I'm new to the crypto world. How new? One week. In that week I've learned that cryptocurrency is a huge new world full of many twists and turns. I retired this year at 54 after having done well in the 9-5 world and through investing. The first thing I discovered, I have a lot more free time on my hands - shocking I know. Where to I like to spend free time? Learning and that is how crypto comes in.
I decided to give it a go the week of Thanksgiving figuring with family in town for the holidays it would give me natural breaks from diving in head first full of excitement and obsession.
Step one - download some Podcast. I listened to a few to get some basic down but settled on the Coin Bureau with lots of content and being pretty entertaining. While listening, I figured I'd work on the next step.
Step two - set up a crypto miner. Having a couple of old laptops sitting around, why not put them to use. I started clearing off old programs and cleaning up the hard drives. Once done I download my first mining program, unmineable. Pretty simple actually and then decided to focus on my first coin. Being new, I'd really only heard of a few BitCoin and DogeCoin being the most notable and of course settled in on the meme coin for a starting spot. What's that, you have to have a wallet set up? So after downloading the Doge wallet and learning about addresses and recovery phrases I was off and running.
Knowing nothing really about mining, I was sure I was going to be crypto rich in no time. Not so fast. After battling with Microsoft Defender and Virus Protection for longer than I'd like to admit, my roughly 400 hash rate has me at nearly one whole Doge coin after a week of mining. We are talking almost $0.20 work of coin here.
Step three - set up more crypto miners. I set up my second old laptop roughly the same way but this time after a little research of the best coins to mine decided to focus on RavenCoin. With another low hash rate it was clear, there has to be a better (faster) was than CPU mining on an old laptop. With my two teenage boys in school, I next turned to one of their gaming computers. Turns out, mining off a graphics card (GPU) reaps rewards at a much higher rate and in this case over 50MH (or mega hashes which is a million calculations per second). I also focused this computer on mining RavenCoin when I'm on it (not when my son is gaming because that really strains the graphic card) and have just over 30 RavenCoins mined worth around $3.35.
The point here isn't to make a lot of money in ten days but rather to learn as we go.
Step four - eat some turkey and watch some football. After cooking up a delicious bird on Thanksgiving to share with family (it did come out well), I took a break from all the crypto podcasts, videos, articles and thinking about mining to watch my beloved Detroit Lions lose yet again. I was born in England but grew up in Detroit so please don't blame me. My winless Lions kept me from thinking about crypto for a few hours until my nephew showed me his new book which was of course about crypto. Down the rabbit hole again while trying to fight the Tryptophan.
Step five - non-mining methods for getting crypto. With my miners hard at work raking in pennies a day I began exploring other ways to "earn" crypto. Hence reading this article on Publish0x after discovering it today and already earning some Ampleforth (AMPL) and Harvest Finance (FARM) reading articles and tipping the authors. I'm doing all this on the Brave Browser, also discovered today, while earning Basic Attention Tokens (BAT). With a new gaming computer ordered yesterday (CyberMonday) for my younger son my attention will be shifting to earning crypto and learning about NFT's on games to put those two boys to work doing what they love.
Well that's it, ten days in the books and five new cryptocurrencies to add to my growing list of wallets. I hope you liked my first post on this new adventure (small tips appreciated) and look forward to posting about new learnings and earnings as I venture forth into the crypto world.
