Catpain’s Log 009 – xCoding XRP

Ever read a Dan Brown book? I have. A lot of people will have heard of this Novel, “The Davinci Code” [1]. In short, it’s a mystery, suspense book where the main character Robert Langdon embarks on an adventure to search for a real life Holy Grail. The man is a symbologist and on his journey he deciphers countless meanings behind paintings and object to help solve the mystery of finding the grail. “A picture is worth a thousand words” as the saying goes, but Langdon would say “Which words?”

Symbols are at the heart of every civilization. Use them every day! From the app icons on our smartphones to the alphabet to the markings on our currency. Symbols are instantly recognizable and when looking at one you may identify with the meaning immediately.

Let’s take a look at a widely known symbol. It’s a very important one. And you don’t even have to be a math geek to know it! Pi!

This singular symbol is a cornerstone of mathematics; geometry. Unlink a flag it is also a unit of measurement. Pi is used as an angle measurement expressed in the unit radians. But if you prefer degrees, one Pi is 180 degrees. Two Pi and you get a full circle.

Alright, so units and instant identification and meaning make up a good symbol. A currencies do this exactly. Here are two currency symbols. Can you tell what country they belong to?

On the left is the Indian Rupee symbol, and the British Pound symbol on the right. Each, when seen, can easily strike in the mind of the view what country that money came from. I argue XRP needs the same. Bitcoin even does this! The capital ‘B’ with two lines down.

When I think of XRP I think of this symbol. The symbol is that of a triskelion, and it has been around for years. To me, it reminds me of their three core software offerings; xRapid, xCurrent, xVia. All joined together.

When thinking of XRP you may be tricked into thinking that the Ripple triskelion is good enough, but you’d be dead wrong. Ripple and XRP are totally different things. XRP is the digital asset that flows like drops of water on the Interledger that has a caretaker; Ripple.

The XRP community has called for a design. There have been numerous submissions. All you have to do is take a look at the @xrpsmbol twitter account to see the various tweets and ideas of others.

Here are a couple of the submissions from that twitter account:

CoinTrek even has one! Although mine is less of a creation and points out something that’s already out there. I even like the explanation behind it. I had this idea of complex numbers. There’s a real part and an imaginary one.

The ledger is very real and we use it to confirm transactions we make. Swapping IOU’s actually. But XRP is the enabler of said ledger and maybe it’s analogous to the imaginary part. I was searching about for existing symbols for imaginary parts of numbers. Of course there’s the italicised letter ‘i’ that we all know from high school algebra. But what about those fancy math papers? Then I remembered writing a document in LaTeX and thought of a font. Why don’t we just use this? It’s simple. The image below is the symbol ‘I’ from the Fraktur script [2][3]. There a loads of angles and is used by LaTex for, you guessed it, the imaginary number symbol. Nobody would see it coming either, and it already exists!

Call me silly but there’s kind of a backward ‘P’ and forward ‘R’ in there too. Not seeing an ‘X’ though. Just drop a line in there somewhere and call it a day!

Symbols are important. The community is adoping one. Years from now, the adoped symbol for XRP is going to be globally recognizable. The question I submit to you is, will you rember the days you owned XRP before then?

References:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Da_Vinci_Code
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur
3. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fraktur_I_symbol.png

Captain’s Log 008 – Mindless vs Mindful Mining

Secondary Warp Field – Achievement

Has anyone bothered to take a look at the price of graphics cards lately? An Nvidia GTX 1070 is over $500! I have even seen them as high as $800 at the beginning of 2018. All the GPUs have been snapped up by, well, people like me! I have no shame. From my perspective. Earning passive income has been a small obsession of mine for a while. Some people manage this in the form of collecting royalties from a published book. I know there are folks that do this renting out their houses, but I decided to do it with cryptocurrency. There are many way to earn cryptocurrency, but in this case mining. In this post, I’ll take you on my journey building a mining rig, I’ll share with you some resources and I’ll tell you why I decided to build instead of renting hash power.

Like most people Googling “How to Mine Bitcoin”, I was nuts about the rage of making massive amounts of money! I stumbled across NiceHash [1] and quickly learned that the Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB graphics card in my day to day gaming rig would bring me in roughly $0.50-1.0 USD a day. Wow! That’s pretty awesome. All I had to do was let this thing run and in come the dollar signs. I saw this work over a month earning my first, call it, $50 worth of BTC. Logically I wanted to find a way to do this faster with more hash power and earn more. Here’s a nice graphic of the NiceHash concept. You’re not actually mining. You’re selling hashpower to renters whom in turn mine with your rig and pay for it in Bitcoin.

