My Bitcoin Mining Experience

A lot of Bitcoin users love the currency, but if you need to use some of it in the real world, there are generally speaking a ton of hoops, as well as long wait times. For instance, a normal workflow would be: Transfer Bitcoin to exchange Exchange Bitcoin to local currency (USD, CAD, etc) Wire the currency to a third party service Transfer to bank So there is a lot of room for improvement here. Bitcoin Debit Card You've likely heard of these, especially if you've been in cryptocurrency for a while but they are actually pretty great to have. I use WageCan  and haven't had one bad experience so far. I want to outline the positives and negatives of these kinds of services (but specifically WageCan ). Pros Use your bitcoin for everyday purchases. Withdraw money from ATMs. Bitcoin you leave in your wallet earns 0.009% interest every day. Cheap debit card Cons Transaction fees Depending on the card you may need to wait a short period...

I don't pretend to be a journalist, or to be really a good blogger in general, however there is something to be said about Coinfire.io . I've read a good few articles from Coinfire.io , and they have been what I would consider very poor journalism. I'm only going to target maybe 1 or 2 articles, because I don't have all day. Now, I'm not an associate of GAW , PayCoin, PayBase, or pay-whatever but there is something to be said about their kind of journalism and specifically about their posts about GAW and their platforms. Now, I will admit that there has been a good deal of miss steps and issues with GAW's announcements, however the posts on Coinfire.io seem to be more of attacks rather than reports. If you have read some of their articles regarding GAW (thinking back to the SEC investigation), I would recommend you give it a read to see what I'm referring to. This community and industry is already riddled with terrible companies and scams, but we w...

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

Paybase, the Paycoin platform for the use, purchase, and selling of XPY. Recently, the launch of GAW's Honor Program was to be released on Feb 1st, 2015. However, this was set back by an amount of time TBD (which i hope is disclosed sometime in the near future). GAW has made no statements about the completion of the launch for this program as of yet, and has a lot of users, even long time customers are selling off and quitting on GAW. I personally have had to sell off about 300XPY to make good on some of my investors, however i still hold over 200 XPY on the off chance that the launch happens in the near future and the $20 floor is upheld. The running price of 1 XPY is approximately $1.06 at the time of writing this. I'm not sure how this floor will be upheld, or the time frame they're shooting for to have this accomplished. Hashbase, the zenminer platform with a new face has had no update for a good deal of time. Many members have questioned GAW / Josh Garza with ...

PayBase is the platform launched by GAW,  a platform that is created for transactions and services with XPY(PayCoin - the coin developed by GAW). XPY, The Coin I just want to take a moment to address XPY as a coin. I think what GAW is trying to do with their coin is an excellent concept, brining it to mainstream consumers. One way they said this can be done is the spending it at large online merchants which is a good start. One of the reasons they thought brining crypto to the masses is building the XPY floor. What they mean by floor is the minimum price of their coin (stated to be $20 USD), making it's volatility very little, or non-existent. GAW has dropped the ball for keeping the floor, the coin being averagely around $3 USD. I'm not saying that it will never get to the level,  however, i don't think anytime soon. Current Features Currently, PayBase allows users to store their XPY(PayCoin) in PayBase , and buy/sell XPY. It has an internal market tha...

Slush pool has a nice open beta web client that is so much better than the old one, it's mind blowing. It has new charts that give you good insight into hardware performance and up time, as well as a good log of your payouts, and block rewards. They have implemented a rewards system called the scoring hashrate. Dashboard Scoring Hashrate User participation to pool's mining power is measured by  scoring hash rate . It reflects how much work the user did in recent hours. You can understand scoring hash rate as an  exponential moving average  from hash rate of all user mining devices connected to the pool (see   EMA on wikipedia ). The averaging smooths out short hash rate drops or increases and makes rewards calculation more stable and fair (the exact mathematical definition is provided lower). For example, if your scoring hash rate is 1% of the whole pool, you receive 1% of the block rewards. If you own 0.031% of hash rate, you receive 0.031%...

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...

Hashie.co is release an upcoming update with their new feature of Miner Mods . Unfortunately there haven't been any specifics mentioned as of yet. I can only speculate that they may involve functionality similar (but different) to companies like Zeus or GAW. I have a feeling they will act as "boosts" such as hash-speed boosts, or maybe something like GAW's double dip. When this update is released, I'll be tweeting it out with a new blog post on all the details of what features are actually added onto Hashie .

Buy Low - Sell High Everyone knows this basic principle to make some money at investment. This can be used in the stock-market and the like, but also a fantastic principle to keep in mind when dealing with bitcoin. Bitcoin has massive volatility like stocks do, but keep this in mind not when you are buying and selling bitcoin, but buying and selling THINGS with bitcoin. I use this principle when I purchase cloud hash power for instance, let's have an example. If I have a large sum of bitcoin, let's say 4 BTC, and I want to buy cloud-mining from Hashie.co . They sell at a rate of $4.90/ 10GH. @ Bitcoin price of $350: 4 BTC X $350 = $1400 You can purchase 2857 GH/s @ Bitcoin price of $400: 4 BTC X $400 = $1600 You can purchase 3265 GH/s Now, with the above example you can see a large difference in the amount you can purchase (You already knew that) but when you can resell this hashpower when you're made enough, you can sell them at the low...

This post may be a bit of a rant. So as many of you know, the bombshell that zeusminer was no longer providing new hardware to it's customers, and instead is converting everything to cloud mining thing... Well, it got me fired up. I'm sure there was a reason (hopefully not what I believe to be unbelievable greed), but a pre-order customer has to feel shafted. I love this community and this is, in my opinion, on the same level as that KNC garbage that was pulled a short while ago. If you're a normal reader of this blog, you know I'm a fan of cloud mining. Great service to have, and competition in the market place helps the cloud miners get a  competitive  deal on hashpower. THIS BEING SAID. Enough is enough, if you're a miner looking to get some hardware for home on at least a moderate level, it's impossible. The only company that I still trust in the mining community for hardware is the rocket-surgeons over at Bitmain . Bitmain lau...

GAW released some information and their White Paper for their coin code named " HashCoin ". They're developing a new platform that encompass Zencloud and Hashtalk called "HashBase", and with this large development process, this coin is just another brain child that GAW is pursuing. The basis of the coin is to become in my opinion a less volatile bitcoin, that is widely accepted by merchants. Now, obviously, to do this they are going to need serious merchant adoption and for merchants to adopt, I think they're going to need to see that it's not volatile first hand. I see issues with it, but they are a good and very well off company, so I'm sure they've thought through the problems with their strategy. If you're interested in the specifics, please check both GAW's site  and a release of the information from and Cryptocoin News . This coin seems like it's going the route of more institutionalized currency, like USD or CAD (...