Tag Archives: Dash

A Personal Rant on Trading Bitcoin

Posted by mysticstache on

I would say the summary of my trading practices thus far can be summed up into, “I’m an idiot.”

It’s up. it’s down. Oh, my gosh I could have made $10k. Oh, no I’ve lost $300. Ack! What does everyone else think?… Just an average day in a Cryptocurrency trader’s life. But not for the above average trader’s life. Much of the same advice you’d get from a financial planner is applies to Bitcoin and other currencies.

Research the Company

Who are the developers of the Currency you’re thinking about buying? Who are their investors? Have they successfully launched a currency before? Have previous projects they worked on failed in a spectacular fashion?

There are a lot of motivations for attempting to create a new Altcoin. Notoriety, solving social or economic problems, or greed are some of the most popular themes of Cryptocurrency. Following the successes or failures of a development team will guide you in figuring out what motivates them. Don’t get stuck into thinking greed is bad motive. Several self-interested projects made a lot of money for the development team and early investors who knew when to sell.

Research the Product

The development teams are going to market their Cryptocurrency to garner investment interest, adoption, and higher trading prices. That makes it easy to find information like what problems are they trying to solve or new Blockchain technology are they trying to introduce? Are they trying to bring a solution to Apple products or Mobile devices where others aren’t?

Invest for the Long Term

If you’re full time job is staring at charts and day trading, you can still do that with cryptocurrencies. You just need to adjust to the increased volatility. By Volatility I mean 40% up or down in a day… 30 minutes even. But if your trading on the intraday bumps you might find a higher portion of your profits going to fees and splits. So, I say invest for the long term. If I had followed the advice in these sections, I’d have a lot more disposable income.

Personal Stories

I met a guy while working at Dell that told me a story of the $300,000 240 MB Hard drive he bought. Yes, MB. Well he cashed in some of his employee purchase plan stock for a new hard drive when the stock wasn’t worth all that much. At the time of telling me the story the Hard Drive was worthless and the amount of stock he sold for it was worth $300,000. Oh, how we laughed. And now I’ll relate for you the story of the guy who bought a pizza with Bitcoin when it was worth pennies and now that Bitcoin would be worth Millions. You’d think I’d learn from others, but I too have purchased a $700 tablet for $4,000 worth of Bitcoin at today’s prices.

But I think more disappointing are opportunities I missed due to fear.

Stratis is an Altcoin someone pointed out to me in December of 2016. The price was under $0.05. I thought well let’s wait and see what happens. The interesting thing about Stratis is the development team’s partnership with Microsoft and building their platform on the .NET framework. This means that the products a developer would write to interact with their Blockchain technology can run natively on Windows Operating Systems without a lot of additional translation code or “wrapper” code. The price went up to something over $0.07 and I said, “Ok I’ll buy some.” And invested $300. I woke up one morning a few weeks later and the price is over $0.30, and has been hovering between $0.40 and $0.50 the last two weeks. The currency had a lot of earmarks of something I thought was a good investment, and I kick myself for not putting in $1500 or more at the $0.07 price.

DASH, which was launched as Dark Coin, I used to mine. The name Dark Coin certainly sounded cool to the kids and it was marketed as the first truly anonymous currency because the network had the function called mixing where your bitcoin cold be split up and mixed with fractions from other Dark Coin on the network without additional entries in the blockchain thus removing the traceability of the transactions. When fintech investing in Blockchain technologies started becoming serious business they grew up and changed the name to DASH. I had mined 8 DARK when I had a hard drive failure and said well I won’t both with that currency any more. At that time, Dash was only worth around $1.00, so I was out maybe $10. At the same time Stratis had its big jump DASH goes to $100 and has stated above $50. Now why didn’t I keep mining when the difficulty was low and amass a vast fortune? I was able to restore my Dark Wallet from a backup and retrieve my 8+ DASH, but I could have had 100 over the course of that year.

Check out the stellar raise of PIVX. I looked at it when it was less than $0.03. It’s trading at $1.38 today… $1,500.00 would be worth over $100,000, and it happened extremely fast.

Stay tuned!

Wikipedia – Bitcoin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Bitcoin Forum – The most popular place to discuss all Cryptocurrencies

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php

Cryptocurrency Trading Charts

https://coinmarketcap.com/

Most Profitable Mining Calculations

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

Some Exchanges

https://poloniex.com/

https://btc-e.com/

https://www.gdax.com/

https://www.bittrex.com/

 

 

 

 

 

Cryptocurrency Mining Software and Pools

Posted by mysticstache on

In “Mining Cryptocurrencies” I wrote briefly about CPU, GPU and ASIC mining. All of these mining methods require software to get work (the complicated math problem) from the Cryptocurrency’s network and send it to the hardware to calculate.

