My Bitcoin Mining Experience

COINCUBE - automatic trading platform What is COINCUBE ? COINCUBE is an automatic trading platform for bitcoin. It uses your chosen API ( coinbase , bitfinex ) for an exchange to use your bitcoin to grow your investment. They use an algorithm called WAVE to trade bitcoins into and out of whatever currency you choose (USD, EUROS, etc.). They charge either a flat rate or a performance based rate, performance based rates make more sense because then you only pay if you make money. Security How  COINCUBE  works allows you to have all your holdings in your own account. For instance, I use the Bitfinex  exchange in my "CUBE". All the bitcoin I'm using with the platform sits in the exchange account of your choosing, meaning you have control to take your bitcoin whenever you'd like. They also have 2 factor authentication on your account if you choose (which i always recommend), it's a solid step to a more secure platform and even if they get through that, the ...

Forget the heat, lets mine in the snow So, I've been mining inside for about a year, normally with one or two pieces of hardware. I lived in a one room apartment then, so the heat and noise was a bit crazy. Luckily I live in a proper several room flat with a fairly large balcony, which will now be the new stage for my small mining farm. What's involved So all that's really involved is as follows: 1 x large rubbermaid storage unit 2 x 6 inch vents 2 x 4 inch vents 1 x 6 inch blower fane 1 x 4 inch blower fan 2 x 3 slot extension cords 1 x router 3 x ethernet cords 1 x piece of cardboard for a divider 3 x miner PSU 3 x Antminer S5 Here's a little video of the rig that I have set up: So now you should have an idea of exactly how it's set up. There's many ways to build an outdoor unit like this, but this was just my vision. I just wanted to go through some of the reasoning behind how its set up, to help educate some of your decisio...

Overview Recently I picked up a Antminer S5 from the great folks over at BitcoinWare . The unit works fantastic at the rated 1155GH/s at factory settings. The unit really has a simple set up, and are basically plug and play. Specs: Hash Rate: 1155 GH/s ±5%  Power Consumption: 590 W (at the wall)   Power Efficiency: 0.51 J/GH (at the wall)   Rated Voltage: 12V   Dimensions: 298 mm x 137 mm x 155 mm   Cooling: 1x 12038 fan   Operating Conditions: 0 °C to 35 °C   Certified By: FCC / CE   Network Connection: Ethernet   Hardware Setup What you need: Power cord Ethernet cord PSU (power supply unit)  I purchased a PSU  ( 900/1200W PSU ) and the Antminer S5 from  BitcoinWare , so the only bit I needed to have was an Ethernet cord ready.  Plug the 4 PCI-E plugs from the PSU into the miner, grab your ethernet cord and plug it into the front (side with fan), then just plug the PSU into the wall and...

I didn't get any scrypt miners until recent, and I know these have been around for a while, but they yield some pretty serious bitcoin. So I'm currently running 2 13MH/s Black Widows, and getting in and around 0.01BTC/day. They are a fairly noisy unit, but I've found that purchasing fairly mid-grad computer fan, and subbing it in for the factory fan, reduces noise massively and also doesn't result in heat issues (take this with a grain of salt, make sure you do get the appropriate fan for the unit, size, and speed). A good suggestion also, for running units like this is to get a high efficiency PSU to help reduce heat in the wires, as well as noise of the PSU. I'm running a 1300 Watt EVGA PSU with no issues, powering both of my units. CleverMining I've set my pool up with CleverMining because of their profitability and auto conversion into BTC. Now, before people hate on multipools because it essentially can end up increasing sell pressure, I'm ...

Article from:  CoinDesk A long-anticipated report published by the Canadian Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce has called for a "regulatory light touch" on bitcoin and digital currencies. The report, entitled  "Digital Currency: You Can't Flip This Coin!" , comes after a  months-long review  that included a number of  hearings  before the Senate committee, and will undoubtedly play a role in how the Canadian government shapes future regulation. The committee recommended that the government look for ways to utilize digital currencies and blockchain technology, deeming the technology "ingenious" and capable of potentially meeting critical needs in both the financial sector and the unbanked in the world. The report stated: "The federal government [should], in considering any legislation, regulation and policies, create an environment that fosters innovation for digital currencies and their associat...

