It's been just over 2 months since I came to the realization that we were watching the future unfold right before our eyes. We are living in a time when we will soon look back on and say "I was there when..."
Yes, I'd heard of Bitcoin before, but it was learning about blockchain that sent me down the rabbit hole.
I was completely convinced, (and still am) that this is the future of money, and that changed everything. Lucky for me it wasn't too hard to convince my husband. All my other projects have been put on hold, as it made everything else seem insignificant. I knew what I had to do to join this movement. I had to become a miner. I didn't just want to mine to get exposure to the market, I wanted to know more, learn more, get involved and most importantly, I wanted to support this movement and join this growing network... and I wanted to be able to teach others too.
Being a stay at home mom means my life isn't exactly fancy-free. I have a lot to work around, as many of you who might want in on this amazing early wave of opportunity, can relate. When there's a baby in the picture, its not quite as easy as flipping on a computer and running a program.
I'm excited to tell you about my journey to building my first, then second rig, as I now plan my third, fourth... fifth...
I did so much research. I weighed my options on what kind of approach I wanted to take. I realized as I bought my first GPU, I had nowhere to assemble without creating a baby danger zone.
So,
Mission #1 - Create space.
I had done some research and was about to buy my parts, but wait. WHERE was I going to do all of this work?
My home isn't exactly huge, and we don't even have a basement. We live on a few acres, but this isn't exactly an outdoorsy kind of activity. I have a garage full of junk. Perfect.
So I set about cleaning up. I worked around her nap time at first and organized. I stayed up way too late, way too many times. Everyday, I did a little more. I picked a corner and went through all the junk until I could sweep the floor or wipe a counter. So much went into the garbage, or into a camp fire. I killed SO MANY SPIDERS. It was spider Armageddon. Shudder.
When I began to see space, new stuff went in. I used the things that I had available to me. I had a pretty decked out home office to work with from our last house, and the rest was odds and ends repurposed, if only as temporary fixtures. If it could serve a purpose, it was put to work. If not, it was trash. I had shelves that my friends gave me from their home reno, those went on the wall. I had leftover MDF from our previous shelf project and used that too. I moved our desks and my old computer set up from out of our house and into the garage it all went.
I even had to pull LAN from the house into the garage so I could have a hard wired connection to work with. So into the ceiling I went. That was its own adventure. I'll tell that story another time perhaps.
YouTubers are amazing at showing you which components to buy right down to the last wire and zip tie. What they don't show you is where they actually do all this work. Unless you have all sorts of money or just happen to have an empty warehouse with some mega wattage just in your back yard, you're gonna have to get creative about where to do something like this. It's the least glamourous work ever, but it's one of the barriers to entry for a job like mining.
Mission #2 - Congrats on your new job
I, like many moms, am pulled in about a thousand directions each day. Between trying to cook and eat organic food everyday, to keeping our property clean, the house clean, happy husband and keep a tiny human alive (while trying to stay alive myself) my plate is regularly pretty full. I find that a number of things will fill an entire day without even a moment to think about touching a computer. It took quite the shift in mindset once the space was ready. I had to think about this like it was my job, as though I had a boss. It's not that I'm not self motivated. I have that in spades and I don't mind saying it. What I do have is a ton of competing priorities. I know that in order to be successful in this space, I have to put it at or near, the top of my to do list, continuously. Keep improving, like I'm going for a promotion. Like a regular job. The better I do, the more hardware I can justify, and the more I can expand.
Mission #3 - Getting this BLEEPING BLEEEEEEEEEP computer working!!!!!
Ok, so as you can tell, this didn't go smoothly for me. Damn you guys on YouTube making this look easy! It wasn't. Yes I'm a noob, but I've built "normal" computers before. The monstrosity hanging from chicken wire around a fan, well I call that my GMO PC. I went to so many computer stores in town and many of them had never seen a motherboard like the ASUS B250 Mining expert (19 PCI E GPU!) Many had never dealt with a 1375w PSU. I had no help except to session video after video on YouTube. It took hours. It was the weirdest binge watching you've ever imagined. I watched 2 hour continuous build videos while eating popcorn and taking notes.
YouTubers, you're amazing. Thank you, thank you. Moms I promise you. Even if you've never touched the inside of a computer before, all the answers are on YouTube.
So long story short, I read some manuals, tried multiple different components. With GPU, without GPU, inserted different ram. Tried a new board. Drank some wine. Tried the other PSU. Still nothing. Days pass. Wine bottles are emptied. Turns out I had 2 flawed PSUs, that weren't freakin' cheap either. Thermaltake, you suck, never again. Corsair for the win. what made me laugh was that my diagnostic tool for this was a super cheap 600w PSU (all I could find without an online order) and that flashed the board up. My job is saved! After more frustrations, corrupting my Windows install once or twice, I kept going, and eventually, I had a stable build.
Mission #4 - Getting Mining!
Ok, after all that, I still had empty crypto wallets! That just felt wrong. So much work just to get to this point. At this point my friends were starting to question my sanity, and if they were ever going to see me again. I've always been a little weird so none of this was too shocking, to those who know me, but I was totally becoming the crazy computer lady who lives in her garage.
My particular method of mining was to try and get the simplest, most stable setup I could, so I could leave it alone and let it do its thing. I don't have the luxury of watching it all day long to make sure it doesn't keel over, I have a baby for that! I tried a number of services, I tried Nicehash, then Minergate, then Nicehash again. Then we all know what happened to Nicehash. Not so nice. Lost about $100. At least it wasn't my first dollars mining, but still. That sucked.
So now I have 2 miners running on Nanopool and so far so good! I like direct mining. Why would you care what crypto you're mining if you're getting paid out in Bitcoin? I should have realized how shady that business model was. But that's all part of the job.... keep learning!
So now it's a mission to keep adding GPUs, and reconfigure to keep the heat off. This is what I've got so far... and it's not pretty, but I'm also not done yet ;) Far from it.
