How To Mine Ethereum Part 2: Hashrate and GPUs

Dog has been walked.

So, once you decide that you want to mine Ether, you've got to shell out some cash for GPUs. But first, DO YOUR RESEARCH! Firstly, know the difference between processing power (hashrate) and memory. The higher the hashrate, the faster ether will  be mined, and the more money you will make. For memory, at the time of writing, you need at least 3gb to mine ether, because the blockchain is large enough to require that much memory. The blockchain is slowly increasing in size, so down the road you will need more and more memory.

So, you should be looking for a GPU with some where in the range of 20-30 Mh/s (mega hashes per second with 1 megahash = 1,000 hashes (SI units do come in handy!)). Now to make things more confusing, 1 Mh/s when mining ether does NOT equal 1 Mh/s of mining other coins. It kind of stinks, but that's the way it is, so get used to it.

AMD GPUs tend to be seen as a better investment than NVIDIA GPUs because of they have comparable hashrates for less than half the price. Now, you can't actually buy a AMD GPU that's good for mining at retail prices, because mining has become so popular that there is a worldwide shortage of GPUs. Yes, there is a worldwide shortage of a computer component that is tied to a highly volatile coin, and the manufacturer does not want to flood the market by manufacturing more GPUs, since the price of ether could drop, people stop mining, and there's a glut of GPUs and they can't sell they're new GPUs at a profit. Don't you just love economics? Needless to say, gamers are pissed at miners because of the price increase of GPUs (the other big market for GPUs is gaming PCs), for instance a AMD RX 480 8gb retailed for $200 brand new, and now you'd be hard pressed to find a USED one on ebay for $300. That being said, I believe this is still the best option. It still has a hasrate comparable to the $800 NVIDIA cards, and it consumes less power. It's a year older than the AMD RX 580 8gb, but again, still has a comparable hashrate with lower energy consumption and costs less (the 580 is about $450 on Ebay).

So once you pick your GPU, you need to decide if you want to just add it to your existing desktop computer or build a dedicated mining rig. If you're just getting your feet wet and don't want to invest $2,000 buck in building a 7 GPU mining rig, then I suggest just buying 1 or 2 GPUs and installing them to a desktop computer.

And now I need a nap.

How To Mine Ethereum Part 1: Super Basic

Ethereum (aka Ether) is a cryptocurrency (like bitcoin, but any cryptocurrency besides bitcoin is called an altcoin) but it works on a very different algorithm that was designed for smart contracts that are always executed correctly because they are part of a public ledger, so one party cannot disrupt the contract. Ether is the currency with which the contracts can be executed. Ether is the second "biggest" cryptocurrency, so it's the "biggest" altcoin (Litecoin, Dash, and Siacoin are others, but there's like 1200 different cryptocurrencies, including meme-based one like Dogecoin...yeah...meme-based).

That's all well and good, but how will it make me rich? Chances are, it won't. The value of Ether (and all other cryptocurrencies) is super speculative, so you kind of just need to buy a few coins, get lucky and ride a wave until you get scared and then sell them. Not too much different from penny stocks. Really, the main difference between altcoins (bitcoins is accepted by some vendors, so it's kind of becoming a real currency) and penny stock is that you can min for altcoins. All you need is a sieve and...jk you need a GPU. If you don't know what a GPU is, you should probably stop reading and not worry about mining. Huh...still there? Okay. A GPU is a graphics processing unit (aka graphics card) that is normally used for rendering games or models or art and other graphic-y things. But you can also use it to compute things, kind of like a CPU (central processing unit, the main "brain of your computer. But GPUs compute things much faster than CPUs and you can have up to 7 of them on a single motherboard, instead of just one CPU. So, you can compute the Ether blockchain algorithm that needs to be processed to keep the Ether network secure, and then you get rewarded for it! In Ether! So, mining is just this process of running the blockchain on your computer and then getting paid for it. You can also mine with a CPU but they're super slow and you won't make any money because it will cost you more in electricity than you will make mining Ether.

I have to take the Dog for a walk, so part 2 will be coming soon.

Coffee Mug

Basically, drink a mug of coffee and listen to this song. Or just listen to this song.

