"screen" isn't mentioned here I don't think except in the list of things to apt-get install if you're on a Raspberry Pi.  No big deal, it's small.  I've used it for years when I think of it.  When you ssh to a machine, log in, then type screen it starts with a blurb you can ignore by hitting enter.  If something interrupts your connection, like if it's over WiFi: reconnect to that machine, log in, type screen -r and it will resume your session.  cgminer can be running just fine the whole time and doing work.  I just did that, I have my old 2Pac plugged into a Zero, started over ssh from my laptop.  Laptop crashed, I rebooted and reconnected, the Zero's still mining away like nothing happened.  (blinky light was going, even  disconnected)  FYI the Zero (ZeroW with wifi) and 2Pac were running mostly fine on a 2.5 amp cell phone charger with an OTG cable between, little 4 inch one.

You start ssh by enabling in raspi-config normally.  Once that's on you can connect to it, that's what "running headless" is all about.  You don't need a monitor, you just connect by ssh from some other machine.  ssh username@machinename

I would expect colors are a function of when it was made, I don't know.  One batch of heat sinks were one color, another was another.  When you plug it into cgminer you'll see a serial number, but I'm not sure those were actively implemented then.  My 2Pac is 10010660, the heat sink is silver (natural aluminum), the circuit board is green.  My NewPac is the same colors.  Maybe there was a certain batch for a specific reason.  Later is probably better because improvements come along generally.

Finally caught up reading this thread.  Nobody’s posted about using a big heat sink.

There's about 50 square inches of 1/8" thick aluminum.  Forgot how to post images on this board.



I’ve never been a fan of fans, for electronics anyway.  I spent 20 years working as an electronics technician and replaced a lot of power transistors so I’m a great fan of good heatsink paste, the white kind that’s almost like paint.  I’ve had a 2-Pac for a few years, never put a fan on it.  Then I got a NewPac and I was intrigued by the positive temperature coefficient and the fact that they’re more efficient when cool.  So I took a chunk of aluminum that was kicking around and bolted it on with a couple machine screws and heatsink paste.  Didn’t disturb anything else, just attached to one side of the heat sink.  You could use a washing machine or file cabinet as a heat sink, except aluminum’s better than steel.  Black paint helps too.  A solar heated birdbath and mining machine, yeah,

I could use a bigger piece of aluminum, this settles in at about 350 MHz.  I have one of those fancy thermometers somewhere, this is cooler than I like a shower, just reaching over to feel it occasionally.  Semiconductors in general are OK near the boiling temperature of water, but those are just dumb transistors.  I had this so hot I could smell it once but let it cool for a half hour and it was fine.  No fan means no noise but it also means not relying on some fan that can fail when the bearings get old.  Look for ball bearings and an MTBF figure.  Pretty blue LEDs are not where your priority should be.  You can buy a Pi from http://www.newark.com and that’s a decent place to buy quality fans too.

@VH: I saw your comment that cgminer expects data to be ready from the pool (regarding slow CPUs/USB).  There is an old proxy https://github.com/slush0/stratum-mining-proxy I don’t know if it could help.  I’ve used it, years ago, Pooler’s Litecoin version, it can be helpful in slow internet situations.  The big disadvantage is that every miner running through it has to run at the same difficulty setting.

[edit]

To try Slush's proxy you'll probably need his stratum module from https://pypi.org/project/stratum  Also there's a newer page devoted to the proxy at https://slushpool.com/help/mining-proxy/  I spend a few hours in 2019 trying to get it working again and gave up.  I don't like Python and it relies on at least 2 other programs.  I have had both Slush and Pooler respond to emails in the past.

The autotuning is a good thing, but I don’t know how to turn it off for a 2Pac running on the same cgminer.  It runs, ramps down to 0 and sits there.  The cgminer that’s the master branch doesn’t do that.  Autotune should only run on BM1387s I think.  I tried just the 2Pac by itself, same problem.

I see a lot of somewhat silly cgminer questions.  Try this: “cgminer –help > cgminer_help.txt”.  There’s no man page it seems but this will give a reference file meanwhile.  You don’t really need to put all your parameters on the command line every time.  Do it once, hit S for settings, then W for write and write it out to the default config file (~/.cgminer/cgminer.conf).  Then you can start by just typing cgminer.  Make install should put it someplace in your path.  You can edit the config file, make copies, variations, etc.  Cgminer has been around for years, different people/companies make their own versions to work with equipment they make, there’s not really any merging them back together.  I need a totally different one for my old Gridseed Scrypt ASIC.

Oh, testing on an old Dell Latitude D530, USB extension cable by Tripp-Lite, no hub yet.  AMD64 Debian Buster.  “Linux d530 4.19.0-6-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.67-2+deb10u1 (2019-09-20) x86_64 GNU/Linux”  I also have 3 Raspberry Pi 3Bs, 4 Zeroes, an Odroid N2 and a Rock64.  I like the ARM stuff.

