of two things:

  1. When you create your wallet, the instructions say to fill in the environment variable SCPRIME_WALLET_PASSWORDwith the seed phrase generated, but they don’t tell you how to do this. I also failed to write this information down at the time, but thank goodness for command history. Here’s what you do.

  2. Create a text file in a user folder, which could be something like /var/services/homes/johndoe. Inside of this folder, create a text file called wallet_pass.txt. The first line should contain the entire seed phrase returned when you initialized the wallet.

  3. Next, you have to set the SCPRIME_WALLET_PASSWORD to the seed phrase in this file. You accomplish this by typing SCPRIME_WALLET_PASSWORD=cat /var/services/homes/johndoe/wallet_pass.txt. Note that these are backticks, not single quotes!

  4. You can confirm that this works by typing setat the command prompt. The OS will list all of the environment variables, and you should see one for SCPRIME_WALLET_PASSWORD, except that instead of showing the catcommand, it will display your seed phrase in single quotes!

  5. Finally, type export SCPRIME_WALLET_PASSWORD. I am not a Linux expert, but I believe that environment variables need to be added to a profile in order for them to be applied upon reboot. However, I’ve rebooted my unit already, and it seems to still operate correctly. Perhaps I’ll have trouble receiving my SCP from contracts if the environment variable isn’t actually set after rebooting. I would normally check this and confirm before posting here, but I really don’t want to reboot the unit because one of the key metrics is uptime.

  6. I think that these two small pieces of info will help you to get your NAS running smoothly. However, if you run into trouble, I highly recommend joining the ScPrime Discord and posting your questions in #support-other. The admins and mods there are extremely involved and helpful!

  7. My Contracts

  8. In the past few weeks, I’ve only received a total of 106GB of contracts. However, ScPrime is still in the testnet phase and we all could see our storage get filled rapidly, should their service take off. Here’s what my stats look like:

  9. Anticipated Revenue: 1.528 SCPLocked Collateral: 975.5 mSRevenue: 20.49 mS

  10. Sure, this doesn’t look like much, but there are two key pieces of information to keep in mind:

  11. When I first purchased my SCP collateral, I paid around $1.25 per token. It’s currently trading at $2.43. If you look another file storage providers in the crypto sector, you can see that ScPrime has a lot of room to grow.

  12. Let’s project SCP’s market cap onto FileCoin, which also provides decentralized file storage:

  13. There’s also SiaCoin, which isn’t straight-up file storage, but that’s still one aspect of their service:

  14. I’ll take either of those valuations, personally.

  15. I’m still waiting for my next XA-Miner email so I can get their 64TB model and place it at a different location. While I’m bummed I don’t have one right now because of the previous ordering issue, I’m grateful to the ScPrime team for allowing us to run on other hardware. Their Synology NAS solution is almost as turnkey as the XA-Miner, and I’m very excited to see how it does in 2022. I’ll post another update once my used storage increases and I get some more sizable contracts.