Even before GPU prices hit all time highs, a GTX 1070 was still pretty expensive; around $3-400. Enter the NiceHash marketplace to order hash power. I had worked it out! Yes! I thought I could actually put in, say $50 in BTC to NiceHash, make an order for hashpower to go mine Ethereum. Then make enough from that to sell the ETH for BTC and end up with more than what I had put in. Mindlessly hoping I’d mine for less and make more. Translated I thought the cycle would repeat endlessly. Great idea if the markets are heading in your direction. Great idea if the difficulty of whatever you’re mining holds steady forever… Great idea if… So, you get the point. I actually tried this and failed. Not to say this is impossible. Mining or buying crypto in the hopes that it will one day increase in price is the mantra of a HODLER.

Here’s why I failed and you might too. The reason is fees and a poor understanding of how I’d actually make money. I spent a lot of time thinking about why I failed to make more money back than I put in, so like a good engineer I made a spreadsheet and went to the math. NiceHash charges a fee to place an order and you pay an amount in BTC per unit of hash per day. Check out my calculator here if you want! The calculator disregards the fees but you’ll get the idea. Usage is pretty simple. Put in the price of bitcoin and the marketplace rate of whatever algorithm on NiceHash you want to use. Then adjust the hashpower limit and amount you want to spend until the duration in hours or days matches what you want. Lastly, use another mining calculator online to determine if what you’re going to mine will net you more than what you paid in BTC. I’ve used whattomine [2] to do this. Remember to ignore electrical cost because as a renter of hashpower you don’t have it.

Keep in mind, this calculator doesn’t account for two things. The first is the fee that NiceHash charges and what I call “slippage”. Slipple is a term I coined referring to the percent of hashpower that either gets rejected by the pool or somehow doesn’t earn you anything. Keyword is somehow. After I made this sheet I learned that there would have to be a perfect storm of market pricing for both the price of the coin and what hashpower is selling for on NiceHash. There are some advantages to this system. If you want a lot of hashpower quickly, then this solution is great. I used it once to mine some siacoin early on and ended up with a boat load of it, which I then used to toy around with.

After all this I decided it was worth getting my own rig and to quit trying to play the “will mining X using rented hashpower make me money?” game. I wanted to build a mining rig but wasn’t quite sure how to do it. After searching for a resource I came across one of the best run blogs and resources for individuals wanting to get into hobby mining, and that is www.1stminingrig.com [3]. The fellow that runs the blog goes by the name Ciprian V, and it is obvious that he actually cares about helping others get in on the action. He is very knowledgeable and gives good advice. I credit his blog with arming me with the knowledge I needed to build my rig. I have built a number of computers in the past, but when it comes to a specialty computer there are extra steps to follow, specifically in the realm of BIOS settings. I saved up a few bucks and settled on a parts list, which I’ve shared below. Personally, I like to use PCPartpicker [4] because it help make sure your parts are compatible.

Here is my build: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/tRCr7W

Rationale for part selection:

• CPU – You do not need a powerful processor.
• RAM – Max of 4GB. Barebones memory for Windows to run.
• Mother Board – Get one with the most PCIe slots you can.
• Hard Drive – Anything will do. Cheapest SSD you can find.
• Power Supply – PSU – Two 750 or 850 Watt supplies daisy chained together.
• Accessories:
  • Risers. Get good ones! – Here’s an example.
  • Multipower Supply Adapter – Here’s an example.
  • External power button. – Here’s an example.
• GPU – What you get is really up to you or your bank account XD.

For me, I wanted to get the most efficient and the most versatile GPU. I evaluated my NVIDIA and AMD options, and honed in on my choice. While the AMD RX 580 and 480 GPUs are descent for mining, I already had an NVIDIA 1060 6GB in my gaming rig so I knew that I wanted to try and stick with NVIDIA if I could. I was looking to build a 6 GPU mining rig and my first inclination was go get a 6 1080Ti’s. Except those things were going for over $1000 at the time and my budget was about $2000 for GPUs. I kept scaling my choices back and ultimately realized that I could get 4 GPUs at best, and I was eyeing the GTX 1070 and 1080 models. I ran the numbers for hash power and decided I’d be better off with the 1070s.

For performance metrics I went off of Ciprian’s 1stminingrig site. He really has done a ton of leg work getting these numbers together.

• GTX 1070 – 1stminingrig link
• GTX 1080 – 1stminingrig link

Fair warning about profitability. Do not base your entire research off of NiceHash’s profitability calculator. The thing really is a wild guess. True the calculator uses past data, but the markets are so volatile that you have to ask yourself. Is the past going to be any reflection of the future? Probably not.

