Cryptocurrency (trading/mining)

[Appelpitje]

Does anyone here have some experience with cryptocurrency trading and/or mining?
I found some ways to make a profit with mining, but then trading also looks interesting. Trading bots are also a thing now.

Would be cool to hear from someone who has some experience with this

[Razo[R]apiD]

IMHO mining is usually more expensive than profits gained and trading is a gamble - especially when you trade currency (ie. forex) and try to earn on differences + it's not an equal battle because there are bots, which are not a thing "now" - they are a standard. Bots play for big companies and banks, and are developed by professional teams, so they are not the same thing as bots written for games by cheaters/hackers etc. People are hired for big companies to write automated trading tools that integrate with official APIs.

But that's my opinion, I don't have any real experience. If I were ever to trade on stock exchange, I would make long-term investments.

[James]

I always lived by a rule in life; and that is.. "There is no such thing as easy money. If you want something, you need to work hard for it." I've always lived by that rule, and I understand some peoples' livings are easier than others, but in general I would say this rule is pretty on point. AT any rate, I was interested in the cryptocurrency a while ago, but from what I've read; RR is right, you would need a ridiculous datacenter filled with super fast computers running algorithms all day 24x7. You would be spending more than getting anything out of it. Also, there is a "max" for how much cryptocurrency is generated. It's not an infinite number. I think the max is million something, but it definitely has a limited unlike the currency we're used to. You're honestly better off "learning" the stock exchange and looking at statistics and trends and buying/selling stocks based on your findings. Granted it's a gamble, but it's probably the fastest way to get "easy" cash. Anyway, I went a bit of skew, but just my opinion.

[anspectrum]

There is tons of information (some very credible) on the net that can help you figure out easily whether to play this game or not. I've not mined or traded in any crypto currency but know people who are doing it. And as they say, early starters are always the winners. So if you had purchased this like when it was launched you would have become a millionaire by now if not billionaire. Even just look at the trend in 2017 it has been like vertical climb. You typically need to invest approx. 13-15K USD for a rig with 6-8 high end GPU cards, with that some miscellaneous expense but rig is the major capital. Then you need to calculate your power consumption and other admin overheads. Some of the guys I know are making 30 USD a day by mining. You can also trade bitcoin with other crtypto currencies and gain profits from that.

But, as James said, bitcoin has a limit of 21 million and some 16/17 million have already been mined. But as the algorithm has been designed to accommodate computing resources, even with all the processing power in the world it will take upto year 2140 to mine those complete 21 million coins.

I also fully agree with RR and James that only go for tangibles. These cyber commodities are easy gain but easy loss as well. The choice is yours. Here is today's trading ......http://bitcointicker.co/

HTH.

P.S: @James I still cant upload pics

[Appelpitje]

Alright thanks for the information so far!

You seem to be talking only about bitcoin so far, i wouldn't invest in that atm since indeed it will die anytime. But maybe it is worth getting some bitcoins and wait to sell them at a higher price. For the bot part, there are indeed some companies that offer "investments" and you can get +% back but after X days. There is a open source bot on github (https://github.com/carlos8f/zenbot) which i may try. You can even let it simulate with the realtime data, looks cool to try it out

Now where i found a profitable way for mining is not Bitcoin but Monero. I'm not going to explain the differences but this might be worth reading: https://medium.com/@yobanjo/monero-v...n-2d5633a74605
TLDR: Monero is more secure, scalable, ASIC miner proof (so far). It's just less known compared to bitcoin.

Now for a profitable mining setup, take for example Monero:
On this site: http://monerobenchmarks.info/ you can see howmuch a GPU or CPU would be able to calculate hashes per second for Monero(Cryptonight). For example take a look at an AMD R9 290 card: 700H/s for 200W. 1 card cost second-hand around $150.
With 700H/S, you can get around $1.15 per day, which makes $34 per month. But thats with the current Monero worth (1XMR=$126), so if Monero would rise then it will be even faster profitable than with the prices now. But then what if Monero gets suddenly only $20 worth? Then it would be possible to move on to an other AltCoin.

So basically you dont really need a $5000 setup to make some profit, altho if the setup contains out of GTX 10X0 cards it will consume a lot less power usage compared to the power hungry AMD cards

Currently i do not have to pay for my electricity, which makes it even more interesting

Here is an overview for 2x AMD R9 290 cards, they would cost me $150 each. After 3 months i would already got them back, but only if and only if Monero can hold its worth or rise ofcourse!


I just made a small list for investment costs for a simple setup for above:
Motherboard: $75
CPU: $40
HDD/SSD: not really needed since i have some + its possible to even use a bootable usb and mine from that
PSU(800W, to start with): Already got one just laying here from my old server
GPUs: $300
PCIE riser cards: $10

So this makes a total of: $425
And im pretty sure Monero will rise just like Bitcoin rose so far But like they say: never hope for it haha
So that would make around 4 months to make the investment already back! But ofcourse a card can die for example. But im guessing over a year this should make some "good" money.
Even after those 4 months it might be time to get even 8 GPUs and then gain $380/month.

As far i can see this cryptocurrency it's all gambling, but when investing in a mining setup, it's still possible to sell it afterwards..

[Razo[R]apiD]

I didn't talk only about BitCoin I don't know prices of electricity where you live, but it might be so you mine less than you spend on the bills - even if it's not you paying the bills The overall picture is that you pay more than you get usually, but of course you can treat it like an investment, where you invest money spent on electricity bills and rig for coins which hopefully will be worth more in future and once you have some kind of AltCoins you can play with them like on Forex, earning on differences between rates of different cryptocurrencies. The problem with Forex for me, or any currency trading platform, is that usually there aren't any long-term trends that you can follow, which basically makes it a gamble imho.

[Razo[R]apiD]

Anyway I find the idea of cryptocurrencies interesting, because unlike real money nowadays, you could say that every cryptocurrency has coverage in power and time spent to mine it, unlike real money which can be printed. Dollar once had (at least on paper) coverage in gold and you could always give dollars and exchange them for gold with constant exchange rate, so you basically always paid in gold - you just had paper bills for easier use, transport, etc.

If you had a country which would make a cryptocurrency their official currency, and only the national bank would be allowed to mine it and distribute, then you could say that the strength of given currency reflects the economy or power production that let's this country mine it. Different countries could use different cryptocurrencies where it's easier or harder to mine - depending on the power production capabilities of given country and economy strength, but because cryptocurrency is based on mathematical algorithms it wouldn't be possible to "print" money anymore or introduce fake money, because blockchain would invalidate it as fake.