I remember the early days of bitcoin, mostly the spectacle of it all. There was BitcoinTV, the pizza that everyone revalues with each all-time-high price, the bitcoin spigot that gave out free coins to drum up interest, the scams, the fears, the dreams and the realities. To say that a lot of people were wrong back then is an understatement.
Earlier this summer I decided to enter the crypto market by using my normally idle 1080's to start mining. I did some quick reading and found that the recommended mining was ZEC. I fired it up, joined a pool and set out to look for an exchange to use. I settled on www.hitbtc.com for some reason that eludes me now. I've seen positive and negative posts and I will simply say that I have not had any major issues with the exchange over the past few months. The only thing I do not like is the fractions of coins that seem to be left over very frequently.
I gathered a little bit of Zec and decided I wanted to change it over to Bitcoin. I easily did this and then decided I wanted to give it a shot and actually spend it. Newegg.com struck my interest and I needed a pair of headphones. I set up a mobile wallet on my phone and transferred from the exchange to my phone wallet and then used that to pay Newegg. It went fairly easily for a first time. I received my headphones paid for by ZEC mining a few days later.
I watched the market for some time and made a few trades on the ups and downs. I lost a little bit on speculation but enjoyed it as a side interest. I had invested very little except electricity so far. My job saw me collecting decommissioned servers so I looked into how to possibly use them for mining as well.
Turns out there is a very healthy CPU mining coin called Monero. It is also a very privacy focused coin which I felt was primed to grow in value and use as well. I set about mining and investing in Monero. I quickly had several older Xeon servers happily mining away XMR as the price started to rise. Seeing a modest amount in my exchange and wallet I decided to investigate "cashing out".
So tonight I set about doing the following:
- Setup a new checking account separate from my other accounts. If anything unwanted happened, it would happen to a brand new account with little exposure possible.
- Setup a Coinbase account and link the new account - https://www.coinbase.com/join/5a1f7509969d0d00d896810c
- transfer over some Ethereum (based on fees) to sell
- transfer the amount from Coinbase to my new account
I setup a CapitalOne 360 checking account because it had no fees and no minimum balance. I decided to fund it with $100 just for kicks anyway. I then quickly setup a new account on Coinbase and immediately setup two-factor authentication with my phone/authenticator. Then I linked up my brand new account and was able to login and link them quickly. So far, no issues at all.
Now I need to withdraw the Ethereum from my HitBTC account and into my coinbase account. Simple enough, put in the authenticator, answer the email address and wait for the transaction to show up on Coinbase. I will say that the transactions between MyMonero.com wallet to HitBTC was a bit long and then the exchange of Ethereum from HitBTC to Coinbase was a bit long as well. Coinbase required at least 50 block confirmations which took approximately 15 minutes.
So far it has been a bit of a journey but an interesting one that I can see getting better. Right now I am converting Cryptocurrencies to USD so there are a few more steps. I'd have liked to have just spent ETH or XMR directly but the list seems lacking right now for major vendors. Hopefully that will quickly change in 2018. I'll follow this up hopefully tomorrow!