Video: Life in a Chinese Bitcoin Mine

I found this very interesting video on life in a bitcoin mine in china. The video actually taught me a few things, one of which is that bitcoin is legal in China for ordinary citizens. This misconception isn't all that surprising considering China's love of censorship; after all, even Facebook is blocked in China. This site, gives more detail about bitcoin's legal status in China. Anyways, enjoy!

Mining again?

The last time I mined was way back in in January of 2014. I actually didn't get anything for it either. The blocks for bitcoin were too difficult.

This time, I have mined a more feline cryptocurrency, Nyancoin to be exact. I used the QT wallets integrated miner. I downloaded minerd here. From here ( I think, I had to google it again) I jumped on http://xpool.net . http://xpool.net as the Server, 8870 as the port, and my wallet as the username. I also set my type to pool mining, as I actually wanted to get something, as opposed to playing the crypto lottery. ( as you may know, solo mining means you have to solve a whole block on your own.

The mining had minimal results and in a few hours I got maybe ⅓ of a nyancoin. I also mined this morning for a few hours and got ¼ of a nyancoin. Overall, it is very slow progress. I have a pretty well made computer, and I get 24 kilohash/ second on average. But to truly get meaningful results, I would need to buy an ASIC.

I also only mined when the difficulty was quite low. The difficulty was at 3.3 at one point and I could not get any shares ( shares are a proof of work, and more shares when a block is solved means you will get more of the reward). With bitcoin, my shares never added up high enough to actually get any bitcoin sent to my wallet. With Nyan however, this was not the case.

Overall, it was fun to actually mine something! I recommend trying it out!

Qoinpro review

Nearly two years ago, I signed up with qoin pro. The idea behind the site is you get free cryptos daily. This sounds great but, the site gives so little crypto, you will never actually get anything.

My balance for coins I actually care about are next to nothing. Worst yet, the withdrawal fees are so high I can’t get anything.

BitCoin

BTC

0.00002060774

0.00000002630

59.00%

0.00000004182

Your BitCoin balance:	0.00002060 BTC
Minimum transaction fee:	0.00010000 BTC
Minimum amount:	0.00015500 BTC

DogeCoin

DOGE

1.12645061934

0.00197690616

59.00%

0.00314328079

Your DogeCoin balance:

1.12645061 DOGE

Minimum transaction fee:

4.00000000 DOGE

Minimum amount:

1.34615384 DOGE

Maximum you can send:

0.00000000 DOGE

LiteCoin

LTC

0.00041519675

0.00000036252

59.00%

0.00000057641

Your LiteCoin balance:	0.00041519 LTC
Minimum transaction fee:	0.00100000 LTC
Minimum amount:	0.00126390 LTC
Maximum you can send:	0.00000000 LTC

They do make some cool banners.

You can even sign up under me here. Although, there isn't really a point.

Below is the front page.

I love the nonsense of this page. “Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe”

What does that have do to with anything? There is no interest involved in this site at all.

In short, while Qoinpro is not a scam per se ( be careful of the daily coins you need to pay to unlock. They basically will never return their value [those kind of are a scam]) it won't make you any money. I suppose you would have better luck with facuets.

On a final final note, some of the altcoins are actually withdraw-able, like Feathercoin. But I don't really have an interest in that at this time.

Faucets, Boxes, and More

Faucets have some interesting issues. The concept of a faucet is you get a free very small amount of bitcoin or other cryptocurrency. In exchange, you visit this website, and the owners of the website get ad revenue from your traffic. A few other sources of faucets might be for promotional reasons, for exchange TRI has a faucet with no ads (which might be down). The purpose of this faucet is to increase the value and the interesting in TRI ( whether this works is an very different issue).

One issue with Faucets is frequent use will result in a lot of small transactions to your wallet. Ultimately, when you choose to spent this money, because of its many inputs, the transaction fees related to that transaction will be quite large ( as I talk about in this post).

Faucetbox is a interesting site that provides a solution to this problem. Faucets that choose so, can send money to faucetbox instead. The payment are gathered from whatever faucets the user uses. Amount of bitcoin is past a user set threshold, payment is made to the related bitcoin address.

I now use a few sites that utilize this:

The Bitcoin Sheep

Faucet of America

Jazz Faucet

In other news

User, Sakura Kaminari, has created an online petition for steam to start accepting dogecoin as a form of payment. Steam is an excellent way of buying games, and often times offers the games at great prices. You can find and sign the petition here.

