Dutch Crypto story #1
Follow my journey into the world of Crypto mining/trading
As you know bitcoin sky rocked a few weeks back, now it's up to 4000 USD, where a few months ago it was 'only' 800 USD.
Back in the days when bitcoin was getting noticed by the media (I think it was around 2010) I started looking into bitcoin and the mining of bitcoin. As a tech enthusiast I was mainly interested in the technical part of mining the bitcoin.
At that time I did not had the resources or the believe in bitcoin and my PC at that time was just not good enough for anything (browsing it was tho!) I followed it for a bit, mined some bitcoin but did not store the wallet.dat file.. (still regretting it at this day!)
After some time I started getting back into it when a friend of mine said that dogecoin was going to be something big, he is a big reddit fan and a lot of redditors where posting about dogecoin as just a joke. This was 2015 I believe. I had a better PC and mined a lot of dogecoin, even bought some coins! At the time it was not worth much but I earned around 200 USD in dogecoin by mining and trading. At some point I stopped because of the difficulty increase and dogecoin was dropping into a huge dip. I only had around 50 USD worth of dogecoin in a matter of weeks...
Now, 1 month ago dogecoin gained some popularity tho and I sold it all with a little bit of profit. Luckily I had my money back and was trusting the other coins anymore either.
Until, 1 month ago! I was at Disneyland Paris, where my brother told me that the bitcoin price exploded! That a lot of people gained interest in it and were mining it and he asked me why I wasn't mining anything. I started looking into mining and how it is working now a days with bitcoin mining/cloud mining. The system that I have for video editing consisted of:
- i7 6800K @ 4GHZ
- Nvidia GTX 970
At this point I started looking at simple solutions because a lot had changed in the last years. I wanted something that my video editing PC could run when I was not using it. I quickly found about minergate.
I am not going to spent a lot of words about this program/company but lets put it quick and easy: they are scammers...
DO NOT USE MINERGATE OR ANY OTHER RELATED PROGRAM/COMPANY EVER
I started looking into mining with miners found on github that were good at mining XMR coin because for no reason. At this rate tho it was not profitably for me. The electricity bill was higher than what it will earn me. By reading more and more I found out about dual mining and about switching coins and undervolting GPUs and stuff. This was really intensive work and would become a day job if you wanted to do it correctly. I just simply do not have the time to do it or the effort because it would earn me penny's a day. So I was starting to read about cloud mining, where you buy power to mine instead of hardware.
At this point I was almost 3 weeks in to it so lets jump to the present time :)
I quickly found out about NiceHash, which was exactly what I was looking for! I installed the miner because I wanted to learn something before I invest in it.
How nicehash works is, you install their app and you mine for the people that buy hashpower. So basically you are not mining coins for your own but for others and the more you contribute the more bitcoin you earn.
So lets say I earn 2 USD a day in BTC, this could be a bit of a hazard because I am not mining BTC but for example at this moment it's really profitable to mine Zcash, I mean zcash but do not get payed in zcash but in BTC. At this point I am fine with it since I do not believe that BTC will drop anymore but will just keep rising.
Anyway for now, since it's a lot of text ;) I am mining around 2 USD a day which is fine for me, this gives me a little cash to keep pushing and reading more and more. I am starting to get interest in:
- my own GPU rig
- antminers
- cloud mining
In the next few days I will try and optimize nicehash and see what I can do to make it more profitable like overclocking etc. So follow me and lets discover this journey together!
