For a small cost, many just rent large amounts of hash and hope to hit, many  can point their rigs at nicehash and get paid per share mining there as if they were mining in a generic pool, but these rigs when rented are diverted to where the renter wants them. The rig owner is always getting paid, I have got my KNC titan pointed here.

Solar panels are ill advised, they are currently one of the most expensive energy sources which have a very long ROI time of like 20 or so years if they were producing maximum power. A solar wind combo is ideal, in the UK however you can sometimes get panels installed for free or with government subsidy, or you can pay a monthly cost, its worth working out if this will help, but this only would reduce costs in the day time. A better option in the UK is to go with a provider with a cheap day per kWh rate of say 11 pence, and a cheap night rate of like 4.5 pence for 7 hours at night (economy 7) this can average the price at just under 10 pence per kWh and is very profitable with scrypt, but the current gen bitcoin hardware you would still have a long ROI time. Factor in the halving and it just got more difficult.

Solar panels are a green option, if you were not too fussed about the cost but wanted to do it from a green perspective.

I would suggest buying coins with the money for solar panels to be honest. I found a much better return on investment buying coins.

I am curious to see this, the ETH price has surprised me. I am HODLING the little ETH I mine now to see what happens.

the price doubled id sell half and keep half. As id get back my original capital, plus id have bitcoins.

I would hold some for further increases/utilization

I doubt the core developers would implement this. If they did, the  code would just be forked and a network fork done, as i doubt any major pools nor users would use such a client version. And if word ever got out this was done, bitcoins price would tumble and so ends bitcoin as a trusted trustless system.

Love it. That is so true. Luckily, i don't think the bitcoin core devs are that stupid, and if they ever did, miners and users could just fork the code.

I use the solocalc android app to calculate that.

Jacob

The solar driven antrouter reminds me of solar sails idea where sunlight can gently propel a spacecraft through space. Who knows though, i wont get too cocky until the end of the round

Come on my little slug!

Reading this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1475343.0

Id say use this as an option guys to point your hash away from antpool to another smaller pool. I wouldn't mine here given its history of mining empty TX blocks.

I am already a user of TREZOR and multisig type vaults from coinbase. Both of these are great for storing large amounts of funds safely. I also decided to give LEDGER a try. It is much cheaper than TREZOR at £20 for the HW.1 wallet. That's right only £20 for highly secure storage of bitcoins.

I set it up using the chrome application from ledger. I used aload of nectar points from my credit card on ebay to buy one of these along with a £144 worth paper wallet which I swept, a way of 'cashing out' my nectar points (had £160 worth) with an ebay voucher. This was simple enough.

First it installs  the drivers, automatically on windows 7 and 10. You set a PIN and then write down your recovery seed on the provided card. You then are asked to unplug and replug when it has been created.

Unlike TREZOR, the ledger  does not have a screen, but can nicely fit on any key ring. You can use it in electrum or the ledger app and a couple of other pieces of software. For the life of me, I could not get Multibit HD to detect the ledger on two machines.

Due to the nature of the recovery seed, ledger *MUST* be set up on a PC you know to be clean. In my case my freshly reformatted and installed laptop.

Once set up you enter your PIN before you use it in electrum. You only get 3 attempts or it wipes the ledger. It also comes with a security card; and a QR code which you can make another one from. This security card is needed, as when you send bitcoins from a ledger hardware wallet, it sends a challenge based on the address numeric and asks you to enter in numbers/letters from the security card corresponding to that address. This challenge will also let you know if malware has tried to get you to sign a transaction to who knows where.

Once you have entered the correct sequence it asks for, it will sign the transaction and broadcast it to the network. It  can safely be kept on a set of keys (the HW.1 seems so fragile however so do not be ham-fisted with it)

The private keys are stored IN the device. Transaction signing happens IN the device. For ultimate security, Trezor with its internal display seems like top notch security, but the ledger is a cheaper and acceptable competitor. I read a post of someone who lost loads of coins in a WINRAR  pass worded folder, for anything larger than a few hundred quid, your best options are in order of security below in my opinion:

1. TREZOR - with the seed stored safely / OR Encrypted Paper Wallet

2. Ledger - with the seed stored safely

3. Coinbase Multi-Sig Vault - (you can recover your vault if you forget the passphrase with the user key, or decrypt it without coinbase with the user key and encrypted seed, should coinbase ever go bust, this however requires trust in that coinbase never kept a copy of the keys during set up) this is great for convenience, can use the coinbase mobile app to view balances, and has timed withdrawls.

4. Generic Paper Wallet (stored securely) - I have ranked this lower than the other three, as the TREZOR and LEDGER is both protected by some authencation factor, where someone finding your paper wallet is not unless you encrypted it.

5. Bitcoin QT encrypted wallet or other encrypted wallet (vulnerable to malware upon decryption)

6. Online wallet (weakest, use for funds you will quickly move or spend and if you do, use 2FA. You have been warned)

7. Vanity Addresses generated online at some random site (DO NOT USE)!

Only one small downside of this wallet and trezor:
I have a vanity address I generated on my own PC with vanitygen. It would be nice to be able to import its private key and use it with LEDGER, but then it would probably render it much more insecure as it would enable the PC to write to the secure element. You cannot import private keys onto these.

I would say that LEDGER is great for the price, and it has the possibility to support Altcoins such as Litecoin or Doge. In a way I prefer it to my TREZOR for convenience and the build, but for ULTIMATE* security the TREZOR is best.

Whatever wallet you use, I highly recommend never storing all your funds in a SINGLE wallet.

