Those of you who follow me on my tech YouTube channel will know that I have ventured into the world of Cryptocurrency.
It’s something I believe in and something which I enjoy. Without a doubt, digital currency is here to stay and I want to be more involved in it.
Late to the Game
When I was travelling South America several years ago I stumbled across a new thing called Bitcoin. The whole concept of a decentralised digital currency was fascinating to me.
I followed the discussions on BitcoinTalk, downloaded a wallet, and installed the software to start mining.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to mine. I spent days trying to download the pool information, but the slow internet speeds and the relatively low power of my portable laptop made it too time consuming. Eventually, I gave up.
Bitcoin was under a dollar at this point so I decided to spend a few hundred dollars on it and see what happens. However, I ran into some problems with my wallet and decided just to leave it.
My attention turned to my travels, but a few years later I realised I had made a big mistake. If I had invested and held my coins, I would be a millionaire today.
Hindsight is, of course, a wonderful thing. There is no guarantee I would have held my coins until they were really profitable.
Not investing when Bitcoin when it was under a dollar was understandable given my circumstances at the time, however the big mistake I made was later on when I made the assumption that I had missed my boat.
I had many opportunities to jump into the world of Cryptocurrency again, though I always held onto the belief that I was too late to the game.
I wasn’t.
If you start investing in Cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2018 you are far from being new to the game, however you aren’t late to the game either. Over the next few years we will see digital currencies being adopted in banks, online payment systems, and more.
Making Money with Cryptocurrencies
There are two main ways to make money from digital currencies.
- Buy & Sell Coins
- Mine Coins
The difficulty in mining Bitcoin is too high at this stage which is why miners mine other coins. These other coins are sometimes called Alt Coins (Alternative Coins).
Given my experience with building PCs and my aversion to risk, mining coins seemed like the best option for me.
I had tested the waters for a month or so with my PC’s two 1080 TI graphic cards. During this time I tried many different mining applications and got a better understanding of everything.
When it came to building my mining rigs, I opted for 24 1060 6GB GPUs (GPU = Graphics Cards). These GPUs were divided into three rigs. I was essentially building three PCs which had eight GPUs attached.
As you can imagine, this volume of equipment came in a huge number of boxes.
It took me around two days to get the three PCs built and tweak everything the way I wanted. This was the first time I had built dedicated mining rigs so I had to common installation problems. By the third mining rig I knew how to build things set everything up quickly as I had troubleshooted so many things.
You can see my first three mining rigs in the video below.
A few weeks after I built these mining rigs I built a fourth mining rig. The fourth rig contained four 1080 TIs.
I use the versatile Awesome Miner application to administrate all of my mining rigs. It’s a fantastic application, however if you want something more simplistic, I recommend NiceHash.
NiceHash sells your mining rigs’ hashing power to sellers and pays you in bitcoin. It’s ridiculously easy to use. You just sign up for an account, download the app, and click start. That’s all there is to it.
Once you have reached their minimum payment threshold, you can withdraw your Bitcoin to CoinBase free of charge.
NieHash is the perfect entry point into mining for digital currency, but I encourage you to spend some time investigating what is going in the background and then trying some alternatives.
I Believe in Cryptocurrency
The large number of negative stories about Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies in the media have given many people a bad impression about what digital currency is all about.
I’m not one for conspiracy theorists, however it is quite clear that many organisations are attacking Crypto as they feel threatened. Organisations like Banks will be very wary of Crypto and will actively discourage its adoption. If they don’t adapt for the mass arrival of digital currencies, they may find themselves left behind.
I strongly believe that Cryptocurrencies are here to stay because of the many practical applications online and in industries for payments, funding, crowd sourcing, transactions, and more.
My belief in the technology itself is why I wasn’t too concerned when the prices of digital currencies dropped so much in January. Prices are always going to go up and down, but every day these currencies are being used in many useful ways and many concerns, such as high transaction fees and privacy, are being addressed.
Final Thoughts
I hope you have enjoyed this article.
It’s the first time I have focused an entire article on the topic of Cryptocurrency, however it will not be the last.
I have added a Cryptocurrency discussion room to Rise Forums and will be expanding the area soon.
Have you dipped your toes into the world of Cryptocurrency yet? If not, why not.
Leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts.
Kevin
