2018: Day 81 the one where an 18th NiceHash mining payment showed up
Word count 170,643 + 902 or 171,545 of 1,000,000
Dear Reader,
This started at 05:30 hours this morning. A couple days back my 18th NiceHash mining payment showed up. You can tell by the gaps in my payments the time between payments from NiceHash in BTC from reaching the .001 threshold has been increasing. It appears that has been caused by a combination of things: 1) algorithmically mining gets harder daily, 2) the price of BTC is up compared to alternate coins, and 3) the price people are bidding for hashing power has dropped. Those are the things that come to mind right now after my first pull of lungo style espresso from my Nespresso Expert machine. It was glorious, but it has yet to fully open the possibilities of the day. At the moment my thoughts are way more tactical and process related vs. strategic or imaginative. Seriously, I’m sitting here listening to Pandora on my Storm Stryker custom built computer looking at cryptocurrency mining statistics. We are quickly closing in on my 100 day cryptocurrency mining experiment. At the end of that journey, I will try to write up my thoughts on what happened and provide some reflections on what happened.
NiceHash wallet payments in reverse order:
18. 2018-03-20 Mining payment → 0.00107147 BTC
17. 2018-03-11 Mining payment → 0.00115447 BTC
16. 2018-03-05 Mining payment → 0.00109993 BTC
15. 2018-02-28 Mining payment → 0.00112356 BTC
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
You can tell from that reverse order listing of my NiceHash wallet payments the time between payments is just increasing. My two NVIDIA GTX 1060 graphics cards are not able to sell mining hashing power at the same rates they were able to get earlier this year. Right now all they are really doing is making my office hotter. You can see in the thumbnail associated with this blog post Captain Pickles the dog enjoying the excess heat.
Topic 1: Google Home Max
Giving up my Amazon Echo device I ordered back on November 18, 2014 meant that I have started looking for a bluetooth stereo for my bedroom. The number one contender at the moment seems to be the Google Home Max speaker or some variation of that type of device. I’m not entirely sure how Google engineers managed to make that thing cost $399. A solid build probably should have yielded a $199 and $299 version. My Audioengine A5+ speakers are currently selling for between $399 and $469. Those premium powered speakers are absolutely fantastic desktop speakers. All of the video reviews of the Google Home Max on YouTube seem to indicate that it is a pretty darn good speaker, but the price tag has me wondering. Audioengine does have a couple of options that would meet my needs include the new A5+ wireless speakers or the B2 wireless speaker. The B2 option is selling for $225 right now and might be a good option. I would be able to control it with either my Chromebook or my Pixel 2 XL smartphone.
Topic 2: Surfing the web
We will be watching a ton of NCAA tournament coverage to wrap up this week. Most of the games seem to be on CBS which is great since we get that channel in high definition via our over the air antenna. That makes it much easier to watch the games. No bandwidth is burning via the whole streaming setup. So far this month we have used about half our total bandwidth allotment from the cable company. I’m not sure what will happen when we upgrade to a 4K television. I’m going to need to watch the bandwidth limit a lot closer. That is for sure. Streaming 4K eats up a lot more bandwidth. My custom build computer streams YouTube in 4K, but most of those clips are pretty short. Watching longer movies on the television will eat up a lot more bandwidth.
Topic 3: Looking at computer parts again
My new computer build is going along pretty well. I spent some time looking at computer parts today. The new Intel i9 processors look pretty good, but they are still really expensive. Overall that new build is lacking a GPU, CPU, RAM, and a liquid CPU cooler. It might be worth a trip to the Micro Center computers and electronics store to look at all those parts and figure out a path forward. In just a few days my 100 day cryptocurrency mining challenge will be over and I could pull my extra GPU out of my Storm Stryker case and wait patiently for the next generation of NVIDIA graphics cards to be released. Nothing seems to be in stock on the NVIDIA website except the Titan V GPU. That graphics card clocks in at $2,999.00 and is way out of my price range. That is probably the reason that it is still in stock. It is so expensive that very few folks building a computer are going to want to buy one. I’ll probably end up picking up one part at a time. That is pretty much this computer build has gone. At a minimum I’ll need to get one stick of DDR4 RAM, a CPU, and a liquid CPU cooler of some type.
Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs
