2018: Day 56 the one with where I lost a ton of mining time
Word count 134,256 + 1,002 or 135,258 of 1,000,000
Dear Reader,
Yesterday I went to sleep thinking my Storm Stryker computer build running the NiceHash Miner v2.0.1.11 beta was selling hashing power to mine cryptocurrency. In the morning yesterday when I sat down to watch some Star Trek Voyager on Netflix my virus scanning software had quarantined the excavator.exe file. I know you are wondering if all these years later if Voyager is still as disappointing as it was during the broadcast run. At this point watching it is sort of like getting a decent rental car. It is not the car you would have bought on your own, but it works well enough. Netflix works better than the NiceHash excavator.exe file. That thing is constantly flagging the virus scanner. Other than code that I have written nothing really sets off the Webroot virus scanning on this computer.
It looks like my cryptocurrency mining payments are starting to take longer and longer to arrive via the NiceHash mining software system. Some folks have been warning that cryptocurrency is going to get harder and harder to mine. My mining payments from NiceHash have been pretty regular on a 3 day clip from 1/13 to 2/15. After 2/15 things just slowed down a bit on the selling hashing power front. My initial thoughts were to try to use the MSI Afterburner software to raise the power limit from the current 80% and 85% voltage limits. Those were put in place to lower the overall heat level in my office. Some folks work with core clock and memory clock speed boosts. Those overclocking measures help the card perform at a higher rate than stock settings. I have not really tried to boost the clock speeds on my cards.
NiceHash wallet payments in reverse order:
14. 2018-02-23 Mining payment → 0.00106113 BTC
13. 2018-02-19 Mining payment → 0.00119364 BTC
12. 2018-02-15 Mining payment → 0.00102799 BTC
11. 2018-02-12 Mining payment → 0.00102953 BTC
10. 2018-02-09 Mining payment → 0.00102322 BTC
9. 2018-02-06 Mining payment → 0.00101337 BTC
8. 2018-02-03 Mining payment → 0.00135065 BTC
7. 2018-01-30 Mining payment → 0.00102840 BTC
6. 2018-01-27 Mining payment → 0.00120973 BTC
5. 2018-01-24 Mining payment → 0.00125795 BTC
4. 2018-01-21 Mining payment → 0.00133244 BTC
3. 2018-01-18 Mining payment → 0.00119401 BTC
2. 2018-01-15 Mining payment → 0.00105970 BTC
1. 2018-01-13 Mining payment → 0.00118327 BTC
All that mining works out to about 0.0159 BTC or roughly $151.52 USD. All of that effort and time to generate 1.59% of a bitcoin. It makes more sense if you know that a single bitcoin is work about $9,512.80. Sure it was a lot more exciting when a single bitcoin was work almost $20k. Well it was about double the level of my current excitement. This weekend has been about recovering and working through the pure wildness that is managing a toddler. We did go to Cabela’s and they sold me some red licorice today. I’m pretty sure that it is not vegan. Oddly enough a couple quick Google searches did not tell me the ingredients. I’m going to have to walk down the stairs and look. That is going to have to wait until later.
Topic 1: I have been looking at computer builds
Right now the motherboard that has my full attention and interest is is the ASUS TUF X299 MARK 1. Dropping in an i9 core and some DDR4 RAM would be an expensive build. Earlier today I was looking at that build combination with an NVIDIA Titan Xp graphics card. That probably won’t work out now that the Titan Xp GPU is sold out on the NVIDIA website. It would have been a powerful and epic computer setup. That part combination would make for a build that could support 4K and VR with ease.
It seems like the only people really avidly building computers are the cryptocurrency miners. A really cutting edge build would cost several thousand dollars. It might be easier for somebody to just buy a retail computer build vs. trying at assemble all the right parts. I have owned two Hewlett Packard builds over the years. One of them was destroyed in a flooded room in college and the other came with a monitor I had purchased at Costco. That build worked out just fine and was the seed of what ultimately became my Storm Stryker computer build. I’m really more of a add a part here and there computer builder. The problem with upgrading a motherboard is that the new CPU and RAM are always going to be pricey. Getting an upgrade that is on the cutting edge of technology tends to be very expensive. Technology that sits behind the bleeding edge of the technology curve is generally cheaper, but a lot less fun and exciting.
Getting an Intel i7 chip will work just fine. Upgrading to the new i9 chipset is more exciting and more expensive. For the most part either of those chipsets would be a fine addition to my next computer build. I do not think anything in my computer usage pattern has been limited by CPU power. That used to a lot more of a concern than it is today. At this point, the motherboard and the GPU are going to be the driving factors of what the computer build can do. For the most part the build quality of the ASUS TUF motherboards seems to be pretty decent. I have been reading all sorts of reviews about the X299 Mark 1. The Mark 2 does not seem as exciting a configuration.
Topic 2: The Olympics are ending
We have not had cable for some time now. I have been checking my overall internet usage and things seem to be ok. We really do not watch a ton of television these days. Our TiVo is pretty full of Olympic video recordings. Giving up cable was pretty easy to do. This batch of writing is pretty much real time again. It took some time to figure out what was going on. Maybe getting tired was enough to slow down the pace of my writing. Things slowed down here in this month. It seems like I am just going to write about 1,000 words per day.
Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs
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