Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Day 19 the one where I got my 3rd NiceHash mining wallet payout

2018: Day 19 the one where I got my 3rd NiceHash mining wallet payout
Word count 49,281 + 2,015 or 51,296 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

Bitcoin seems to have bounced back from the recent plunge under 10,000. People are still out speculatively gathering digital acorns in force. My efforts to gather acorns are still in progress. These payments from NiceHash are starting to rack up. Earlier this morning I got my third wallet payment from NiceHash. Selling my hashing power to NiceHash has been working out ok so far this year. My third payment was for 0.00119401 BTC with a fee of 0.00002437 BTC. Making a transfer from NiceHash which is my miner to the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange requires a balance of at least .002 BTC. It seems to be taking me two payments from NiceHash to be able to transfer to Coinbase. The mechanics are pretty simply. NiceHash pays in BTC which is just a fancy way of saying bitcoins. Given the value of a bitcoin even a fraction can be worth some money. In my case my current mining total is 0.00343698 BTC or according to my recent Google search for “0.00343698 BTC in USD” returned a result of 39.74 US Dollar.

I’m going to keep mining until Wednesday, April 11, 2018 to see what happens. That will round out 100 days for the year. At that point all of my mining efforts can be tallied up. I’m curious to see what the value of 100 days worth of mining will be. One ASUS Dual series GeForce GTX 1060 DUAL-GTX1060-O3G 3GB graphics card cost me a total of $323.73. That cost is a little higher due to the shipping and taxes related purchasing two graphics cards. The seller did refund me the $249.99 for the graphics card that broke down, but not the shipping or taxes. That pretty much means my mining effort needs to surpass $323.73. At the moment my current working theory is to discount the power costs. That is probably not the best strategy, but at the moment that is what I am going with. I am mining with two cards in my Storm Stryker custom built computer.. Back in 2016 I purchased an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB Founders Edition graphics card directly from NVIDIA. Both cards are running right now using the NiceHash Miner software. It might be a more accurate test to see if the ASUS card could pay itself off in 100 days, but I’ll use both cards to make this more interesting.

It looks like on January 21, 2018 my NiceHash wallet will receive a 4th payment. That should be enough to make my 2nd transfer to Coinbase from NiceHash. Right now the transfers are free from NiceHash to Coinbase. That probably means I should transfer every time my wallet hits the minimum amount. I’m just learning about cryptocurrency. Knowing how to make transfers is an important part of the process. Learning about mining works has been very interesting. I have started to learn about all the different algorithms NiceHash sends my way. Each algorithm corresponds to specific coins. I find it all terribly interesting. Some of the coins are not work very much at the moment, but who knows they might skyrocket like bitcoin did this last year. My musing about mining will probably continue until April 11, 2018 or maybe the 12th if I end up writing a really awesome recap.

Mining has been an interesting experience so far. I have learned how to use the MSI Afterburner software to control my GPU temperature based on limiting power. It is a very decent piece of software for being free. Getting the NiceHash miner software setup and using MSI Afterburner to regulate temperatures was easy enough. I have even been through my first mining software upgrade. That was interesting. The upgrade from NiceHash Miner v2.0.1.6 to v2.0.1.8 was really about a change to the CPU inclusion process. After the upgrade the new version tried to get me to run the CPU miner. That was not going to happen. It was not power efficient, profitable, or useful for the relative temperature of my case. My CPU is cooled by a Corsair water cooler and it works well. It does not appear that CPU mining is profitable. Maybe some way exists to do it in a profitable way. That is not something that I am aware of at the moment.

Topic 1: Getting a water cooled GPU

People in mass are talking about mining and how to get into mining. People engaging in speculative mining are buying up pretty much every GPU on the market with a reasonable price and mining potential. A number of folks really do appear to be buying and reselling GPUs at higher prices to take advantage of the shortage. My interest in getting a new GPU is not really based on mining. My attention has been pulled toward some of the new set of graphics cards that have integrated water cooling. For example, the GIGABYTE AORUS Xtreme GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Waterforce 11GD graphics card looks pretty great. Sure it costs more than a thousand dollars and that alone is enough to keep me from buying one. It does not have an onboard graphics card fan. A cooling block rests on the card and an external fan pulls liquid out of the block and helps push heat outside the computer case. Let’s just say that this card peaked my interest. I even put in my cart and looked at the final price. That was as far as it got.

