Month #1 / Chapter #1 in my mining journey. . April/May 2017
I didn't have the courage to build my own miner and I ended up stumbling across
www.MiningCave.com before the summer crypto bubble they sold mining rigs at reasonable prices.
MiningCave Cheetah GPU Mining Rig
I purchased a 6x AMD Rx470 rig with a pretty sweet frame delivered to my house in the USA from Canada . . for ~$2000 (147 mh/s / ~1000 watts)
https://youtu.be/NjAyj8WUvvILook at that ETH price on that video thumbnail! ($80)
Next I bought 4 bitcoins for $1200 bucks each
I bought the BTC with CoinBase (here's my referral link)
https://www.coinbase.com/join/58dab7602dcf7f00a1e3d00aAlso bought 1/4 of the BTC with CoinMama (here's my referral link)
https://www.Coinmama.com/?ref=voskcoinHere's my opinion on CoinBase. . it is a nice setup, easy to use, and intuitive for beginners. However they freeze the site in some opportune times to sell, and there's a lot of negative feedback about them. If it's your first couple cryptocurrency transactions it's not a bad place to be, however I wouldn't advocate staying there with options like gemini, bittrex, kraken, and many others out there.
CoinMama is sweet for what it is, easy ready to use site to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum with a Credit Card -- you can do this with some other sites like even CoinBase however CoinMama does not have ridiculously low limits to begin with.
By the way this isn't some annoying long post just to generate referral revenue, but if I'm going to talk about the stuff and you end up using it why not help us both
I was dying to find somewhere to buy a Baikalminer Cube . . Then I discovered a fellow forum member was selling potentially 2x Baikalminer Cube's (300 mh/s x11 / x13 / x14 / x15 / qubit / quark in the computer hardware classifieds section
So I bought both of these little baby ASIC miners with . . 1.6 BTC . . maybe I should have hodled that Bitcoin in hindsight?! Or did I come out even further ahead later on?
Here's my initial review video on the Baikal Miner Cube
https://youtu.be/47a4CDeFjqQOnce I bought a sufficient PSU (ended up being overkill because I was having trouble scoring more of the cubes/Seasonic 660w platinum) the earnings were solid!
I wanted to dive into every aspect of crypto / crypto mining as fast as I could . . so within a couple weeks I had acquired the almighty bitcoin, a gpu miner with the most popular card at the time rx470's, and also 2 asic miners. However I was still very curious about cloud mining . . so my research continued and I decided to take a big gamble on two things . . trusting a cloud mining company (Genesis Mining) and trusting that Monero will increase in value to make the purchase worth it.
I spent ~$2,400 on a Monero XMR cloud mining contract with Genesis Mining
https://youtu.be/59Ii8MzzHJAThings were going well with Genesis Mining as far as the Monero contract went for awhile . . however in the last 30 days as of writing this 09.07.17 they have held XMR payout's due to "issues" on their end. If I ever get paid out and it's appropriate I will have broken even on a 2 year mining contract within ~5-6 months. We shall see. Again this isn't a creative ad, it's me, my journey, and ever changing results - if you'd like to signup for Genesis Mining I'd appreciate if you used my code as it gives you 3% off and I get a hashpower upgrade
Referral code for signing up
https://www.genesis-mining.com/a/825579Affiliate code for purchases
p7Yi4lThen I made a video on early me, replacing my lame insufficient random external hard drive power supplies with a quality ATX PSU, bumping my earnings on my Baikalminer Cube's to appropriate levels
https://youtu.be/M5hOIKzqikYBitmain had recently released the Antminer L3+ which an interesting launch to say the least. Many people stated to not buy the L3+ anymore as there's no way it will be profitable . . here we are months later and it sells out faster than ever. After a couple days of debate I put a pre-order in for one unit, wish I could go back and kick myself to get more!
Then began the nightmare of the . . Pandaminer possibly the worst prebuilt GPU/ETH/ZEC/XMR miner I have ever heard of. Pandaminer as a company is an absolute nightmare to deal with, their ambassadors or whatever they call them are only interested in lining their own farms with Pandaminers, after weeks of negotiating and him backing out on a deal the Pandaminer rep in Virginia, USA finally sold me my first pandaminer, the excitement only lasted until I turned it on . .
https://youtu.be/lOh6hgTRYBYI did not have 220/240v setup yet, so he assured me that a simple step-up transformer would do the job no problem and he used one. Well it was a fire hazard in addition to Pandaminers already being a fire hazard themselves. . and barely a working solution at best. Long story short don't buy an ASIC if you don't have 240v ready. I will get back to more on why you should never buy a Pandaminer in the next post, as I am roughly following the chronological timeline and it takes me 2-3 weeks to almost take a sledgehammer to the miner. .
