FAQ

Stock Miner (formerly MineStreet, then HoodMiner; renamed Stock Miner 2026-07-14 — name only, token mechanics/supply/numbers unchanged; token ticker now $MINER, was $TICK; NFT symbol RIG).

Practical questions, answered straight. The numbers all come from Params.sol.

Litepaper · Mechanics · Risks

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Getting started

What is Stock Miner, in one sentence? You buy a Miner NFT tied to a ticker, it earns a pro-rata share of everything flowing through that ticker's pool, and it gets paid in the tokenized stock itself.

What do I need to mint? ETH for the miner (0.01 / 0.025 / 0.05 depending on tier), gas, and 500 $MINER, which is burned. You must hold the $MINER and approve it — the mint reverts if you don't.

Which tier should I buy? We're not going to tell you that. What we'll tell you is the trade: a Whale costs 5x a Penny and carries 7x the hash power, so per ETH it earns more. It also has a $20/day cap against the Penny's $3, and there are only 20 of them per ticker, ever. Whether the scarcity is worth the ticket is a call you make, not one we make for you.

Why is my brand-new miner earning nothing? It's booting. 24 hours at zero hash power. It exists so nobody can front-run a big purchase by minting into the same block and taking a slice of money they didn't help create. It happens once per miner, ever. Buy one on the marketplace and it's already booted — no warm-up at all.

Can I buy as many as I want? On the primary: 5 per tier, per ticker, per wallet. On the marketplace: as many as you can find.

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Earning and claiming

How often should I claim? Daily is the right habit. Your allowance refills continuously and maxes out at one daily cap, so if you leave a miner uncollected for a week you don't accumulate a week of allowance — you accumulate one day's. Claiming more often than daily doesn't earn you more; it just splits the same amount across more gas.

What actually happens if I don't claim for a week? Your rewards keep accruing — you don't lose them. But your allowance to withdraw them is capped at one day's worth, so you can only pull one cap out as a catch-up burst, then wait for the bucket to refill. The earnings aren't gone. They're queued.

So the daily cap takes my money? No. The daily cap delays — reward you couldn't take stays pending and is claimable later. The lifetime cap forfeits — if a claim would take you past your lifetime cap, the excess rolls back into the pool and pays everyone else. Those are different mechanisms and it's worth knowing which is which.

Why is the cap in dollars when I'm paid in stock? The cap is enforced on the ETH value your miner realises, then whatever that is gets converted to the asset. One dollar number caps every miner regardless of what it's paid in. The ETH/USD rate comes from a governance-set registry behind a 48-hour timelock, not a live oracle — so it's a governance-pegged dollar, not a live-market dollar. If a rate goes stale (>7 days), the app flags it, but your claims keep working. We chose availability over freshness deliberately.

What am I actually paid in? GOOGL, TSLA, NVDA, AAPL, MSFT, and AMZN miners are paid in Robinhood tokenized stock tokens. ETH miners are paid in ETH/WETH. HOOD miners are paid in Stock Miner's own HOOD ERC-20 — because there is no Robinhood tokenized stock for HOOD; it doesn't exist. That's a real difference and we're not going to hide it behind a ticker symbol. See risks.md §6.

The stock token is paused. Where's my money? Safe. If the reward asset can't be delivered, the protocol still computes your reward, applies your caps, and credits the ETH to your miner as a deferred, retryable balance. Nothing is destroyed and nothing leaks to anyone else. Retry when it unpauses. In a marketplace settlement, or if governance declares emergency mode on a delisted asset, you can take it as ETH.

Can a paused stock stop me from minting? No. The mint path routes pure ETH and never touches the stock token. That was a deliberate architectural constraint: protocol availability beats payout immediacy.

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Burnout, refurbish, merge

My miner burned out. Is it dead? It stopped earning. It isn't dead. It keeps its (now scorched) art, it's still yours, and it's still tradeable — burned-out miners are collectibles and the marketplace shows their status honestly.

Should I refurbish it? Depends entirely on the pool, and we won't pretend to know. Here's the math you need: refurbishing costs 5,000 / 10,000 / 25,000 $MINER by tier, adds exactly one mint price of new lifetime cap, and brings the miner back at half the efficiency of the last cycle — 50%, then 25%, then 12.5%. Three refurbishes maximum, then it's over for good. A thrice-refurbished Penny Miner is running at one-eighth of a hash and has burned 15,000 $MINER. Do that arithmetic against the pool before you spend.

Is merging a good deal? Merging is a status and supply mechanic, not an edge. Two prime miners become one with 2.0x the tier's hash power (conserved, not created) and the two caps summed with no bonus, for 50,000 $MINER. Your daily cap doesn't go up — a merged Whale is still $20/day — so it takes about twice as long to work through twice the cap.

An earlier version of the parameters gave merged miners a 2.2x hash and 1.1x cap bonus for 15,000 $MINER. Our simulator found that made merging free money and broke the whale scarcity ceiling. We removed the bonus and raised the price. Merge now if you want fewer, rarer, bigger machines. Don't merge looking for alpha; there isn't any.

What can't I merge? Anything refurbished (prime miners only), anything burned out, anything already merged (no re-merging), and anything of a different ticker or tier from its partner.