Also, note there are several different kinds of math problems currencies use related to their protocol. I won’t go into a lot of detail, first because I’m not a math wiz, second because I could devote several posts to one protocol and there are several, but most importantly because that’s not the approach I’m taking in my blog. I’m here to help someone who doesn’t need to know every last tiny nuance of every Cryptocurrency to get started.

I will however list some Currency and Protocol pairs. Bitcoin uses SHA-256, Litecoin and DNote use scrypt, Dash (which used to be Dark Coin) uses X11, Ethereum uses Ethash, and ZCash uses Equihash. If you’ve taken my advice in previous posts you’ve checked out http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency and know you know what some of the items on that page are.

Going back to mining software… As I stated above, the hardware performs the math, but software is required to gather the math and send it to the hardware. That means a device is required to communicate with the hardware. In the case of CPUs, GPUs this usually means a computer with a hard disk to install the software. The first versions of ASIC miners were USB devices for computers and the software would detect them to send work to them. Standalone ASIC devices still have a CPU,  network interface and software, but these software is flashed to a chip or written to an SD card plugged into an integrated computer like a Raspberry Pi.

Nearly all mining software is available for free from Github.com. Start by either going to a mining pool or the coin’s community page to find links and instructions. Standalone ASIC miners have their own software. Upgrades are usually available from the manufacturer.

In most cases the software only provides mining for one protocol. That’s not always the case, some developers have created software that can receive a command from a pool that mines multiple pools to switch which currency the software is mining.

Mining software is almost exclusively written in C++. Which doesn’t mean a lot to many people. But it allows for two main advantages. First the software can be easily put together for multiple OS, Linux and Windows being the most popular. Secondly the software is modular, or it can be broken up into pieces.  Developers can take a miner currently available on Github for one currency and replace the parts they need for another currency and thus all the existing support for GPUs and OS come along for the ride. Likewise, if a new family of video cards is released it’s easy to add a new piece of code to support those cards. When you’re looking for mining software make to you download the right package for your operating system and your video card family (Windows/Nvidia or Linux/AMD etc.) Some software packages have both video card families available in each OS package, but you’ll find from reading through reviews that one software might work better with your hardware than another.

There is scant little mining software for Apple products. Mostly because Apple sucks. Yeah I said it. But also, because you can’t add and upgrade the Video cards for GPU mining and Apple locks down what software is made available to their systems. I guess the company is scared mining software might over heat the CPU.

As a funny side note, my son was actually trying to mine Litecoin on some of our old Android phones. He had to place them under box fans to keep them from over heating and in the end he never made enough to = $0.01, but the price of Litecoin is on the rise again so who knows.

Solo vs. Pool

I introduced a new term “pool” above, so now is a good time to talk about solo vs. pool mining. Solo mining means you use your hardware to mine blocks directly on the block chain. This can be profitable for the first 10 minutes a new currency network is up. Once the currency becomes popular and there is always a handful of miners who seem to have invested $1 billion in hardware to have the best Hash Rate, it’s time to find a pool.

Pool mining means miners pool their Hash Rates, or combine their work. The Pool itself gets the block reward and divides it among its member miners per the amount of work each contributed to finding the block. There are several different methods of determining how much each miner gets of the reward, but in general the miner who does the most work get the highest percentage. One of the bits of information you’ll get from Coinwarz.com is how much currency you should generate a day. Keep in mind that with Solo mining you only receive a reward when you find the block, but then you get the whole reward. You may not actually get that reward for several weeks… months? in the case of Bitcoin, unless you have spent $1 billion in your mining farm you will not see a reward ever. However, with pool mining, because you earn some of the reward every time a block is found, you should see your balance growing at the rate Coinwarz.com has calculated for you.

In the early days when most Bitcoin enthusiasts were altruistic and rebels against the world, all the software was open source and the pools were free. That’s not 100% the case anymore. Some of the best mining software for Altcoins has a DevFee built-in. For some part of your mining day the software will disconnect from your pool and connect to the developer’s pool and account and mine for them to reimburse them for the time they spent developing the awesome software you’re using. Likewise, mining pools almost universally charge a fee, 1 or 2% of your earnings to pay for the upkeep, fees and maintenance of the servers you’re using.

Up next a look at networks and wallets.

Stay tuned!

Wikipedia – Bitcoin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Bitcoin Forum – The most popular place to discuss all Cryptocurrencies

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php

Cryptocurrency Trading Charts

https://coinmarketcap.com/

Most Profitable Mining Calculations

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

Some Exchanges

https://poloniex.com/

https://btc-e.com/

https://www.gdax.com/

https://www.bittrex.com/