People coming into this community may have a bit of a disconnect from bitcoin to "real currency", in other worlds, our conventional currency system that's already set in place compared to this new more streamlined process. Now let's bring these two into prospective. Modern Banking Banking with local currencies (CAD for me), has made leaps and bounds as far as upgrading into a more digital environment. With features like email money transfers and online transactions between your personal accounts, there has been some serious movement in the online banking space. This being considered, the time from start to finish from an email transfer, it takes a good deal of time to send any amount of money. There's also the issue with having to deal with a very inefficient system to do any complicated service like opening an account. Cryptocurrency Now enter, crypto (specifically bitcoin). You can create a wallet (or "bank") in less than a minut...

Overview This article will be about the basics of bitcoin mining for finding a bitcoin miner and understanding some of the concepts that differ from miner to miner. Hashrate Hashrate is a pretty simple concept. It is literally how many hashes the miner can complete per second. In modern bitcoin miners you'll be seeing a lot of stats like 100 GH/s or 1 TH/s. It's still a hashrate, but at a much higher speed. For instance, 100 GH/s is actually 100,000,000 hashes per second. Examples: 1 kH/s is 1,000 hashes per second (sometimes mistakenly written KH/s). 1 MH/s is 1,000,000 hashes per second. 1 GH/s is 1,000,000,000 hashes per second. 1 TH/s is 1,000,000,000,000 hashes per second. 1 PH/s is 1,000,000,000,000,000 hashes per second. Power Consumption Before looking for a miner, I strongly recommend you test or look up (as long as your home/flat is up to code) the wattage of your wall outlets. Each miner has a different consumption as well as effici...

If you've read some or any of my posts, you know that I like bitcoin and cryptocurrencies for what they are capable of and the concepts behind them. I'd love to see them dominate trades in the real world and squeeze out country regulated money, but as I say this I'm reluctant to think that will actually happen. Bitcoin has some of the greatest people I've met, but also a large amount of scum and scammers. If we want the currency( or currencies) to go anywhere, and truly become the first universal, multi-nation currency, how can our base-line of users be garbage. In the bitcoin community I rarely trust any one company or person (with the exception of Bitmain and GAW perhaps). The community that runs these scams and ponzi's and what not, are in my opinion, shattering the strength of the community as well as the want for any new comers to join the community. I believe that this technology is in a playground phase, we're aware of it's potential but we...

Today I'll be giving a bit of a look into BTC-Flow . It's a game based bitcoin faucet that has me pretty into it. No more of the jumping from site to site clicking your way through pop ups and other fun activities. The concept of the game is that you run a  company. At first, your company mines bitcoin and has a earning rate of 0.0000015 BTC/Min and your max capacity is 0.000012 BTC. Your part in running this company is getting the bitcoin from your company either before or after your max capacity is hit. You then need to click once your bitcoin capacity is reached to put that balance into your main bank. From here you basically repeat this as much as you'd like. If you really enjoy this, you can "level" your business with bitcoin to increase capacity and earning/min at any point. If you like faucets, you need to check this out . BTC-Flow.com

Overview This is for the Antminer S3 , mine are batch 11. So to get started, the units are very nicely made from my experience, and actually not too bad to get started with. You're going to need your miner, a PSU (power supply unit, like the one in your PC) and an Ethernet cord. S3+ Specifications: Hash Rate: 453 GH/s±5% with great OC potential   Power Consumption: 355 Watt at the wall    Power Efficiency: 0.78J/GH on wall   Power Supply: 12V DC Size:  331 mm x 137 mm x 160 mm  Fans: Two 14038 fans mounted on both front and back ends   Operating Temperature: 0 °C to 35 °C   Complied with: FCC / CE Network Connection: Ethernet   Power consumption: This figure depends on the PSU efficiency, ambient temperature and the accuracy of the power meters. Step One: Network Let's prepare your network. You need to have your routers IP address to look something like 192.168.1.X. The x can be reall...