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Selling

Does my miner stop earning while it's listed? No. Escrowed miners keep earning for you, the seller, right up until they sell. A permissionless crank auto-claims for escrowed listings daily.

What happens to my pending rewards when it sells? This is the one that costs people money, so read it properly:

You get everything claimable under the daily cap at that moment — up to one daily cap's allowance — plus any pause-deferred rewards, paid to you in ETH.

Anything pending beyond that one daily cap rolls back into the ticker pool. It goes to the other miners. It doesn't go to the buyer, it doesn't go to us, and it doesn't come to you.

So what do I do about it? Claim daily, and drain the miner before it sells. The crank does this for escrowed listings, and the amount at risk is at most about one day's accrual — but that's not nothing. The app shows your exact pending and warns you before you confirm. Don't click through the warning.

Why is it built that way? Because if a sale paid out unlimited pending, "list it and sell it to your own second wallet" would be a one-line bypass of the daily cap. The rate limit has to hold on the way out or it doesn't hold at all.

What does the buyer get? A booted machine with no pending rewards and no new warm-up, plus its full history on the card: lifetime earned, cap remaining, refurbish count, burnout status. You cannot quietly sell someone a nearly-dead miner. The provenance is on-chain and in the listing.

What's the fee? 5%, split 40% treasury / 40% $MINER buyback-burn / 20% back into the pool of the ticker you just traded. No royalty on top.

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$MINER and governance

Is $MINER a yield token? No. It's fuel and a vote. Fixed supply of 1,000,000,000, no emissions ever. You burn it to mint (500), to refurbish, and to merge (50,000). You stake it to vote and to get a hash boost.

Doesn't the buyback-and-burn make it deflationary? Not meaningfully, and we'd rather say so than let you assume. Our simulation puts total annual burn between 0.15% and about 3% of supply depending on how the protocol does. It's a utility sink, not a deflation engine. Anyone selling you the burn as a price thesis is selling you something.

What does staking get me? A vote (at 10,000 $MINER), the right to propose (at 250,000), and +5% hash power on all your miners while staked. The boost requires the same 10,000 $MINER minimum — below that, staking does nothing for your hash. Unstaking has a 7-day cooldown.

What can governance actually do? Vote a pre-IPO ticker live. That's it. Proposals can only ever promote a ticker from the pre-approved list (COIN, SPY, BTC). This is parameter governance, not open governance — there is no proposal shape that drains the treasury, because we never wrote one. 5-day vote, 4% quorum, 48-hour timelock.

Is the sqrt voting gameable? Yes, and we say so on the tin. Splitting a stake across N wallets, each above the 10,000 threshold, multiplies your voting power by roughly √N. That's inherent to quadratic voting without an identity layer, which we don't have. What contains it: the per-wallet floor costs real money, and the worst thing a successful attack achieves is listing a ticker earlier than the community wanted. Full disclosure in mechanics.md §7.

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Events

What actually happens during Earnings Week? The ticker's vault drip doubles from 1%/day to 2%/day for up to 7 days. That's it. It is not a hash-power multiplier — multiplying everyone's hash in a pool equally changes nobody's share of it, and we weren't going to ship a number that does nothing. The vault funds it out of its own holdings, which means it draws the vault down faster. Real money, from a place we'll name.

Dividend Day? A one-off bonus drip of up to 5% of a ticker's vault into its pool. Capped at 5% in the controller and capped again independently inside the vault, so a compromised controller can't drain a vault.

After-Hours? A top-up into pools paid from the treasury's Growth bucket. New money from the treasury, not a reshuffle of yours.

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The uncomfortable ones

Is this a Ponzi? It's a negative-sum redistribution game with a disclosed house edge and one real external asset in the vault. Most of what you earn is other buyers' money — our own simulation says 53–60% of a day-one buyer's earnings come directly from later buyers' mints. We published that simulation rather than bury it. The vault holding real tokenized stock is genuine exogenous exposure, and it is not big enough to change the sentence. Call it what you think it is; we've given you the numbers to decide with.

Will I make money? We will never answer that question, in any venue, in any form. Not because we're being coy — because we don't know, and anyone who tells you they do is lying to you. What we can tell you is what our own model found: the average buyer sees about 0.82x of their mint price back over a year, early cohorts do well, and the bottom decile of late buyers earned 0.15x–0.19x in every scenario we ran, including the good ones. Read the risk page. It's the most important thing we've written.

Am I really getting a share of Alphabet? No. Robinhood's stock tokens are SPV-backed derivatives, not shares. No shareholder rights, no vote, no direct claim on the company. The issuer can pause transfers, block addresses, burn tokens from any holder, and rebase balances on corporate actions. Details in risks.md §6.

Has this been audited? Internally, yes — across every phase, with findings fixed and re-tested. Externally, not yet. An independent external audit is pending and we are not going to use the word "audited" without that qualifier attached.

Can I use this from the US or UK? No. Not available to U.S. persons or U.K. residents. The frontend geo-fences.

Where do I check that you're telling the truth? contracts/src/config/Params.sol holds every economic constant in the protocol, and no other contract is permitted to hard-code one. The tokenomics report is published unedited, red flags and all. Every event, split, and treasury movement emits on-chain and appears in the app's public log. If the docs and the chain ever disagree, the chain is right and we have a bug — come tell us.