My Baikalminer's were doing well, super low power consumption, profitable, quiet, just sweet little miners. I was earning a higher profit on the prohashing mining pool as opposed to mining on dash p2poolmining mining pools, so I decided to make a video about how prohashing is one of the best / most profitable mining pools.
https://youtu.be/eG1bQ-MjlKIFinally I created my first month of mining, in review
https://youtu.be/uQ4JC8v0bCkI'd like to thank everyone who takes the time to watch my YouTube videos, especially those that thumbs up and leave comments. You all make this journey so much more fun and make the videos worthwhile, here is what my first month in review looked like as far as YouTube stats
This concludes my first ~30 days of my crazy crypto adventure
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June 2017 arrives, and after many headaches, debates with my gf, and kicking back 20+designs to her, we finally settled on a logo design that I liked
For those wondering on the inspiration one, I simply love wolves the lonewolf concept has applied to my own personal life and not necessarily out of choice. However if you are surrounded by toxic people and in a toxic environment do your best to remove them from your life and yourself from that environment and build a brighter future. . .even if some of them are your family. Furthermore in the world of crypto you don't want to be a sheep as they say dumb money follows smart money and I view the dumb money as the sheeps. Ultimately my goal here is the build the ultimate crypto wolfpack, finally the inspiration was solidified by my pup Tails, as she has wolf ears and Teal is her favorite shade of grey
The infamous star of my mining operation in June is most certainly . . The Pandaminer B3+
https://youtu.be/sefJNg8Bv5IWhat a nightmare the Pandaminers are, a few problems would have been alleviated if I had 220v/240v setup and a bit more knowledge at that time about miners and how they worked. However that's the issue with the plug and play pre-built gpu miners.
Newcomers to the crypto mining scene think they can buy one and it will work like their Xbox . . maybe it will . . maybe it won't and mine most certainly did not. Aside from multiple people almost losing their entire mining farms, houses, and possibly even their lives because these miners were catching on fire (seemed to be only when dual mining) the miner was a rushed half-baked and budget cut production.
This was around the height of crypto craze of 2017 where any and everything crypto mining related ESPECIALLY Ethereum was disappearing in minutes not hours or days or weeks, so what did my genius self do? Put my Bitcoin towards yet another . . . Pandaminer!
https://youtu.be/PIwmfx8KjqY
Some people learn from others mistakes, some learn the hard way from their own mistakes, I learn the harder way from several of my own mistakes.
The Pandaminer was plagued with problems from 1-2 gpu's not registering properly, one PSU not being able to supply enough power, the second Pandaminer PSU was capable of powering the Pandaminer but that Panda also had a potentially dead GPU. The miners are ungodly loud, not suitable for an in-house miner at all. There was no true in-depth footage out on these and they also were changing parts with each batch making it even harder to gauge exactly what you were getting. The reviews I read made the product seem like a pretty good deal/bet. There's also a lot of reports of Pandaminer ripping people off on BTC exchange rates, as well as failing to deliver one of their batches and then offering people partial refunds or a sub-par replacement.
Eliovp made a very interesting pandamOS (custom linux panda miner OS as opposed to the chinese windows 10 the panda miners ship with)
This is the saving grace to the Pandaminers if you could potentially consider one, however I would absolutely never advocate the purchase of a Pandaminer new/used
https://youtu.be/s4_6WdIRSE0I put both the black and grey Pandaminer up for sale + I was upfront about the issues I was having with them and ended up breaking even on both of them, simply because the market demand was insane for miners.
At this time Bitcoin was somewhere around 2500/BTC and I decided to make my first big investment for long term holding, I put a BTC into Iconomi/ICN, exactly 2500 tokens
Iconomi token valuation 09.07.17
I thought then, and still now that ICN has great potential, at one point ICN was ~$5 a token, clearly in hindsight I wish I had cashed out then and I thought about it but what if it had gone to $10?! Either way ICN has come back down recently, I still currently hold those same exact 2500 tokens as I think it's a promising project and I love the concept of them buying back tokens and "burning" them. If you're interested in iconomi checkout their site
https://www.iconomi.net/ for more info.
In addition to holding ICN, I still had some BTC as well as several ETH summing up my very limited cryptocurrency portfolio.
To sum up June as I entered July . . my mining farm consisted of me mining in my garage, basement, and bathroom with the Mining Cave GPU Cheetah Rig, Baikalminer cube's, 2x Genesis Mining Contracts, and 4x Trio GPU mining rigs.
https://youtu.be/axizRatdMRo
