Turtlecoin (TRTL) Review: Fast, Private and Easy to Mine

In this review of Turtlecoin, we will take a look at one of the most interesting community driven cryptocurrency projects currently around.

Turtlecoin is a microcap cryptocurrency that is fully private, fast and easy to use. It is also one of the few coins that you can easily mine with your PC's CPU.

So, what is Turtlecoin exactly and should you consider it? In this complete review, we will take an in-depth look into the project and will give you what you need to know.

Let's dive into Turtlecoin.

What is Turtlecoin?

Turtlecoin is a cryptocurrency that was started less than a year ago by two developers. According to the tale of the founding, the two were in a bar and were discussing the plethora of fake ICOs and shitcoins in the market.

The developers, called Bebop and Rocksteady wanted to start a project that was focused on technology and community development. A project that did not require a large pre-mine, ICO, or marketing budget.

The project was officially started on the 7th of December 2017. The developers who got involved with the project from the initial stages were doing it merely as a hobby and were not getting paid. Moreover, the coin was launched without a whitepaper and still does not have one to this day.

What is most important about this project is the work that has gone into the technology. Lets take a look at some of this.

Turtlecoin Technology

Despite the fact that Turtlecoin was started as a "fun" project, there are a number of features that make it quite an advanced coin which is still easy enough for newbies to use and mine. This is because of a number of specific technicalities with Turtlecoin.

Short Block Times

Turtlecoin has a block time of only 30 seconds. This is much lower than the Bitcoin block time of 10 minutes. This means that transactions will confirm much more quickly than on the established chains.

This effectively means that transactions you send on the Turtlecoin will confirm about 10 times faster than transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. This is particularly relevant today given the backlog that many are experienced with uncomfirmed transactions.

Privacy Features

Given that Turtlecoin uses the CryptoNight hashing algorithm, it has a lot of the same privacy features as Monero (XMR), one of the foremost privacy coins. Every transaction that you send is private.

This is because Turtlecoin makes use of Mixins which will mix your private key with those of other users. This Mixin is based on a concept called Borromean Ring Signatures which was developed by Blockstream..

Previously, you could choose 0 mixins if you did not mind your transaction to be public. However, this was viewed as sub-optimal for network privacy for those who wanted to remain private. Hence, Turtlecoin recently upgraded its protocol to require a minimum of 7 Mixins per transaction.

Easy Mining

Turtlecoin is a relatively easy coin to mine. This is becoming quite a rarity these days given the intense mining competition in some of the more established PoW blockchains.

In terms of mining the coins, Turtlecoin comes with its own really simple basic CPU miner. Of course, there are also options for you to use the more common Monero mining software with XMR-Stak. This could be an attractive alternative for those miners who would rather use their GPU and mining pools.

User Friedly Wallets

In order to make Turtlecoin easy to use, the developers wanted to make sure that the wallet was intuitive and had a simple GUI. With Turtlecoin, there are 5 GUI wallets that you can use with Turtlecoin.

The Golang, Winforms, Python and Electron wallets are available on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. The is also a Windows only wallet that was coded in C#. For example, below is a screenshot of the open Golan GUI.

For those users who are more comfortable with the command line, then Turtlecoin also offers this as an option with their standard CLI wallets.

Turtlecoin Community

One of the most powerful things driving Turtlecoin is the community. Given that the project does not have a marketing team or an ICO budget, these community developers and users have taken it upon themselves to help spread adoption of the coin. The main developers actually want peer review of their work and encourage new users to get involved. On the website they say:

The TurtleCoin community is very welcoming to all users and developers. You won't get shouted at when things break, and we welcome critiques of our work.

This inclusive atmosphere has served to supercharge the growth of the turtlecoin community. For example, they currently have over 11,700 users in their discord chat. They have regular updates in this discord chat and they actively aim to help newcomers. Below is a screenshot when we joined the chat.

The developers are also very active on Medium as they update the community on a weekly basis. Apart from these weekly updates, they also have a whole host of resources and posts that help users better understand the more technical aspects of Turtlecoin. There is also quite an active presence in the Turtlecoin subreddit.

Lastly, you have a great deal of action in their project GitHub. There are over 35 developers who are actively pushing through regular commits on the project. To get an idea of just how much work is being done on the project, you can see their contributions over time below.

We have covered numerous projects, including those that have raised millions in their ICOs, and they can't compare to the development work that has been done on Turtlecoin. This is further proof that a massive ICO is not needed to create a great product.

Turtlecoin Mining

One of the biggest incentives for new users to get on board with Turtlecoin is the mining aspect. The short block times and reasonable block rewards mean that the coin is quite easy to mine.