Price increase increases adoption?

Litecoin has been in the spotlight recently because of its rapid price changes, trading at almost 9 dollars coin july 8th and 9th. This has been a high since the 80 dollar days bitcoin was in the thousands.

I think this increase in price has increased interest in cryptocurrencies. I speculate as “interesting” movements happen in the price of cryptocurrecny, more people become interested in them.  This means more vendors will accept the coin and more people may use it.For example, some Adult content sites are even adopting litecoin in addition to bitcoin. You can even buy handcrafted goods for litcoin! Like here on esty!

Last Year this week:

Last Year this week I posted by defeat to Kelso in making this blog. The post is available here. For more details of the story you can start with my first blog post. At this time my blog wasn't even about bitcoins and cryptocurrency yet. On my second post I started to talk about bitcoin, and from there, the rest is history. The contest was measured in terms of page views, who ever had the most page-views at the end won. I think at the time I had something like 1,000 page views, and Keslo had 2,000. Its interesting now that I have closer to 5,000 whereas last I checked he had more like 3,000. 

Bitcoin, a mystery of the internet

While my auto-play was on YouTube I ran into this video. Some the information about bitcoin isn't 100% correct ( like bitcoin isn't completely anonymous) but it is still an interesting video. Some of the claims of the purpose of bitcoin seem a bit outlandish to me. It asserts removing power from government is the purpose of bitcoin. However, if this is the purpose of bitcoin, bitcoin has largely failed in this purpose. The assertions regarding standard of living increasing upon the mass adoption of bitcoin seem unfounded and without merit.

Despite some of the flaws,  it is still interesting to see bitcoin grow in popularity,

Speculation on why the Get fairshare tipbot keeps getting shut down

For those of you not familiar with get fair share, it is a community dedicated to this idea of universal basic Income. In my own words basically, it is the idea that everyone is entitled to a basic standard of income regardless of employment status. They cite one issue with welfare is work is disincentive as working might cause one to lose their welfare status. Universal basic income solves this problem by providing money for impoverished people (  and rich people), but also it allows them to work and make more money, allowing the incentive to work to exist.

In an article i recently wrote for coinbuzz I spoke about how ISIS has been given instruction on how to use bitcoin recently, I also spoke about how giving bitcoin to ISIS is illegal. This is seen in the case of Bryce Weiner, and US Law. I have more details in my past article.

It recently dawned on me that changetip stopped Bryce Weiner's tip from going through for personal liability reasons.  If this is the case, perhaps reddit is doing the same thing. Perhaps if the fairshare bot gave money to a terrorist organization, Reddit itself could be fined. Again, this is speculation, but I think it has merit.

Am I a Real Author Now?

I have good news! I am now officially a published Author on Coinbuzz!
Here are my first two published posts. The first is on the tax implications of bitcoin and the second is on what will happen to the price of bitcoin if Ron Paul's downfall of the US dollar ideas are true. Enjoy!

This good news, also has some bad news too. And that is I probably will be posting on here less often. We will see!

New about page

A Redditor recommended I create an about page, so here it is!

Also Doge is trading at $0.00020000  each, which is the highest I have seen in a while! Such Moon!

RocketShips

The price of Doge has gone to the moon! 

At Least for me! Recently I bought more Doge with bitcoin at 50 satoshi a dogecoin. It’s now around 80! This didn’t happen overnight though; the price dropped all the way down to 38 satashi a one point. The moral is good things happen to those who wait. In fact, if I had more Bitcoin, the best course of action would be to buy even more Doge at the 38 Satoshi Price. Emotion might give me the opposite response. From an emotional standpoint I might be tempted to sell my Doge to get out of it.


Now I have said my Doge has made me money, but that is not entirely true as I have not realized the earnings from it. And to be honest, I’m not sure how. In theory I could use an exchange to turn my Doge into USD to spend. But that would require lots of ID and a lot of personal information that I do not want to give. Another option is to buy things directly with Dogecoin, but I am not sure what I want right now. A third option is that I can trade my Doge for bitcoin and trade that for what I want to buy.

I wanted to emphasis my key point here: Trading, and life frankly, can be risky. But even if things don't look good, don't give up. Sometimes it takes time for a market to turn around.  Sometimes it may look like you have made a terrible mistake. And perhaps you have! But, if you have patience, you will be rewarded. Best of luck!