To tell you why I chose the GTX 1070 over a 1080 was because of the confluence versatility combined with efficiency requirement. You may check profitability of a 1080 vs a 1070 and determine that you may be able to make more income with a 1080 much more readily than a 1070, but you may overlook one important fact. NVIDIA has outfitted the GTX 1700 with GDDR5 and the GTX 1080 with GDDR5X (5X) memory. 5X memory actually hinders the 1080 such that you are really limiting yourself to being the best at mining the Equihash and Lyra2REv2 algorithms. Ethereum, or Ethash, on a 1080 is problematic. A 1070 is better at Ethash mining than a 1080, and per watt more efficient at Equihash than a 1080 too.

The specific GPU I chose was the EVGA GTX 1070 SC Black Edition, Model#08G-P4-5173-KR. I wanted to be able to mine the most algorithms I could since as a hobby miner I wanted the ability to randomly mine that new up and coming coin at will. Of course, my mining rig’s primary purpose would be t reach return on investment and beyond, but I definately devote a little hashpower time to other cryptos. For instance, I heard about Ravencoin a while back. Dropped everything I was doing for a few days to go mine 1000RVN. No idea if that will ever become anything, but I figured why not? Plus it’s insane fun. Not knowing is what makes things interesting!

Building a rig is fun. There will be challenges. Do your homework! I will share one bit of very good advice. Take your time and don’t be in a rush. I destroyed a motherboard and a CPU because I was excited and rushed to build my rig. A mistake that cost me a couple hundred dollars in components. My rig is unique because I built the frame myself out of wood. Can you believe that people sell these things online for $100+?!? I build mine with $15 worth of wood and a few extra screws lying around my home. I made use of this 1stminingrig guide to help me through it. Although, fair warning, I don’t care how many BIOS articles you read get ready to play with it. 😉

Here is what I ended up with. No, I wasn’t going for good looking. Just functional hardware.

I’ve pictured my rig’s case with and without hardware installed. The case is simply a shelf backed with a piece of plywood. I secured all the components with ether velcro or screws strategically placed to hold things down to the wood.

A lot of people use MSI Afterburner but I happen to be using EVGA Precision. Both software allow you to do the same thing, which is tune the GPU’s core and memory clock speeds as well as voltages. I have used it to set all of my GPUs to +150/+500Mhz core and memory clock speeds, respectively. The EVGA 1070 SC Black Edition is already clock around 1784Mhz with its boost clock, and the additional settings bring it up to about 2000 Mhz stable. Believe me, these settings can take some patience and tweaking to get to a setting that doesn’t render the GPU dead afer 5 minutes of mining.

Here are some benchmarks I’ve collected for my rig with baseline settings by algorithm:

• Neoscrypt – 3.308568 MH/s
• Lyra2REv2 154.264 MH/s
• DaggerHashimoto – 104.052 MH/s
• Equihash – 1,061.98 H/s

With the +150/+500 clock settings by algorithm:

• Neoscrypt – 3.6545344 MH/s
• Lyra2REv2 166.396 MH/s
• DaggerHashimoto – 121.196 MH/s
• Equihash – 1,360.408 H/s

Here’s the increase in percentage I got for my hours of playing around with settings!

• Neoscrypt – +10.45%
• Lyra2REv2 +7.86%
• DaggerHashimoto – +16.47%
• Equihash – +28.1%

As you can see, the payoff is small for some algorithms and larger for others. Just learning how to play with GPU settings makes the venture worthwhile!

As of today, I have made about 27% of my initial GPU investment back. That’s $500 out of $1800 I spent on GPUs. Around last December I got my hands on 4 GTX 1070s for about $435 a piece. I intend to make the rest of the full amount back. I’d like to get another two GPUs and increase the rate at which I’m earning, even if it does prolong my return on investment. As of writing, the GPU I bought original is retailing for $550 at NewEgg’s website. That’s still a lot more than I’d rather pay. Hopefully with the slump in the market the prices will continue to drop.

I intend to continue the achievement warp field focus with additional ways to go about earning cryptocurrency. I think mining is the most stereotypical way of doing so, and I want to shed light on others. That is one purpose of CoinTrek, teach cryptocurrency achievement to others, support Ripple, and tackle the hard topics just like  Star Trek has and continues to do! I have removed my gauge from the sidebar. Since I’m not solely about earning a single Bitcoin anymore, I felt having it there was a moot point.

If you feel like helping me out on my journey, or you found this article useful. I would happily take a donation. Ripple and Ethereum are my cryptos of choice and those addresses can be found in the right sidebar.