I’ve yet to make anything by mining, but I did buy $450 worth of Bitcoin last December and sell it in July for $1200.  Watch the price cycle, it’ll be time to invest again before too long when it bottoms out.  You can make enough to afford to mine.  Tripling your investment isn’t unusual.  Keep re-investing your profits about 10 times and you get close to $1 million, do the math.

If I go to pro.coinbase.com/trade, click on withdraw, then USD, then bank account, I see my bank account listed, so it goes to that by ACH.  That I don't want to do yet, I'm watching the price.

Pro <--> regular transfers are addressed at
https://support.pro.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/2945332-how-to-transfer-funds-between-your-coinbase-pro-and-coinbase-accounts

pro.coinbase.com/trade page: Depost, bitcoin, coinbase account tab, max, done.  My bitcoin is now in my pro account.  Slick and intuitive once you know where to look.  If I hadn't heard about GDAX and looked it up I could still be fumbling.  So thank you to Thirdspace for mentioning it.  I don't think this board has a thank button but +1 that guy.

I don't know if I can turn off some of the constant web sockets chatter that happens or not.  It serves no purpose, it wastes bandwidth and CPU, it's just annoying noise.  I'm not a day trader, I don't care about that stuff.

FYI GDAX is AKA pro.coinbase.com  I go to https://pro.coinbase.com and I'm all logged in because I'm logged into Coinbase.  I'll see what happens.  Checking, they seem to be licensed in every state except Hawaii.

Being new to doing this I don't now who's been doing it a while and can be trusted.  I've had a Coinbase account since May 2016, I mostly trust them.  And they trust me to a degree, my daily limits have increased a couple times

I don't so much want to sell the bitcoin as park it as dollars (or something stable like pounds or yen).  I don't need the dollars back right now, I want to buy bitcoin again when the price drops.  If I can keep doing that at 150%-400% profit I can hit a million in probably under 9 cycles.  Until that I want to reinvest 100% of the profit plus the principle, I don't need it back soon.

Yes, that's true that checks have all the numbers.  Some kind of e-check?  I like PayPal except it's reversible.


I'll check them, I don't know.  I use bitstamp for price data sometimes.  That would probably be ideal.  Coinbase seems to have charged me about 1.5% just to accept bitcoin from my Electrum and then I can't do what I expected with it.

Yeah, I didn't know what USDC was, I don't seem to be able to go direct from BTC to USDC on Coinbase.  I can receive USDC into a USDC wallet through an address, but not deposit to it from my BTC wallet.  Meanwhile BTC isn't looking bad so I'm not in a rush.  These are small potatoes by real trader's standards but I'm just starting.


I would think so unless they recently lost the license.  I was buying by bank wire from them as recently as January of this year.  I'm also set up for debit card but it's more expensive.

I thought exchanges were just for one cryptocurrency to another, they didn't deal with dollars.  I expect to need to do this every price cycle with increasing amount of money, so I'm interested in getting set up to do it with low overhead and bother.


So I'm back to favoring Moneygram or Western Union.  I sent a boatload of money to a scammer a few years back by Moneygram, and they won't reverse that.  Western Union wants more forms of ID than I own.  Moneygram I can do at a CVS or Walmart.  Still 20 miles away but oh well.

Yeah, I'll probably do localbitcoins.  I've been using bitcoin for a couple years as a currency to send money, this is my first time trying to buy low and sell high.  I thought Coinbase could do it all, I didn't know they weren't licensed in my state.  I've had an account with them, I can buy with credit/debit card or bank wire, I've been doing that for a couple years.  I don't need the dollars back right now, I want to wait until the bitcoin price drops and reinvest it.  If the fees were too high I was going to open a USD vault at Coinbase and stick it in there for a few months.  Except when I tried to actually do it it didn't work.  The BTC sits in my BTC wallet, I can't deposit it to my USD wallet.

I read the Andrew Cook articles on investing, but the exchanges, etc. he recommends don't seem to be around anymore, or do business in the US.  I investigated them all but they were dead ends.

I do want to park the $ until bitcoin goes down.  As another crypto currency maybe but don't they sort of track bitcoin in price?  Whenever bitcoin is high litecoin is high too.  I mine that a little so I watch it.  I don't watch the rest.

Bull market, that's a good question, care to put it in writing?    I'm looking at bitcoinwisdom and plots from a program I wrote and trying to decide.  It could go up or down as far as I can tell.  It's still wavering around $11k which it's been doing since about 6/24.  I know nothing of the underlying reasons it goes up or down.  A delay in cashing out wasn't the disaster I expected since it's actually gone up slightly.  Still down from the recent $13.7k peak.  I've see predictions that this peak might hit $20k but I'll believe it when I see it.

