All good things must come to an end, and the time is approaching when Arscoin , our experimental cryptocurrency, will soon be joining Susan B. Anthony dollars in the great retired currency bank in the sky. It's been a fun experiment—both to set up and to watch—but it has served its purpose.

And what, exactly, was that purpose? Certainly not to create a new form of money invested with actual value; Arscoins have fungibility, but not liquidity (not inherently, anyway). We wanted to explore the actual process of creating a cryptocurrency. Unlike a physical fiat currency like US dollars, which require both expensive means of production and also substantial assurances of value ("the full faith and credit" of the United States government), dashing off a cryptocurrency based on the Bitcoin or Litecoin source code requires essentially no effort or capital investment. We spent more time setting up servers and applications than we did actually doing anything resembling traditional banking.

Value, though, is where you find it. We took steps to keep Arscoin behind a "glass bubble," ensuring that the blockchain remained only on our servers rather than setting it free (which is arguably a fundamental requirement for any "real" cryptocurrency to thrive—that lack of centralized control and massive decentralized transaction verification). Instead of a currency exchange, we set up a store where users could buy hats and colored usernames. "Withdrawing" Arscoins from the system wasn't really possible—you could certainly send them to other Ars users' online wallet addresses, but we didn't make offline wallets available. The only way to turn them into "real" money would be by a physical trade, and even then, Arscoins would only move between online wallets on Ars Technica-controlled servers.

The lack of actual monetary value didn't really seem to matter much—there were hats to be had, and by God, you wanted them. Interested readers brought tremendous amounts of hardware to bear, and we topped out with more than 2,000 separate pool mining workers churning out a bit over 250 million hashes per second. As I write this on Monday morning, things are considerably down from that high—the total pool hash rate is about 11.5 million hashes per second, with 187 pool workers mining.

We learned, too, that cryptocoin mining favors the early entrants. Prior to opening up Arscoin to the public, it was relatively easy to mine a few tens of thousands of coins in a single evening—using only a few CPUs and no GPUs, I mined almost 50,000 coins my first night. However, as with Bitcoin and Litecoin in the real world, the mining difficulty adjusted as people piled on the hashes, and it wasn't uncommon in the days after launch for people to be receiving less than a single Arscoin per day. Unless, of course, you had a dozen high-end AMD GPUs to throw at the problem—or you were willing to drop $100 or so on ten Amazon EC2 GPU compute instances.

The numbers

As of this morning, there has been a total of 1,103,600 Arscoins generated (though several blocks' worth were lost due to pool issues). About 81,600 of those coins are sitting undistributed on the pool server, mined by users who never configured automatic payouts for their wallets.

The Arscoin store has processed a total of 864 purchases—that's everything, counting first-time hat purchases, regretful hat repurchases, and colored usernames. These purchases amounted to a total of 572,565 Arscoins spent at the store.

Altogether, 3,005 users registered accounts on the pool server, and a total of 5,108 pool workers were created and used. The top ten list of users whose miners hashed and identified the largest number of blocks looks like this, when adjusted to remove Ars staff and those with early access to the system:

258 blocks — ronnyzee

252 blocks — jones

198 blocks — ariaxu

177 blocks — manifest23

174 blocks — TeknoKidCoin

142 blocks — epixoip

130 blocks — IceStorm

120 blocks — Leonassan

111 blocks — nottestuser

106 blocks — isahaya

Of course, with Ars staff included, the list looks a little different:

3958 blocks — Ken Fisher

624 blocks — Lee Hutchinson

502 blocks — Jason Marlin

258 blocks — ronnyzee

252 blocks — jones

233 blocks — Matt Ford (Zeotherm)

198 blocks — ariaxu

198 blocks — Andrew Cunningham

177 blocks — manifest23

174 blocks — TeknoKidCoin

Including mining payouts, our little Arscoin network has processed 2,222,562 transactions. Crazily, that number suggests that the majority of Arscoins are still being held by the user community—even the absence of intrinsic value doesn't appear to deter the desire to have something.

The costs

From a perspective of staff-hours spent, Arscoin was a relatively expensive endeavor. We didn't keep track of the exact amount of time we spent on planning, implementation, and writing the whole thing, but it's easily more than 100 hours split between the whole staff.

We also spent real dollars on the Amazon EC2 compute and RDS instances underpinning the store and pool servers. According to Ars tech guru Lee Aylward, our total hosting bill for the experiment was about $600 (roughly 50 percent of which was the RDS database service bill). However, Aylward speculates that we could have reduced our costs significantly by scaling back to a single Medium instance after we figured out our caching problem.

Some users complained about the amount of electricity used in the exercise, both on the server side and also on the client side—"environmental disaster" is an often-used phrase. We've looked at this issue before, and the data can be interpreted in so many different ways that it's absolutely impossible to reach any definitive conclusion about any cryptocurrency mining operation's environmental impact. However, anyone who believes that Arscoin hastened the melting of the polar ice caps or dumped millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere is almost certainly overreacting. Anyone feeling really bad about contributing to Arscoin is welcome to go buy some carbon credits to assuage their guilt.

The end of all things

And so we come around to it at last: Arscoin will cease to be this coming Friday, April 11. At some point that morning, we'll kill the pool server and take the online wallets and store pages offline; at the same time, we'll stop displaying hats and colored usernames in our comments. You don't have to go home... but you can't mine here anymore.