If you wanted to get an idea of the mining statistics such as rewards and difficulty, then you could make use of the official turtlecoin block explorer. Below is a screenshot of the block explorer at the time of this post.

Another really important reason that this is an attractive coin to mine is the anti-ASIC stance of the developers. This means that the community will take the appropriate action to fight off against the side affects of ASIC miners.

Although ASICs could add to the hashing power on the Turtlecoin network, they would harm the decentralisation of the network and make it much harder for average CPU and GPU miners to discover blocks.

To counter this, the developers recently forked the Turtlecoin network to restrict ASIC mining. This is actually something that Monero also did in response to the same ASIC threat.

Turtlecoin Mining Pools

If you would like to join efforts with other miners by joining a Turtlecoin mining pool, there are a number of options for you. These are also listed in the Turtlecoin blockchain explorer. For example, below are the top 7 TRTL pools by hashing power.

The summary will give you all the information from the fee structure to minimum payout. If you are going to be selecting one of these pools based on this information, you will probably want to double check where their servers are located and choose those closest to yourself.

When it comes to joining a mining pool, it is important to point out the need for decentralisation. If one mining pool gets too much hashrate, the network becomes too centralised.

In order to avoid this, you should try to join some of the less popular pools if you notice an imbalance. It could also be beneficial economically as there are less miners to share the block rewards with.

TRTL Price and Trading

Last month was a pretty eventful week for Turtlecoin in that they were officially listed on CoinMarketCap. This was even done ahead of schedule but happened purely on the power of the turtlecoin community.

Being listed on CMC will allow users to get a better sense of how the price is performing across the market as well as where they can buy / sell their TRTL. Below we can see a list of the markets and volume that has taken place for TRTL over the past 24 hours.

Given that Turtlecoin is still a relatively small new project that is in development stage, there has not been that much activity in the markets. It seems that the only place that you can really trade TRTL currently is on the TradOgre market.

There is also an option to trade your TRTL on Trade Satoshi but there have been those in the community who have cautioned against this. Another option that has been suggested that is not listed on CMC is the Altex exchange. However, there was no activity on this exchange over the past 24 hours when we checked.

These volumes are not really too surprising given the total market cap of Turtlecoin. Sitting currently at about $600,000, there is not that much value that can be exchanged currently on the various exchanges.

In terms of the TRTL price performance, it has been trending lower over the past month to late August. However, this is probably as a result of the general bearishness that is gripping the cryptocurrency markets.

Turtlecoin Roadmap

Another really good reason to back the Turtlecoin project is because of what they have planned in their roadmap. This is further reinforced with the fact that the Turtlecoin developers have been meeting their previous steps in their roadmap. Let's take a look at what could be on the way:

Karai Smart Contracts

They are currently in the process of developing their Karai smart contracts. This will allow the Turtlecoin network to be used as a platform for the development of distributed applications.

This would allow Turtlecoin to start competing with many of the smart contract blockchains such as Ethereum, NEO and the like. However, given the private nature of the Turtlecoin blockchain, these smart contracts will also be private.

They have stated on their roadmap that this is being done in Q2 of 2018. We hope to get an update from the developers on this over the next few coming weeks.

Mobius Fast Blocks with No Sync

For those users who have run full nodes on other PoW chains, you will know how long syncing and entire chain can take. This is especially true for coins that have faster block times such as Turtlecoin.

Something that the Turtlecoin developers would like to introduce are fast blocks that require no sync. These will be called "Mobius" and will produce faster blocks on a shorter chain. This could greatly reduce the side affects of an unwieldy blockchain.

This is a much larger update than many of the others that have taken place so far so they have not given a timeline for this at the moment.

TurtlePay Network

This is also another really ambitious step in the Turtlecoin roadmap. The team would eventually like to see an entire Turtlecoin payment network that will allow holders to make payments with the coins in their wallets.

It probably also makes sense for a coin such as Turtlecoin to focus on this as a long-term goal. The network already has really fast transaction times and if they are able to implement Mobius, it could aid this goal.

Summary

Turtlecoin could be the ideal project for you to get involved in while it is still in the initial stages. There is more potential for return on investment with a microcap coin than there are with established altcoins.

Moreover, you do not have to hand over tokens in an overhyped crowd sale to be a part of this. All you really need to do is download the mining software and get hashing. The coin is one of the easiest to mine as was the developer’s intention.

Moreover, given the exciting roadmap that the team has ahead for the project, the future prospects also look quite promising. Private smart contracts and no sync blockchains could push the coin towards mass adoption.

In conclusion, if you are willing to spend a bit of time and processing power to acquire Turtlecoin, it could be well worth your while. 

A turtle only moves forward by sticking his neck out.