Oh, what option should I look for as far as getting $ back from a localbitcoins deal?  Cashier's check is risky, Paypal can be reversed.  Is there some way to wire through a trusted proxy so the guy on the other end doesn't actually get my bank numbers?  I suppose Moneygram or Western Union might be options.  So localbitcoins automatically handles the escrow?

I don't see Tether or USDT, only USDC as options on Coinbase.  I've never heard of Tether, you picked that just to get it out of Bitcoin before Bitcoin drops?  I see BCH, ETH, ETC, LTC, ZRX, BAT, ZEC, DAI, BSV, XRP, REP, XLM, EOS.  I can use a wallet of one of those currencies or set up a vault.  But no vault in US dollars.  I think because they aren't licensed in MA.

Localbitcoins I've heard of.  Escrow I don't know about but I'm not going to hand it to the first "helpful" person that comes along.  I'm really looking for a way to buy and sell bitcoin going forward and I think localbitcoin has some safety user protection measures in place, like eBay or Aliexpress.

I bought when btc was around $4k and now it's around $12k I want to convert it back to dollars until the price drops again.  Fairly standard.  But I have been buying though Coinbase and checking their page they aren't licensed in my state (Massachusetts).  I sent my btc from my Electrum to my Coinbase account but it seems to sit there as btc in my btc wallet.  It's not a huge amount by their standards, it's my first investment 0.11945068 btc, but I guess I need to find an exchange in a hurry since the price is dropping (I think).  I thought I was all set until I went to cash out.  I sent my btc to Coinbase 24 hours ago and it just sits there.  I have a wire connection to my bank account registered with them.  I think the problem is because they aren't licensed in my state so they're not doing anything, but maybe I need to wait longer.

Let's see if I can do this in ascii art

                                                        sell
                                         sell            /\
                          sell            /\            /  \
               sell        /\            /  \          /    \   reach goal amount, coast or retire
      sell      /\        /  \          /    \        /
sell   /\      /  \      /     \       /      \      /
  /\    /  \    /    \    /       \     /        \    /
 /  \  /    \  /      \  /         \   /          \  /
/    \/      \/        \/            \/            \/
buybuy buy  buy         buy        buy

             time ->

If you read Andrew Cook's investment tutorial PDFs you should buy when it's low and sell when it's high.  So you need a way to do that with minimal fees.  You take your profit from one cycle and invest it in the next one plus your original principle so you can keep making bigger and bigger investments.  Buy a CD with it or put it in a savings account between cycles.  If you dip in and take some out then you don't have that to invest so it will slow down how fast you get to your goal amount.  I can't imagine just buying and holding.

If you have a profit that varies randomly between 150 and 400%, you can start with $450 and get to $1 million in about 7 cycles.  Once you reach your goal you can start taking money out and have an income from it.  The science or luck is in picking the times to buy or sell.  And maybe some day I can afford an Antminer.  But watch bitcoinwisdom.io, mostly buy or sell when the fast and slow moving averages cross.  Start with $10 and it takes a few more cycles, the more you can start with the more you jump ahead.

The Andrew Cook I'm talking about lived in Chile and started an investment firm around bitcoin.  I have 5 PDFs which may have come from saving his 5 articles from Firefox.  They're loosely titled "How to make money trading bitcoin" but other people have written articles with the same title.  They seem to have vanished, I think somebody's trying to sell them.  There's at least 1 part on Scribd but I'm not going to pay for it since I already have it, I was just trying to find a URL to post here.  If you can get a message to me with your email address I can email the pdfs I have.  You could also search for "Cook Investment firm" which was his company then.  He did make at least 1 post here on bitcointalk.org so I imagine he still has an account here.  There's some stuff on reddit with images on imgur.  He's doing day trading of bitcoin now I guess.

I've never had much trouble with Electrum under Linux.  I run both Rasbian and Debian and I have Bitcoin and Litecoin versions of Electrum.  I might have gotten it running under OpenBSD too, years ago now.

I love the fact that once you set up a new copy on a different machine and put in your seed words you have a clone of your original.  If your hard drive or whatever craps out you can start fresh, put in your seed, and all your bitcoin and records are in the new installation.  And if you have multiple computers you can put it on all of them and the copies stay in synch.

I can't imagine trying to live with Windows anymore, haven't used it seriously in 10 years.  There are thousands of programs for Linux, all free.  It took me about 20 years to be comfortable and confident about unix in general though, so I can understand reluctance to adapt.  Viruses?  Mostly only under Windows.  I'm getting off topic.

I use coinbase.com instead of blockchain.com.  They aren't perfect either but I've been with them a few years.  That's for the dollars to bitcoin exchange, then I send it to my Electrum address.

For Linux users that want an onscreen bitcoin price near your clock, try my ticker from https://sourceforge.net/projects/btctick/  It's for LXDE, I don't know if it works with other things.  Free of course.


