I sold all my Ethereum miners around 2017 I think because proof of stake was “coming soon”. It arrived a few months ago haha. I used the profits and all future money to just buy coins and that has worked much better. :)
I do miss the heat of the Ethereum mine though. Thank you for sharing your story, it brings back a lot of memories. It also echoes the stories of most Bitcoin mining companies I read in The Age of Cryptocurrency by Casey and Vigna. Always racing on the hamster wheel of profitability against the difficulty algorithm and electricity prices and flirting with or going bankrupt. I’m glad proof of stake is finally here and we can move to a more sane way of doing things.
I’m glad proof of stake is finally here and we can move to a more sane way of doing things.
Proof of Stake isn’t a drop in replacement for Proof of Work - it comes with completely different properties and implications. If you’re just looking at it from the perspective of running a miner in your room, sure, but if you’re talking about the security and longevity of the actual network…
Proof of Work means participants in the network exchange energy to validate transactions. Anyone may participate without permission. Anyone may leave at any time.
Proof of Stake means participants in the network, that already hold a large stake in the network (32ETH in Ethereum) deposit that stake in exchange for permission to validate transactions. You may not withdrawal your stake (Coming Soon™) and if the transactions you publish are not inline with the rest of the network, you are fined (slashing).
So while it’s true both PoS and PoW can be used to validate and secure a blockchain network, they couldn’t be further from each other. Proof of Work is currently the only solution for a truly decentralized network that’s not susceptible to coercion.
I sort of had a similar story, started mining mid-2014 and went "all in" after Doge was born, for a couple months. LTS I sold all my doges in the following years, the last of which just a couple months before Elon decided to tweet about Doge and skyrocket the price.
Well, that sure is an entertaining read. I can't imagine what the struggle was. Back then I would do ridiculous small bets on rising crypto coins and feel extremely stress, I can't imagine what you've been through...
I have a similar story (albeit at a much smaller scale). Around 2017 when you could still mine eth-derived altcoins feasibly with a GPU, I repurposed my old gaming PC into a mining rig with a few old cards. I took off the side and taped a box fan to it to provide air-flow [1]. My apartment at the time was $950 flat, all utilities included, zero language about max usage in my lease, so effectively whatever I mined was 100% profit.
I wasn't making much, maybe $50/mo at absolute peak? I'm sure if I had scaled up the property manager would have eventually wondered why/who was spiking the apartment building's electrical bill and I would have found the limit to my unit's "unlimited" electricity. But it was a fun project. I was working a full time job too, so I learned a lot about remote managing something like that. I had it all wired up with a VPN so I could SSH into the mining box from my phone. Here's another pic of my "workstation" at the time. The right hand monitor was my "status dashboard", really just a tmux session with htop, iftop, eth miner, etc... [2].
I was ~25 and single at the time and the biggest obstacle to 100% uptime was actually if I wanted to bring guests or dates over, they would wonder why there was a jet engine in the corner of my studio apt. So I would shut it down in that case. Eventually that + loss of profitability + general jankyness of the setup led me to dismantling it. But it was fun while it lasted. The part in the OP about restarting the box with a screwdriving short definitely spoke to me. My box had a whole ritual around restarts that I discovered through trial and error, where I would power up, pull the plug, restart, restart again, and then it would run stable indefinitely. Good times.
So tons of energy (and mental energy) was wasted, graphics cards were hoarded and abused, and in the end nothing of value was gained. Sounds like crypto to me :)
I'm glad the author took some positive experience from it though. There is something "fun", or at least gratifying, about going all in on something even when it puts you through hell.
When there's a gold rush, the only ones really profiting are the ones selling shovels.
Who won in the whole arms race? Hardware manufacturers, and people who could either run arbitrage or steal resources. (Which is which was often a matter of perspective.) Everyone else? Break-even or worse.
What was actually built, for all that effort? Almost nothing. What did we gain as a society? The same.
And I'm not sure that dollar-denominated financial markets are really any different.
You can't undervalue the education received for this experience. The point is to try and fail at as many thing as possible if you are truly leaning from them.
I had a similar story, mining bitcoin with fpgas, litecoins with gpus and energy for free in a student dorm. I could however pack it in a free room in the dorm. Nobody cared about it. I did around 20 bitcoins, but sold almost everything before it hit 500 euro/coin, because my girlfriend got pregnant and we needed an apartment. I held 3 coins, that after the network split with Bitcoin cash, was doubled. I ended up selling them well.. I still have 5000 peercoins, since the idea was great, and I was able to mine and mint them well, but unfortunately it never became the thing.. Maybe one day, I get rich. For now, I just was able to buy a small apartment with my 3 BTCs..