Advantage of an Individual Retirement Account (IRA)

I know I'm getting old because I used to post about cool things like pokemon popping out of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) when trying to understand the mysteries of the universe, and now I'm writing a post about retirement savings accounts. Welp, I guess it won't be long until I'm wearing diapers again...

Put bluntly, an IRA is a bank account where you can invest money and not have to pay taxes on interest (Roth IRA), or delay paying taxes on interest (Traditional IRA). So, a Roth IRA sounds a lot better, right? Well, in a Traditional IRA you put the money in before income tax, so your interest is earned on tax free money, and then you pay taxes once the money is withdrawn. Dang, I just realized how boring this topic is, but I'm going to power through. Okay, so I'm a fan of the Roth IRA for two reasons: 1) It's super easy to add money too because you just transfer money from your normal bank account to your Roth IRA account and you don't really have to worry about tax forms, and 2) since the amount of money you can put into either type is limited to $5,500 per year, if you can save $5,500 of after tax money, you're really saving like $7,500ish (I'm not going to calculate stuff) of pre-tax money.

So, that's the basics. I highly recommend Mr. Money Mustache and Mad FIentist if you want to get serious about saving money. Also, /r/financialindependence is a great community.

Shipping Container Homes and Tiny Houses

Buying a home is expensive (duh). I'm a pretty cheap and eccentric guy, so I stumbled across shipping container homes (like the ones that are stacked up on cargo ships) and tiny houses. First things first, how are theses different from trailers? Well, tiny houses really aren't much different, they're basically just smaller, but more upscale trailers (like $57k for an off the shelf 117sqft home which is about $487 per square foot). Making a DIY tiny house is much less expensive. On the other hand, shipping container homes tend to be permanent structures made from one or more containers that are often stacked in cool ways. The containers themselves are pretty darn cheap, about $1k-6k (depending on newness) for a 40' x 8' x 8' container (320sqft). That's $3 to $18 per square foot (before adding things like electricity and plumbing)! To put that number into perspective, most houses I've seen, you'd be lucky to find anything under $120 per square foot. So, in essence tiny homes save you money by reducing your consumption and shipping container homes save you money by re-purposing mass produced containers. Obviously, you still need to buy land.

Elm From Tumbleweed Tiny House Company

Inside of the Tiny House

Modern Shipping Container Home

Spoonflower

The actual fabric! (rotated)

The design

Spoonflower inspired me to start designing fabrics that I could use to make Arm Pillozzz. Spoonflower is a neat site that allows you to upload images and tile them to create patterns. Then you can order them or just post them online so that other people can order them. You get 10% of any sales and you get a 10% discount on your own fabrics. Ordering a pattern on the basic cotton fabric is $17.50 per yard length (the rolls are 42" wide), so it's expensive compared to commercial fabrics. But you can make pretty much anything you want. It's like a zazzle/cafepress type site for fabric.  Most of my patterns are rigidly geometric, but I think I'm a pretty creative geometrist (Geometrician? Geometer? Whatever, I like geometry.) I think pattern design is math intensive considering that to effectively repeat a unit block, the boundaries of the block have to be consistent when repeated. Also, there are a lot of colors, and the way they interact and compliment each other is very interesting. Here's my first pattern!

LiteCoin Mining

I started looking into mining LiteCoin. I'm not too sure that it will be profitable, but I thought I'd give a shot with an old computer that goes completely unused. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (long term support) because Windows XP is not going to be supported by Microsoft after April 8, 2014. I downloaded the LiteCoin wallet and the bootlogger quick sync file. The syncing was only supposed to take an hour, but it took about four. Good start. Guess that's what I get for using a 10 year old computer. Anyschmows, I still have to download a mining program (pooler's cpuminer) and join a mining pool. I could go it alone, but it's practically impossible to get any coins by yourself. An analogy to the way LiteCoin (and BitCoin and all other altcoins) are mined is everyone is throwing darts trying to hit the LiteCoin and whoever hits it, wins. So my slow computer is a tiny dart and fast computers are machine guns. So, to distribute the effort and end up with a partial coin instead of nothing, pools were formed and the more computing power you contribute to the pool, the larger of a percentage of the LiteCoin you'll get when your pool wins. Kind of like a lottery pool.

Interestingly, mining is what keeps the network safe, as the math that your computer is doing is checking the validity chain of other people's transactions. Neat stuff.