These seem to be the pins and needles times of deciding what to do.  Stay in or cash out and reinvest the profits on the next cycle.  Which gives you more leverage because you could make a bigger investment.  But if you cash out and it's really still going up you've not only lost that extra money but you have to wait longer for it to bottom out so you can buy again.

https://bitcoinwisdom.io/markets/bitfinex/btcusd

I thought I had gotten seniority enough to post images here, but I no longer have a host for them.  Anyway, look at May of this year.  There were fluctuations for weeks but no net change, then about 1/3 of the way into June it started rising again and went from about $8000 to about $12000.  You should be able to see that on bitcoinwisdom if you set the time interval to 1 day so that you're seeing May.  I think we're seeing that again.

What I'd like to do is a series of buy low, sell high steps, reinvesting the profit from one peak into the next one.  I wrote a somewhat silly simulation program, the output of which is like:

Start with how much? 450
Goal is? 1000000
invest $450.00, get back $1474.03 (randomized profit 328%)
wait for price to bottom out
invest $1474.03, get back $4809.05 (randomized profit 326%)
wait for price to bottom out
invest $4809.05, get back $12700.42 (randomized profit 264%)
wait for price to bottom out
invest $12700.42, get back $46824.96 (randomized profit 369%)
wait for price to bottom out
invest $46824.96, get back $149630.09 (randomized profit 320%)
wait for price to bottom out
invest $149630.09, get back $594102.06 (randomized profit 397%)
wait for price to bottom out
invest $594102.06, get back $1276485.25 (randomized profit 215%)

My initial investment is somewhat expendable, I wish I'd had more to spend.  I would expect each cycle to take a year or so.


I was thinking supply and demand, since the supply of new bitcoins is drying up it seemed like that would push the price up.

Anybody else read Andrew Cook's articles?  There's a copy of part 1 at https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/274wbs/how_to_make_money_trading_bitcoin_day_1_of_5/ but there are 4 more parts, you'll have to search for them, the first 3 or 4 are the most important.

I'm trying to decide if this peak is over.  The last one hit $19,000 and some people have speculated this one would reach $20,000.  I jumped in at about $4,000 with $450.  If this is a peak it's much lower than I expected.  We had a few weeks of uncertainty that ended a couple weeks ago when it went from $8k to $12k.  This could be more of that.  There's power in reinvesting, but you need to wait for the price to drop.  Then you make x% profit on more capital, and keep reinvesting.  As long as it doesn't go below where you jumped in you're not losing money.

Since the mining difficulty factor is climbing beyond where it's practical to mine without free electricity like solar, it makes sense that the price is going up.  I was surprised the last low only got down to about $4k and not more like $400, but that's probably what the future holds.

Old thread I know but really, you won't lose your wallet.  As long as you kept the "seed", the 13 words (which you should keep on paper someplace safe) it will be recreated.  Make a new wallet where you need to and enter the seed words in the right order.  You'll get a clone of the original, complete with addresses.  You can even have the same wallet on multiple computers if that makes you feel safer.  Everything that makes your wallet what it is comes right back when your seed gets looked up somewhere online.  Even years later.

But it also means that if anyone else were to get them they could impersonate you and steal your balance so keep them private and don't put them anywhere online.

Maybe it's been discussed, I haven't been in here in a few weeks, but what's up with your litecoin prices?  In your Android app it's been flatlined at about $42 for weeks and the "LTC/USD" price at the top of https://bitcoinwisdom.com/ shows $41.279 too.  Yet lower down in the page and on Litecoinpool.org it's actually up at $78 or so.

I worked as an electronics technician for 20 years, started at age 14 for maybe $3/hour, I've been there.  Now I can't see that tiny stuff anymore.  SMD is scary, a job for robots.  I can see my 24" computer screen but I need lighted binocular magnifiers to solder DIP packages even.

Got the electric bill, shut down my 2 ASICs.  Thinking about remounting my solar panels that were mounted on wood until it rotted out.  Maybe I could mine a few hours a day on solar.

hp# apt-get install winusb
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package winusb

On an amd64 Debian machine: Linux hp 3.16.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.16.43-2 (2017-04-30) x86_64 GNU/Linux

I've always had to hotplug mine, either on Raspberry Pis or on my HP laptop with amd64 Debian.  I ran across a cgminer I had downloaded April 30 from http://gekkoscience.com/misc/cgminer-gekko.tar.gz so I just tried it.  I didn't fiddle enough to get it to recognize my 2pac, I just went back to the version I was running.
The new version:


The old version:


Same libusb, etc.  Also I see my "--gekko-2pac-freq 150" wasn't recognized anymore.

OK, I saw that, I thought maybe it moved to a different thread and I missed it or something.  Very frustrating to see time going into old technology that mostly can't break even while the 16 nm stuff that might is on a back burner.