ETH: 0xe85810d64a28c6ffc2351368beace84992a01e09

BTC: 3JQKyiMReYXHkGb48PvdJgd6wjBsBBKD78

As always. Second Star to the Right!

References:

1. www.nicehash.com
2. www.wahttomine.com
3. www.1stminingrig.com
4. www.pcpartpicker.com

Captain’s Log 007 – Ripple Leads The Way

Primary Field of Focus: Ripple – Leading the Way.Today I want to write about a recent occurrence in the realm of crypto and why I think that it is important.Ripple recently announce in a public statement [1] that they were giving $29 Million dollars worth of $XRP to DonorsChoosefor the benefit of teachers in the classroom for Best School Day This single donation of cryptocurrency is special because it is notably the largest ever donated in a single instance before. Check out their YouTube video! The founders of OmiseGO (OMG), Jun Hasegawa, and Ethereum (ETH), Vitalik Buterin, also donated $1Million to Ugandan Refugees [2]. The average person even has the opportunity donate to charity with their own cryptocurrency through an organization called Fidelity Charitable. There is even a little known crypto called Donationcoin (DON). That particular crypto doesn’t seem to have much activity, but at least the concept is out there. If there’s another one out there, let me know. I’d be curious.The act of giving $29 Million to Donors Choose by Ripple is not some publicity stunt by Ripple. I’d venture to say there is way more behind it than that. Yes their name is out there, but for starters, Ripple isn’t just a crypto. Like OmiseGo, they are a company. This single act will help show other companies out there that, one, donating in crypto is possible and a good thing, and two, they are carrying the torch leading the way to encourage other companies to do the same. Now 35,000 classrooms across the country are having their needs fulfilled because of $XRP.Another significant effect, in my opinion, is the market stimulation. DonorsChoose didn’t get $29 United States Dollars, they have it in $XRP. DonorsChoose has to liquidate all of the $XRP into USD to obtain their donation for it to be useful to them. That means selling on markets. At the time of donation $XRP was trading at $0.53, so the $29 Million donation released a new 54,716,981 $XRP onto the market. I know Ripple still has boat loads of $XRP of their own, but it’s now less! This is good for the market because, first, Ripple itself has less of a piece of the overall market. Second, because of the increase in trade volume over the coming weeks as DonorsChoose sells off their donation. They agreed not to sell it all at once, as is their policy with donated shares of a company, according to CNBC [3].In the future, it is my hope and also I expect there will be additional companies contributing to society by donating their crypto. As new companies are created and their crypto assets obtain and grow value, a great source of financial power is wielded. One that can benefit any charity should that company or crypto organization choose to follow Ripple’s lead. In the market volatility of crypto currency $29 Million is created and lost on a weekly basis. We should try and do some good with it while we ride the roller coaster!References:

1. https://ripple.com/insights/ripple-executives-proud-support-americas-public-schools-29-million-xrp-donation-donorschoose-org/
2. https://stocksgazette.com/2018/03/30/omisego-omg-and-ethereum-founder-give-hope-to-uganda-refugees-with-1m-donation/
3. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/28/ripple-gives-away-29-million-of-its-cryptocurrency-to-public-schools.html

Captain’s Log 006 – Introducing Warp Fields!

When I first started CoinTrek, I couldn’t help but dive in aimlessly and start writing, and my goal to earn a single bitcoin quickly became a limiting factor in the development of this blog. Since then I have reimagined what CoinTrek will become. Now with great pleasure I bring to you Warp Fields! One of my greatest fascinations with Star Trek was the mere fact that almost everything was plausible. I read a book in my early college days called, “The Physics of Star Trek” [1]. In that book I first came to realize that a man named Miguel Alcubierre had actually invented Warp Drive. Albeit on paper, but the math existed! Isn’t that awesome? We as a species have the brain power to figure out how to warp space. Unfortunately, the energy requirements are impossible with today’s technology but I am confident that humanity will get there one day.

The Alcubierre Drive got me thinking. CoinTrek is trying to cover a broad range of topics, but I only need one niche, and then it hit me. Just like any starship needs a warp field to travel, I need one too. A Field of Focus! Cointrek will now have Warp Fields of Focus! Now, I do not wish to abandon entirely my other interests, so there will be four Fields of Focus starting out. However, only one of them will be my primary field of focus at any given time. The others shall be secondary. Moving forward I plan to blog monthly about my primary field of focus and one of the three secondaries. If I have time for a third or more then I will do so.

Primary Warp Field: – Ripple, $XRP

My primary field of focus moving forward is going to be Ripple! I repeatedly kept coming back to a single crypto subject that I feel strongly about. Ripple is a company that is going to change the world. I’m not jumping on the bandwagon here by any means because of the $XRP hype last December 2017. I will disclose that I own some $XRP, but I got in before it broke above $0.20. That’s late compared to some people who’ve been into this since 2013.