OneWallet, The Bitcoin Market Place Everyone has heard of, and likely used Ebay, or Ebay adjacent sites. They generally are online auction sites that sell in a variety of currencies, primarily in GBP, CAD, and USD. OneWallet takes the concept of online auction sites, and made a version exclusive for Bitcoin. Simple Sign up process and a nice design. This platform will definitely help those in the bitcoin community purchase goods with bitcoin, and mitigates that need to convert bitcoin to their local currency. Landing Page OneWallet has all the pieces needed for a well functioning auction platform. Honestly, my favourite part of the home home page is where it says "BUYER PROTECTION" at the bottom. If you've been around the community for almost any amount of time at all, likely you've been scammed or at least someone tried to scam you AT LEAST once. These protections will ensure that the customers will feel safe with the platform and help it grow a...

Coinbase Is Great If you're a vet to the bitcoin and crypto currency world, you've very likely heard of a little company called Coinbase (my personal wallet of choice). I stumbled across a incubator called Y Combinator , this company had incubated Coinbase into the bitcoin wallet-ing behemoth that it is today. Y Combinator  puts $120,000 into tech startups and they help incubate (mentor and such) them to ensure they grow large. Now, why give out this money, just the goodness of their generous hearts? No, not so much. This company takes a % equity in each business they incubate, from 5-10%. If you visit their site, you can see all the huge companies they's worked on, owning a fair stake in each one. To bring this into perspective, they own 10% of Reddit and Twitch, Twitch was acquired by google. What i'm trying to say here, the incubation of coinbase by this company is a really big deal, and it gives me (and hopefully you) huge hope for the crypto-curr...

Money Transfers A big reason is money transfers. Look at any comparable money transfer site, or even your banks fee chart/table. For a much smaller fee I guarantee you transferring money as bitcoin is no where close to the fee that you're currently paying. If you've never tired this, please do, save some money, and support bitcoin in tandem with your local currency. Think of using bitcoin similar to using e-transfer from one bank to another to bring it into terms of everyday people and bank users, it's not so complicated. Merchant / Company Adoption Just as you might think, companies and businesses have began accepting and using bitcoin day to day, this means the customers are able to pay with bitcoin. When customers gain the ability to pay with bitcoin it becomes more of a priority to pay with it as opposed to USD or any other local currency.  Some large scale companies that have started their acceptance of bitcoin are Amazon, Newegg, and TigerDirect. Ke...

Bitcoin nodes are in essence computers that check and keep up to date on bitcoin transactions. A node helps process and confirm transactions in the bitcoin network, which theoretically, means the more nodes in the network the quicker your transactions get confirmed. To do this is actually very simple! Download bitcoin core Install it Allow it to update (This may take some time, so please be patient) Open port 8333 in your router/modem settings While you wait for your install to update the entire blockchain, go ahead and go into your router settings to open up the port. This can take a minute if you're not very tech savvy. Try going to  http://192.168.0.1/ , this should bring you to your router, try logging in (generic credentials user:admin password:admin). Once you're in you should be able to navigate to something along the lines of "Forwarding" and then you should need to add a new port to allow. Add port 8333, for all protocols and that's it! ...

Overview So, you may be thinking "Hey, I've got a some bitcoin. I need to sell them for USD(or other currencies) to buy everyday things like groceries." Here's how I do it. So, at the current moment it's a transfer rate of around $300/bitcoin, not a very good rate. However, this is the process that I go through, not very complicated. Cryptsy This beautiful trading platform is great, if you don't have an account with them. Make one. Make sure you use Authy or something with all accounts relating to your money, it's worth your time. Add Bitcoin to Cryptsy Account Once logged on, go to your balances page, and select the bitcoin link. A little popout window will give you some options, select deposit, generate address and then send your bitcoins into that address. Make sure you give about an hour or so, so it can confirm with the network. Sell Bitcoins Now, you've got your money right where you want it. Go to the markets on the ...

