Crypto currency mining

[steamship]

Cheers MJ. Will look into these in due course.

[MikkiJayne]

Bit Bucket: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/0...itcoin_bucket/

[moltuae]

Originally Posted by steamship

Slightly OT on the mining side of things, I was going to ask about where you could buy crypto-currencies, as opposed to investing in mining equipment.

I had a quick look at poloniex and everything is priced in BTC . Does that mean you have to buy BTCs before you can buy other currencies, or does it give you an option of using old fashioned money if you have an account? If not, where do you buy BTCs?

For a lot of the exchanges you will need to buy BTC (or LTC, ETH, etc) first. I've always used the UK-based Bittylicious to buy BTC, though there are probably cheaper alternatives. I haven't actually bought any BTC for a while now (not with GBP at least). I bought most of most of the BTC I own 2-3 years ago and I continue to trade with that, plus I earn BTC by mining. Having said that, at the present price I might be tempted to buy some more!

Poloniex is just one exchange of many. It's one of the exchanges I probably use least, but they do often list coins that aren't available on other exchanges. Kraken is probably one of the biggest and best known (and perhaps more trusted?) exchanges. I also use Cryptopia and I've used Bittrex occasionally too.

If you look up the coin you're interested in on Coinmarketcap (eg: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/siacoin/#markets), in the markets tab you'll see a list of trading pairs and the exchanges it trades on, along with the 24hr trade volume.

The most important thing to remember is not to store your cryptocurrencies on the exchanges. Exchanges can (and sometimes do) get hacked.

[steamship]

Cheers Mark. A few more sites to bookmark.

[ulfilias]

Originally Posted by steamship

Slightly OT on the mining side of things, I was going to ask about where you could buy crypto-currencies, as opposed to investing in mining equipment.

I had a quick look at poloniex and everything is priced in BTC. Does that mean you have to buy BTCs before you can buy other currencies, or does it give you an option of using old fashioned money if you have an account? If not, where do you buy BTCs?

I've used Cryptopia and Binance with reasonable ease. I've only ever used cryprto on them. I've converted some of my BCH and DGB from mining to get some small amounts of other things.

My first time I used BTC and transfering in took ages and cost lots compared with the amount I was using (~£100). BCH and DGB have both been pretty cheap and I used XVG to transfer between the two as it's a low value coin and worked on both, it also seemed to be recommended for just such features when researching!

Typically you can transfer in any coin that the exchange trades in, you then sell the coin for BTC and then buy whichever coin with the BTC on the exchange. You don't have to move it around so BTC works fine for this. Most exchanges work on a Vs BTC or one of the bigger Cryptos (LTC/ETH etc).

Also i'd recommend Coinomi as a wallet for a lot of coins. It also has Shapeshift and Changely built in which means you can exchange coins within the app. Handy though I think you can do better with more faff going through a proper exchange. However you do need to register and give them a photo of your passport or similar due to Know Your Customer regs on most of them! (Which is a pain on Poloniex as you need a web camera to take pictures, or your phone and your passport handy)

[steamship]

Originally Posted by ulfilias

... get some small amounts of other things.

This is pretty much what I'm thinking of doing initially. Dipping my toe in first before diving in headlong. Better to stub my stub than crack my skull.

[moltuae]

Looks like the chance to grab a crypto bargain is over. There's a strong price uptick on almost every price graph today: https://coinmarketcap.com






TOM LEE: Bitcoin's bloodbath was totally normal, and now offers 'the biggest buying opportunity in 2018'
http://uk.businessinsider.com/bitcoi...18-1?r=US&IR=T

[ulfilias]

Hi There,

That's probably the start of the upswing again. It may not be quite as Bargainous as the absolute bottom of the curve, but compared with a week ago it's very cheap at ~£8,500 if it goes to the ~£16,000 it was and if it goes to the ~$100,000 predicted!!!

I'm more into mining than direct investing at the moment though!

[ainarssems]

Well,it's been eventful week with new Antminer release, BTC and other cryptocurrency prices dropping and then going up again at different rates as well as payments for hashing power being in a bit of turmoil as well. Busy week as usual for me working night shift and watching kids during day while still trying to follow everything that's happening in cryptoworld; max 4 hours sleep per day.

Low prices has definitely opened some investment opportunities and some profit was to be made exchanging different cryptos as the prices changed at different rates.

Next to discuss is Antminer A3 release, by the looks of it there have been 15k sold so far and i did not buy one, but a lot less than estimated 150k of D3's but this may change with further batches being released. At the moment it should bring profitability down to $20 per day if no further units ship and Siacoin price stays the same. There has been a lot of uproar in community and there are couple of other Blake 2b miners coming out in near future. The official Obelisk miner coming out in June will have similar hashrate but below 500W power consumption compared to 1200W A3, Halong promise 4x more powerful miner at 1000w but no time given. Obelisk miner supposedly have some extra circuitry built in for possible future algo change by fork if required and supported by community which would render other Blake 2b ASIC's useless.

My Onda motherboards arrived today but have not tried them out yet. No way 3 slot wide Vegas i ordered from Amazon will fir, even double slot cards are very tight. Here is a picture with a dodgy reference RX480 on it. The motherboard does have inboard video even if it was advertised as not having one.



RX Vega 56 prices have gone through the roof with even preorder and used cards on e-bay being in £700 range. The ones i ordered from amazon.fr are still best price but long waiting time and qty is now limited to 3. https://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B07...5RDHNB96&psc=1

[ainarssems]

I have been doing some more experimenting for CryptoNight and I got my rig of RX Vega + RX480 + RX 580 to work well for a while onXMR stak, but after it crashed it had reset my AMD config file to just one card and one thread so i have switched back to Cast for noe. Also looked into Gateless Gate Sharp as it has lower dev fee and allows clock/power settings from the miner but that was just freezing up.

I think I will compile my own XMR stak with 0% dev fee and try to make it work. I do think 2% is a bit greedy from them, if it was like 0.5% i would happily pay it.