Here’s what Ripple has on everyone else in crypto:

1. A dream team company that is making all of the right moves. All you have to do is go check out their own blog and twitter feeds to see their progress.
2. Multi-faceted technology that extends beyond just sending around XRP. Ripple goes so much beyond its native token, $XRP.
3. My opinion. Ripple is the most likely to be adopted not only by crypto fan boys and girls, but by industry and regulators.

I will be joining the ranks of what I call “Ripple Reporters”. THese are the men and women that scour the interwebs for information to discuss related to Ripple, and frequent xrpchat[2]. They have their own blogs too. One of my inspirations was a person with the handle Hodor, @Hodor7777 on twitter [3]. I am looking forward to seeing how I fall into this niche.

Secondary Warp Fields

CoinTrek started out talking areas of investing and education, and I have refashioned them into the secondary Warp Fields of Focus. Neither of them has priority over the other, but these represent areas in crypto I want to touch on.

Secondary Warp Field #1 – Achievement

The achievement field of focus will cover all things that I have personally accomplished on my own CoinTrek. This field will focus on earning cryptocurrency, technical development, and cryptocurrencies that are making a difference.

Secondary Warp Field #2 – Investing

I wanted investing to be its own field of focus because I have no real desire to achieve perfection with it. I am not a day trader or swing trader, I am an investor. Fundamentally, if a company has good potential, I am interested. This field of focus will dwell on what I’ve done to keep track of my portfolio and any major moves that I make. As always, for you the reader, only invest in anything what you are personally willing to lose. Any sort of investment moves I make are my own.

Secondary Warp Field #3 – Crypto Culture

This is going to be one of my own most interesting fields of focus because I want to touch on the waves of change crypto and crypto-industry is making on society. There are points worth talking about in both an internal and external context. For instance, internally, crypto is has lots of issues with scamming and hacks. ICOs are taking investor money and not delivering much. What can be done to make your grandmother comfortable with buying cryptocurrency? In another light, how about indirect impacts? Such as companies and crypto organizations. How they treat employees. How diverse are they? What is the makeup of such places? This field of focus is broad and the topics may range widely but I think it’s important to write about. After all, isn’t that what Star Trek was always about? Talking about the hard topics. Getting you to think.

There you have it! I will start on this style of writing starting next month. You may have already noticed that my bitcoin gauge has been replaced with an XRP gauge. I placed a maximum of 10,000 as a placeholder and I may set a goal for myself in the future. For now I intend to collect more XRP relative to any other crypto in my portfolio and I wanted a shiny gauge for it.

References:

1. https://www.amazon.com/Physics-Star-Trek-Lawrence-Krauss/dp/0465002048
2. www.xrpchat.com
3. https://twitter.com/Hodor7777 

CoinTrek – New Year New Me!

I have been out a while folks.  I have been working a bunch of things, but the important part is my life has stabilized.  I’ve moved, started a new job, and among other things generally have been adjusting.  Now I’m ready to jump back in!

Moving forward…

Originally I had set out to earn a Bitcoin. One single bitcoin.  The more I’ve thought about this, the more I believe that I have narrowed myself down into a corner too much. Leaving little room for growth.  I have put a lot of thought into what CoinTrek and I’ll be coming up with a new angle soon. The reason for this is I’ve asked around the community and decided it best that I find a good niche, dig in, and become more consistent.

Coming up… I have a few accomplishments that I want to share.  In the past couple of months, with the time I did have, I’ve built a mining rig and have started earning cryptocurrency.  The learning experiecne is good, and I still want to share it.

Also, I can see I’ve built up a few followers! I’m really thrilled to have you all.  So, moving forward I’m setting a couple goals for myself:

1. Devising a new and better angle for CoinTrek.
2. Regular blog posts – I’m going to shoot for about every two weeks.
3. Sharing the past couple months of learning with you.
4. Creating a CoinTrek path for any “coin-trekkie” out there.

As always, if you have something specific of interest. I’m happy to write my thoughts on it. Drop me a line!

P.s. – My Bitcoin gauge is neat but it might become a gauge for something else! Stay tuned.

CoinTrek – Quick Update

Hello Everyone! I admit silence for a little while now.  My goal is to start writing more frequently and more regularly.  At this point in my life I am in a transition so its very difficult for me to write.  Once I get settled, I’m going to dig into a niche and do it very well.  I hope this happens very soon as I enjoy writing about a topic I enjoy and helping everyone learn!