I hate when cryptomining is described as "solving extremely complex mathematical problems." That makes it sound like math professors gathering around a conference table burning the midnight oil trying to crack a formula when in reality it's just trying to crack a safe by randomly guessing the code over and over again - nothing complex about it.
I get your point, the calculations are generally just arithmetic, but there are in fact many cryptologist who spend a lot of time and effort understanding these algorithms and finding ways to "crack" them.
First gold rush was in summer 2011, when GPU mining was invented, Bitcoin hit $17, first articles appeared in mass media, and Radeon 5XXX cards suddenly vanished from computer stores.
If you want to become rich, take advantage of what comes for free and sell it. For this guy, it was welfare and free electricity. For others, it is healthy soil, or rich natural resources.
Do dormitories put acceptable use/abuse policies on the free electricity they give you?
I know for a fact my university in the early 00's did not have an acceptable use/abuse policy on internet usage, and I was the person that caused them to create that policy!
We had 2 T-3s for internet access, one dedicated to dorms, the other dedicated to labs/office spaces, but there was fast LAN access between the dorms and the labs. The dorm T3 was always slammed in the evening by about 5000 students, and the lab/office one was 100% available - so I set up squid proxy on a lab computer, and was getting 10 Mbps where everyone else was getting 50 kbps.
A sysadmin saw the process running and tried to kill it and it forkbombed for some reason, crashing the lab computer. So they came and knocked on my door and made me sign a paper saying I wouldn't do it again, and then next year every incoming student had a to sign a policy saying they would behave on the network.
I still maintained that I did nothing wrong, and it was the sysadmin that didn't know how to kill a process appropriately that needed to be talked to.
> As soon as I started reading I knew this was going to involve stealing electricity.
My favorite crypto miner story was from a guy who caught an employee hiding ASIC miners above the ceiling tiles in their office. For some reason he thought nobody would notice. They noticed both the noise and the weird new devices on the network.
I suspect he lost more money from getting fired than he gained from the crypto mining. His miners were offline for quite a long time while they were seized as evidence in the ensuing investigation, too.
This is just at the beginning of the story to be fair. Later on he is mining in his living place and also writes about the electrity cost needing to be covered by the mining revenue.
One does not solve climate change by shitting on "immoral users of electricity" ("immoral" from your point-of-view). You might not personally value cryptocurrency activities, but many other people clearly do.
Our entire society is based on energy, and our cumulative and per-capita use of it is only trending upwards. Arguing for increased green energy generation helps all electricity users fight climate change, regardless of your perceived morality of their usage of it.
It currently uses .1% of global energy, instead of all the worlds energy as predicted in 2017. It makes use of stranded energy, off peak energy stabilizing grid production, incentivizes green energy build outs, and with the landfill methane caputure business will soon be the only digital asset that is carbon negative.
What have you heard? That it is a climate disaster and you should stay away?
Seems unlikely, given that this story was told from the perspective of someone mining in the pre-ASIC era. I suppose they could have invested in ASICs early on, but they started as a broke student and the reason the story is fun is because they made it work on a shoestring. "And then I bought $200,000 worth of ASICs in an overseas datacenter" doesn't have the same effect.
Probably more so by "hodling" instead of immediately selling to buy more hardware, or selling half for hardware and holding the other half to split the risk between the two option.
But it's easy to be smart after the fact...
flotzam|3 years ago
"so I'm mining monero to heat my apartment this winter" ... "My ceiling is now on fire"
k__|3 years ago
lemonking|3 years ago
jollyllama|3 years ago
JohnJamesRambo|3 years ago
I do miss the heat of the Ethereum mine though. Thank you for sharing your story, it brings back a lot of memories. It also echoes the stories of most Bitcoin mining companies I read in The Age of Cryptocurrency by Casey and Vigna. Always racing on the hamster wheel of profitability against the difficulty algorithm and electricity prices and flirting with or going bankrupt. I’m glad proof of stake is finally here and we can move to a more sane way of doing things.
unboxingelf|3 years ago
Proof of Work means participants in the network exchange energy to validate transactions. Anyone may participate without permission. Anyone may leave at any time.
Proof of Stake means participants in the network, that already hold a large stake in the network (32ETH in Ethereum) deposit that stake in exchange for permission to validate transactions. You may not withdrawal your stake (Coming Soon™) and if the transactions you publish are not inline with the rest of the network, you are fined (slashing).
So while it’s true both PoS and PoW can be used to validate and secure a blockchain network, they couldn’t be further from each other. Proof of Work is currently the only solution for a truly decentralized network that’s not susceptible to coercion.
lemonking|3 years ago
A true story that sheds light onto what crypto mining was like before the times of warehouse mining farms and dedicated mining hardware (FPGA & ASIC).