HASHNEST is a cloud mining service in the same realms of ZenMiner Cloud. It encompasses some capabilities of both CEX.io and ZenMiner, where ZenMiner has good ROI's and CEX.io allows you to basically resell the cloud hashing power that you previously purchased. When you aquire hashing power, you of course need to pay a maintenance fee, but HASHNEST does a nice thing where it equates what percentage of your earnings are actually put into the fees. For instance, per GH,  37.42% of your profit goes into maintenance fees (electricity, internet, and repairs). Purchase page for mining farm hash rate HASHNEST doesn't allow the resale of this hashing power but if you purchase hasing power from "mining rigs", you can resell it if you no longer feel that the miner is being profitable enough for you. They also support scrypt mining hardware, that mine, and can be purchased with litecoin. Both SHA-256 and Scrypt algorithm hardwares have varying mainten...

What is BTCJam? BTCJam is a bitcoin investment and micro lending platform. You can either submit for a loan at a payment type and percentage that you choose, or you can browse loans and invest if you have some bitcoin in your wallet. The site is well put together and very easy to get started. How/why invest? Investing is great if you don't plan to spend your bitcoin any time soon, I like to think of it as "let it ride". When investing you can choose an investment and then invest however much you'd like, there's no minimum "buy in" to invest. How to get a loan? Investing is pretty straight forward, getting a loan however takes a bit of foot work. To get the service to allow you to post your loan you need to verify a good deal of personal information. For instance to get the bare minimum rating (alphabetic rating, like back in grade-school) to get a loan you'll need to verify your identity as well as your address. Now this is...

To start... What is ZenMiner To give a rundown of what ZenMiner cloud hosting is, it's basically a service that will host your mining rig for a cost per day. There are promotional deals at stores like  GAWMiners  where I got a 27MH/S scrypt machine with a free month of hosting by ZenMiner. Once I don't want them to host my machine anymore, i notify them and then they send it out to me with free shipping. Payouts Payouts are daily and are obviously based on your hashing speed as well as the pool you choose. Pools As a scrypt miner you have the option of choosing between COINKING, CleverMining, Multipool.us, NiceHash, and WafflePool. Now obviously these are multipools because the payouts are in Bitcoins but each one varies in payouts. If you see the "Miners" image above you can see it estimates what your miner will output per 24hours on the pool you selected based on previous payouts on similar miners. You can select these pools on the fly instantly, so ...

CleverMining is basically a multicoin pool that trades all mined coins into bitcoins. The payouts vary from day to day due to exchange rates of both bitcoins, and the mined altcoins. It has great statistics to back it up as well as data while you mine that keeps you informed on everything about your miner, and even the averages of rejected shares so you can see if you're miners are being efficient. So far i've made over 0.004btc in a few days with a rig under 2Mh/s. These margins are pretty good even for multipool algorithms. It covers all the work and then payouts daily when you reach a certain amount of btc. The interface is simple and appealing, and quick to setup. If you're looking for a great way to profit off your scrypt mining id have to reccomend CleverMining

A follow up to a previous blog about PB Mining from last week. I recieved my first payout from my 100GH/s contract last night and it came up to 0.01557916 BTC. Technically it ran for about 3 days (give or take a couple hours). So let's do a little estimation, if that was my payout after 3 days; let's say my average weekly payout at this difficulty is approximately 0.0363513733331 BTC. Any calculation with bitcoin mining is subject to a lot of variation because of "pool luck", but this is just an estimate.   Last week I speculated the yield of a 100GH/s contract with a profitability calculator to be 0.0336 BTC per payout (once a week). It could be that my pool luck was just high during this period of mining, or the rate that i'm receiving is a little but higher than the GH/s contract that I've purchased. So far the PB Mining contract has been an interesting side project. More updates to come on the progress and payouts of the contract as mining difficult...