Best Of

I'm going to hijack your thread a little bit, @primesuspect (although I prefer to think of it as augmentation):

I purchased two of @Thrax 's vidja cards a while back to put into an ethereum miner that I built out of a milk carton and some plywood. It was a fairly difficult project (mostly just getting ubuntu to recognize the video cards), but I'm happy I did it. While I had previously purchased BTC for $, this was my first attempt at a crypto miner, and I learned a ton. Would definitely suggest. I find myself understanding a lot more about crypto and being far less scared to trade, plus, to me it's still all 'fun money.' I don't have the drive to 'make a good investment' that I had when originally purchasing BTC with $.

The miner is now mining ZEC, which I then turn around and trade for BTC, ETH, and Siacoin. At this point, the miner has paid for itself and is pure profit - although that took a solid few months, more than I expected. I also have the added benefit of being allowed to run the miner at work, as we pay for power by the circuit as opposed to by the kWh.

At the time, our landlord also was looking to get rid of some Antminer S7s, so I picked those up from him. Although they don't mine very quickly, I found myself making a couple hundred bucks every few weeks. Nothing to sneer at.

Worth pausing to discuss our landlord - he runs a MASSIVE mining rig out of his side of the datacenter. It stands taller than a man, and is just a nightmare conglomerate of GPUs. I'm not sure what he mines, at the moment.

About a month later, I managed to purchase an Antminer S9 straight from Bitmain. This constituted a fairly sizable investment for a pure hobbyist, so there was definitely a little unpleasant feeling that I had to get over. However, I consoled myself with the knowledge that the S9 was going through third party channels for three times the price I was paying, so while the worst case scenario was 'lose all your money,' the second worst case scenario was 'get the miner and sell it for three times the price you bought.' I figured I could take that risk.

I have had the S9 running since... what, September? And even with the 'bitcoin crash' recently, I have made six times my money back. Again, though, remember that I am being granted free power, and this is liable to change at any time.

Fairly recently (as alluded above), I began trading BTC, ETH, ZEC, and SC back and forth using Shapeshift. During this most recent 'crash,' I have managed to 'save' 3% - including all the fees of trading (which are infinitesimal compared to trading stocks). So, I'm no genius or anything... but I am struck with how EASY it is to get going. I keep a google spreadsheet of all my transactions, all the money I've lost to fees, all the money I've gained/sheltered (already counting the loss from fees), and how much each transaction netted/lost.

My total investment was something approaching $2000 - the etherum miner was $600, and the Antminer S9 was ~$1200 or $1300 at the time, and I probably spent another $100 somewhere, because my stupid brain has a tendency to round down ($1297? that's practically $1200!).

The only major concern I have is that I am treating BTC like a commodity instead of a currency. The pragmatic side of me knows that it CAN'T be a currency right now due to its volatility, and that I should go ahead and trade and gamble and play... but the idealistic side of me knows that the more we treat it like a commodity, the less chance it has of BECOMING a currency some day - and the more we think of it as a commodity, the more we're willing to accept government regulation on it (whereas we might not be so accepting of government regulating a currency that doesn't belong to them). Since an ideal crypto has a very good chance of taking financial control AWAY from the government, my idealistic (and partially conspiracy-theory) side gets worried whenever I play into what the government wants me to do... worried that I'm contributing to a long term plan to dismiss, devalue, and ultimately eliminate cryptocurrencies from the realm of stable, mature financial tools.

Finally... one of the things I find when discussing crypto is that the EXTREMELY uninformed tend to come out of the woodwork and present themselves as experts. I've been dismissively told 'what's the big deal? I have paper that I can spend right here in my pocket' (the question being why do we need crypto, the bias being 'because I can't think of a reason, there mustn't be one'). I've been told 'bitcoin can't be stable because it's not directly attached to a commodity' (when examples of stable currency unattached to commodities exist and indeed thrive). I've been told that bitcoin is not fungible (maybe I just misunderstand the definition? It's not like each individual BTC has its own unique name...). I've been told that bitcoin has proven itself to be too unstable to use as a currency (implying that BTC is fully mature and done growing into its stability). I've been told that 'mining' is a silly concept in general because the total amount of currency could be released all at once for ease's sake (totally ignoring... well... there are a LOT of problems with that statement, too big for a parenthetical summary).

So... this is a fantastic hobby. I have a lot of fun with it, and I don't need to be hands on all the time. It's mostly automated, and is available when I WANT to play with it... but - this post aside - I tend to stay fairly quiet about it, given how much people seem to already 'know' about it.

@primesuspect said:
Essentially, that's it: BTC and other cryptos have value because others think they do.

That's the highest level. The next level down is: They have value because exchanges exist with sufficiently low skills necessary where people will agree to convert it to other currencies at a given rate.

Coins spike in value when major exchanges add support for them. Otherwise, trading them is sufficiently difficult that their value is depressed. Higher liquidity = higher value.

DISCLAIMER: My BTC, ETH, and LTC trading are at what I would call a noob level, but that is at least better than knowing nothing about it. I've been dabbling in BTC and other cryptocurrencies for a bit and made a tiny bit of money doing such, so I'm willing to answer any basic questions if you have any.

I don't recommend crypto trading on a large scale. I've kept my trading pool under $100 just for fun and learnings.

The #1 thing anyone here needs to know about crypto: use NiceHash. Easy GUI. Automatically selects the most profitable algo every day. Easy to cash out your bux. Even a $250 graphics card can easily make $100+ a month, factoring in a 10 cent/kWh power bill.

The days of complicated command lines and hand-picking your cryptocurrency are done.

NiceHash. Learn more.

//EDIT: No, you cannot mine BTC with a graphics card. It is not profitable. That's why all the other coins exist! You are also not likely to escape the IRS if you generate or obtain sums of money you would deem useful or exciting.