In The Beginning
(At least my adventure's beginning)
This is not a success story, or a failure story (far from it!), as it doesn't end here, but start of a new chapter and a story for my book none the less!
Bitcoin Mining
It's been a while. Like most of us, I've started this as a hobby and it's grown to a lot more than I can imagine. It was the beginning of 2011 when I first read an article about bitcoins for fun, several articles to be exact. It piqued my interest and off I went with my first and only bitcoin mining machine.
Bitcoin was at around $1 at the time, I knew I wanted to mine with a GPU, so I went and picked up a 5870. It was ok, but not good enough, so I went ahead and sold the 5870 and ponied up for 2 x 6990, for 4 GPU's in total. I was able to mine a couple coins a day, as a hobby it wasn't bad. When May of 2011 hit, Bitcoins were trading at around $7. Couple dollars that I mined a couple months back became couple 10's of dollars, to couple hundred of dollars.
My machine got paid off in no time, but as the price continued to spike, difficulty kept rising to the point I was only making $2-4 a day in around May of 2013, not remotely enough to pay for electricity. As a hobby, little did I know or foresaw Bitcoin rising to today's $8300+! I made away with 400 plus bitcoins, which was nothing, or so I thought, but in today's value, it would amount to over $3m dollars.
Post Bitcoin Mining
I didn't look back after clearing my 400 or so Bitcoins. I traded some away, lost a bunch in the Mt. Gox scandal, lost more when Tradehill went down. But with the left over Bitcoins, I travelled, bought my wife's engagement ring and paid off some debt throughout the way.
I can go into the nitty gritty, so much more details, but let's fast forward the fall of 2016. I still have a couple Bitcoins, definitely nothing to write home about, and this is how my second chapter begins: Mining Ethereum and other AltCoins!
I've now got 6 x 5-6 GPU rigs setup at this point (all purchased with Bitcoin), quit my job, been day and night trading crypto and created my own bots for trading.
Join me on this adventure if you may as I dig deeper into my adventures!