Wishing to hear from others with similar experiences in the comments. Take me back to the good old days.
mdrzn|3 years ago
Good times.
adrianomartins|3 years ago
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK|3 years ago
llampx|3 years ago
extr|3 years ago
I wasn't making much, maybe $50/mo at absolute peak? I'm sure if I had scaled up the property manager would have eventually wondered why/who was spiking the apartment building's electrical bill and I would have found the limit to my unit's "unlimited" electricity. But it was a fun project. I was working a full time job too, so I learned a lot about remote managing something like that. I had it all wired up with a VPN so I could SSH into the mining box from my phone. Here's another pic of my "workstation" at the time. The right hand monitor was my "status dashboard", really just a tmux session with htop, iftop, eth miner, etc... [2].
I was ~25 and single at the time and the biggest obstacle to 100% uptime was actually if I wanted to bring guests or dates over, they would wonder why there was a jet engine in the corner of my studio apt. So I would shut it down in that case. Eventually that + loss of profitability + general jankyness of the setup led me to dismantling it. But it was fun while it lasted. The part in the OP about restarting the box with a screwdriving short definitely spoke to me. My box had a whole ritual around restarts that I discovered through trial and error, where I would power up, pull the plug, restart, restart again, and then it would run stable indefinitely. Good times.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/vTDr7Ap.jpeg
[2] https://i.imgur.com/SUFzTZh.jpg
naet|3 years ago
I'm glad the author took some positive experience from it though. There is something "fun", or at least gratifying, about going all in on something even when it puts you through hell.
banannaise|3 years ago
Who won in the whole arms race? Hardware manufacturers, and people who could either run arbitrage or steal resources. (Which is which was often a matter of perspective.) Everyone else? Break-even or worse.
What was actually built, for all that effort? Almost nothing. What did we gain as a society? The same.
And I'm not sure that dollar-denominated financial markets are really any different.
Underhill7|3 years ago
rambambram|3 years ago
lemonking|3 years ago
pelasaco|3 years ago
jliptzin|3 years ago
marktangotango|3 years ago
tromp|3 years ago
InCityDreams|3 years ago
Deliberate?
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK|3 years ago
woah|3 years ago
giarc|3 years ago
andai|3 years ago
Eisenstein|3 years ago
extantproject|3 years ago
SevenNation|3 years ago
mrpopo|3 years ago
mustafabisic1|3 years ago
stall84|3 years ago
Renevith|3 years ago
"took it to my friend’s student dormitory where the electricity was “free”."
I was not disappointed! Life hack: stealing can make you money!
googlryas|3 years ago
I know for a fact my university in the early 00's did not have an acceptable use/abuse policy on internet usage, and I was the person that caused them to create that policy!
We had 2 T-3s for internet access, one dedicated to dorms, the other dedicated to labs/office spaces, but there was fast LAN access between the dorms and the labs. The dorm T3 was always slammed in the evening by about 5000 students, and the lab/office one was 100% available - so I set up squid proxy on a lab computer, and was getting 10 Mbps where everyone else was getting 50 kbps.
A sysadmin saw the process running and tried to kill it and it forkbombed for some reason, crashing the lab computer. So they came and knocked on my door and made me sign a paper saying I wouldn't do it again, and then next year every incoming student had a to sign a policy saying they would behave on the network.
I still maintained that I did nothing wrong, and it was the sysadmin that didn't know how to kill a process appropriately that needed to be talked to.
PragmaticPulp|3 years ago
My favorite crypto miner story was from a guy who caught an employee hiding ASIC miners above the ceiling tiles in their office. For some reason he thought nobody would notice. They noticed both the noise and the weird new devices on the network.
I suspect he lost more money from getting fired than he gained from the crypto mining. His miners were offline for quite a long time while they were seized as evidence in the ensuing investigation, too.
top_sigrid|3 years ago
josu|3 years ago
>Meanwhile, my monthly electricity bill was hovering somewhere around a thousand euros"
vvvvvo|3 years ago
[deleted]
zinodaur|3 years ago
Defitio|3 years ago
[deleted]
mrshadowgoose|3 years ago
Our entire society is based on energy, and our cumulative and per-capita use of it is only trending upwards. Arguing for increased green energy generation helps all electricity users fight climate change, regardless of your perceived morality of their usage of it.
plebianRube|3 years ago
It currently uses .1% of global energy, instead of all the worlds energy as predicted in 2017. It makes use of stranded energy, off peak energy stabilizing grid production, incentivizes green energy build outs, and with the landfill methane caputure business will soon be the only digital asset that is carbon negative.
What have you heard? That it is a climate disaster and you should stay away?
vvvvvo|3 years ago
[deleted]
ambicapter|3 years ago
bjt2n3904|3 years ago
[deleted]
4ggr0|3 years ago
WarChortle|3 years ago
vc9999|3 years ago
g_sch|3 years ago
spyder|3 years ago