Ethereum - How I'm turning electricity into an adventure and education in cryptotrading

Cryptocurrency trading has become more than just a small niche in the world of investing. It has become a vehicle of wealth for many as tokens such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are becoming household names and the concept is becoming hightop discussion in coffee bars worldwide. The truth is anyone with some knowledge of computers and how to turn a screwdriver can start turning their electricity into an investment portfolio - literally.

Coming from a background of investing in the stock world I wanted to challenge myself with the task of relating standard trading to cryptocurrency trading and try my hand at it...the scary way. With a bit of hardware and programming knowledge (and some googling as well) I started off as close to ground level as possible...hardware mining. I figured if I was going to take this on I want to do it from the bottom up, and paired with a low budget I needed to do the homework in order to maximize efficiency and output on a low scale. Ethereum was my flavor of choice and still is the most effective way to generate money from an outlet.

At first, after reading some dated articles on building a mining rig, I set my budget to $1000. After seeing how the world of GPU mining has grossly inflated the pricing of GPUs I had to get crafty. I blew the dust off the old DAW (digital audio workstation), grabbed my screwdriver and started ebaying. All of the research that I had done led me to AMDs RX480 8gb as the GPU of choice, giving the best MH bang for the wattage buck. I landed 3 used for under $300 each, bought Arctic Accelero TT II coolers and waited for them to come in. Being handy with a Dremel tool I was able to install all of the heatsinks with the cooler cradle (otherwise you would have to be missing 3 of them if installed out of the box) and 3 PCI risers, 850w Darkpower PlatinumPlus power supply and a new fan for the CPU I closed my budget under $1200. I'll spare you the mess of cables and open PC case that I affectionately call my "miniminer" and instead show an example of an impressive rig built by someone with a larger budget and more concern for aesthetics.

After some driver and ROM tweaking I was able to get a steady modest 80Mh/s without the box crashing and MSI afterburner was regulating my fan speeds to keep the temps at a manageable 58-60 c. I plugged everything into the watt watcher, turned the monitor off and started monitoring the progress from my laptop. I noticed that in about 3 weeks I had turned $24.50 of electricity into .3 ETH (about $76.80 current market value). It was time to start playing.

I opened a Bittrex account, sent $50 worth of ETH to my trading account and started to get my feet wet. $50?! Yes, only $50. I was happy to learn that Crypto trading is much easier to tinker with in ultra-small trades because the tx fees are percentage based rather than the $6.75/trade I was used to. I swapped it all to the standard trading medium, BTC, funded my side project (sia hosting) and was left with about $38 of BTC to play with. I was happy to see the old familiar candlestick charts that I had learned to not rely on with stock trading, but figured that I'd give it a shot and put my months of learned and dismissed charting knowledge to the test. In 6 days, with about 3 hours a day, I've managed to grow 18% with a few calculated moves. I don't expect these results to be typical, but as I learn more I'll share my gains, losses and strategies to help others that may be interested in getting into this field of trading.

I hope you found my first article to be interesting or at least entertaining. I felt it redundant to add to the thousands of other rig build posts floating on the webs, but if anyone has questions about my build I would be happy to expand. Also, I plan on writing more on the functions and use of Bittrex in a later post. Thanks for stopping by!

If you'd like to donate a few bits of crypto to put towards my project my wallets are -

BTC- 19dhtebhWNQjjvaaSapw4bZry8buohSaoP
ETH- 0x4ba6FC1dd8293081c5B915124ddf13F2425D7D35