The use of 2FA on any exchanges, and the use of HW wallets and the multisig vault protected my coins during a malware infection. Do not underestimate them. I would recommend a ledger for £20 if you store large quantities of coins, it is easy to use and if your storing say 500 quid of bitcoin or more, whats £20 to you? Even with a HW wallet, use common sense. And I do wonder if smart malware could over time work out how to exploit the challenge by gathering enough information from varying transactions, but it is much more secure than many alternatives.

For the sake of £20, please consider something like this if you keep a large sum of coins. I get disheartened when I read stories of people loosing coins or their life savings to malware.

EDIT: As I state, you keep your seed. safe. My ledger somehow wiped itself??? no wrong PIN entries or anything as far as I know. Seed restored.

I agree, and remember all those coins won't be at a SINGLE address, even mining on your own node it uses a new address from your keypool for every block found. So a QC could brute-force one maybe after a long time, then it would have to do each and every one of the others too, unless he purposely moved them to a single address?

And agreed with above poster, someones coins should never be touched. For any reason. Someone steals them and dumps them on the open market I would rather, than a few people deciding whos coins they should and shouldn't destroy. I understand the addresses may be subjectable to QC attacks, so be it. I would rather a large theft and dump which the market could absorb and recover from when some time has elapsed, than bitcoin forever having a reputation of 'destroying' coins and the implications and precedent that sets.

And then not only must a QC get into one address, it must get into every single address that was generated while these early adopters mined.

Its nothing to do with the article, it is the idea of  censoring in ANY WAY the ledger and disabling coins in any way. If quantum computing became a reality, wed have much more to think about than brute forcing these private keys; what if it could undo all the work on the ledger? Either way, while he is entitled to his own opinion which I respect, I do not myself agree with this opinion and am opposed in ***ANY WAY*** doing anything of the sort. To implement anything like this at any time would destroy confidence in a "trustless" system. Id much rather someone stole them and dumped them on the open market which it would absorb in the end than the action of censoring/destroying those coins due to the implications. Could a government then pay off the developers to disable funds by an entity i.e WikiLeaks? The act of censorship like that would set a dangerous precedent.

The British threatened to storm the embassy with Julian Assange, but were forced to relent when they realized they were setting a dangerous precedent*

This is one of those cases, if they can be censored even for this reason, then that opens doors for future coins to be censored later. Think of the trust issues, and I really wouldn't like the media to even get ahold of the fact that someone prominent in the community suggested such an action, the implications of it are far higher than someone stealing and dumping the coins. I understand he said it wouldn't happen for many many years if it were to, but I still disagree whole heartedly with it.

The media would also twist this something silly.

BUT he has reasoning and logic which is valid to him, so what can I say? We can let network coconscious decide these things and the implications of what happens afterwards. The text above is just my opinion, his opinion is equally as valid, which is why many of us live in democracies. Network consensus has that decision.

Depends what fee you attached to the transaction? A higher fee would give a miner more incentive to include the larger TX.

If this is true, paper wallets are not such when kept on a PC. Did you ever open the RAR file at any point as password could have been lifted then? Truecrypt/ciphershed is a much safer option for something like  this. Or better yet, a HW wallet like Ledger or Trezor which does transaction signing inside the device. These also work for litecoin.

http://www.lockdown.co.uk/?pg=combi

will tell you how long it would have  taken to crack such a password like he had.

But also id never store ALL my coins in a single wallet. Plus, were these paper wallets generated properly? As in generated offline?

There have been cases of addresses from vanity websites or other websites being stolen.

Sorry for your loss!

I recently got infected and the use of 2FA on sites like exchanges, a multisig vault like coinbase, and HW wallets stopped me loosing pretty much all my savings.

I had Kaspersky and they still got past, the first time I ever witnessed anything get past Kaspersky.

Why not just swap them around? Seems easier, as failover mode of BFGMiner is designed to start with pool 0 and work up.

Jacob

I use mine as a phone charger thats always plugged in, and a wifi to ethernet which my  KNC titan is plugged into. But if people want to watch slugs race, thats part of the fun : - )

The seatbelt sign is on I guess...

notice how I said 'some people' and not all? because most will think the idea is madness. And reading the thread shows that, but I read the article. People are entitled to their opinions of course, but I know it wont be implemented and if it were, id be worried. The guy who found his bitcoins he mined early on and bought an apartment with them is one example, to even suggest that they should be destroyed in any way to prevent theft is just madness, its like robbing or destroying gold out of someones vault cause someone might steal it.

If they were dumped on the open market and crashed the price, that would 1. be temporary and two. Just how things roll, the coins are owned by someone and that someone has a right to those coins. Be it 1 year or 50 years down the line. I made my investment in full knowledge the price could crash due to these coins. I was talking about it with my mate only today in fact.

All I know is no major mining pools would implement code that destroyed coins as it would harm bitcoins reputation as a whole and thus what they earn with their massive ASIC investment, this would never happen.

If anything like this did happen AND coconscious implemented it (no chance), once the media got ahold of it, bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is done for.

Obviously my posts are just my opinion and a heated one at that, but that's all it is.

I don't agree. Quite frankly some people are motivated by greed and worried about the price crash which would be temporary of dumping those on the open market because it harms their profits. He earned those coins, if he decides to spend them or share them out. Once you start doing stuff like this, bitcoins use as an indisputable* ledger goes, and so does my respect for it.

Satoshi earned those coins for his innovation.

full stop.

And... to even consider proposing destroying coins that have been held for a while, over time that would destroy all the coins...
But WTF is this? It is madness. My coins, my private keys and no one should dictate when they get destroyed, if I want to hold them for my kids or grandkids (being gay beside the point), then that's for me to do as I choose. Same to satoshi..