Maybe if all my mining generates me enough bitcoin value to buy one of those cards I’ll pull the trigger. That is probably not going to happen before April 11, 2018. Two factors go into calculating the potential value of my efforts. Selling my hashing power to NiceHash generates a steady stream of BTC. That stream of BTC has a value that in the aggregate will go up or down based on the spot price of the cryptocurrency. It could end up going up or down. This last week is a great example of watching the value of my BTC drop prodigiously. I watched the value just plunge and all the news articles were piling on with reasons to sell. Oddly enough then the value stopped sliding and started to rebound. People are probably going to keep building mining rigs. My curiosity is about the people are just slapping a few cards in their computer and jumping into the exciting world of mining. It is a lot of electricity that is being used. It has also driven up the price of graphics cards.

Topic 2: Weblog permalink errors

Somehow yesterday I managed to set up the wrong permalink for the day 18 welblog post. Seriously, I somehow generated a permalink with the day 17 headline in the address. That was a careless error that probably has to do with a rogue copy and paste. We are only in week 3 of this 52 week challenge. I’m going to have to stay focused on formatting and building good weblog posts to keep this rolling along. Part of my routine has to include formatting weblog posts each day. I know that people use blog instead of weblog to describe posts these days. Maybe I’ll catch up with the times at some point, but probably not during this post. Today is not the day for catching up. I thought things were cruising along to 3,000 words. A quick check of the word count quickly showed me that the struggle is real and I’m only at 50%.

I have been working with and building out webpages for a long time. Some of that effort still exists out on the old world web wibe. A ton of it has been achieved within the Internet Archive. They have a wacky wayback time machine that lets you view the web as it was back when it was less crowded. I was going to make some type of argument about the internet being better, but that seems like a get off my lawn type of argument. That one will just have to stay in my back pocket forever. My writing skills have improved a lot since this functional journal started. Some of my archives are in dangerous need of editing. Just like this writing journey I do not have the time to go back and editing things from a decade ago. Even editing the first 50,000 words out of 1,000,000 seems like a daunting task to accomplish. It might just be a task that I don’t really want to accomplish.

Topic 3: Collecting hot sauces

We have a ton of hot sauces in the refrigerator. That may not be the best place to keep them, but it makes sense to me so that is where they are going to stay. I have seen pretty much ever episode of a show on YouTube called Hot Ones which could be described as, “The show with hot questions and even hotter wings.” After watching a few episodes, I pretty much decided to get all the hot sauces featured on the show and eat them with some wonderful baked vegan wings. Some of the hot sauces are really good. Some of them are not very good, but they are epicly spicy. A world of hot sauce fanaticism really does exist. It is a world of its own and it is wonderful.

I have to admit that it took some time for me to develop a tolerance for some of the hotter sauces. A very fine line exists between ridiculous and painfully hot. Sauces that do not really bring any flavor to the experience and only bring unnecessary and horrible heat are not my favorite. Some of my favorite sauces are from a company called Queen’s Majesty Hot Sauce. The company appears to be out of Queens, New York and they make some really great hot sauce. My favorites are the Scotch Bonnet & Ginger and the Red Habanero & Black Coffee hot sauces. Depending on my mood at the time they alternate being my favorite hot sauce. I may at some point give a complete ranking of my favorite hot sauces. That topic has been added to the running list of future topics. It will be a good one. I’ll have to wait for a day where my writing skills are at 100% and the passion to write is present.

Topic 4: Learning TensorFlow

You may have noticed from the weblog post thumbnail that Captain Pickles the dog was trying to chew on my newly acquired Learning TensorFlow. I tried to dig into that book yesterday, but things just did not play out well enough to start that process. Maybe I can figure out how to do some TensorFlow during my YouTube live streams that might solve two problems at one time. That has to be good right. Moving things right along.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker custom build PC and my ASUS Flip Chromebook C101P using Google Docs

P.S. Yesterday things concluded at about 2,000 words within this post. I’m not sure this postscript can recover from a 1,000 word deficit. That may be to far of a gap to bridge. Kaylee picked up a touch of the flu and that was enough to slow down the entire household. I’m not feeling 100%, but so far I think my body is fending off this version of the flu virus. Some of the maps they are sharing on the internet and pretty much everywhere show a nationwide flu epidemic this year. For the last few years, I have gotten my flu shot and done pretty well. This year who knows where things will end up.

Upcoming 2018 Writing Topics:

— A post about my top ten favorite science fiction television shows
— Recap of all the video camera equipment I have owned
— All the promise and failures of my first Sony camcorder
— That one with a roadtrip to Florida
— Applied AI: A use case based exploration
— My ode to minor league hockey
— Progress within general AI vs. specialized use cases
— My review of the ASUS C101P Chromebook
— On leadership and the modern workplace
— The best way to archive digital content

Feel free to leave topic suggestions in the comment section.


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