Lazy miner

 Dear miners! In August, we asked you to share your mining experience with us, to send us your mining stories. Our user Andrew was the first to win 1 Bitcoin and now we present you the next winner. This is the story of our user Richard.

One morning, I was reading some tech news site whilst having a coffee. It was my normal morning routine. An article about cryptocurrencies and exchanges caught my eye. For a second, I thought the author was crazy even to mention them. I wouldn’t bother looking at anything like that since I sold all my Bitcoin a few years back when the price was about $30 a coin. It always depressed me to think that I could be driving around in a Ferrari instead of the pile of junk I bought. If only I’d waited those few years before selling out…

Who could have known

So that was why I actively avoided reading anything coin-related for a while. After reading the article I realized that I’d missed my chance to make all that money back not once, but a few times. Maybe nothing had quite hit Bitcoin levels of value, but people were making money and weren’t even forced to melt their graphic cards and ruin their gaming rig.

So I realized this whole world of alt-coins existed and headed off to Google to learn how to make myself some money. After a couple of days off “sick” from work, I decided I was too lazy. It would be far easier to sit in the office and pretend to work than to go through all this hassle of downloading wallets, miners and other assorted stuff and then to transfer and convert it to a spendable currency. That sounded like work to me, a lot more work than I had to actually do at my job. So away went the dream of becoming rich again.

Boring, but easier

A few days later, I found myself researching this stuff more and more. I hunted down my old USB key, spent a few hours trying to remember a password that I probably set whilst drunk on bitcoin winnings, and transferred the last remaining fractions of a bitcoin. I had some money! I could be one of the traders winning big! I was going to be rich!

At that point I realized I had no clue what I was doing. Back to Google I went.  However, it all sounded like a great deal of effort again. So I formed a plan: after much careful deliberation, I randomly picked a coin I was going to invest in on one of the exchanges. This was it, my big chance.

I logged into the exchange every day only to see my coin sitting at the same price. Where’s my big win? What was I doing wrong? Well, it would be easier to describe what I was doing right. Absolutely nothing. Randomly buying and expecting to win big was a poor game plan it seemed. I needed to mine some more coins to play with.

Back to Google, I guess. Except this time I got lucky. During my search I found a forum post mentioning minergate.com. After checking it out I realized this was what I’d been missing this whole time. I couldn’t believe I could actually just click ‘download’, sign in and be mining within minutes. It must be a scam. Or there must at least be some ridiculous configuration that everyone forgets to mention until you breakdown in an IRC channel at 3am (this may or may not be based on experience).

Are you lucky yet?

I downloaded MinerGate software to my desktop. Nothing special, AMD FX8350 CPU and R9 280x GPU. After a couple of clicks I was mining. I was getting some H/s (who even knows what that means* ?) and getting some coins. Thousands of them in fact. Was this it? Was I rich already? As I sat there eagerly watching the numbers go up, I certainly thought so. I transferred the fruits of my labor to an exchange, excited at the prospect of being rich. I was dreaming big. I had tens of thousands of some coin I’d never heard of. I clicked sell and… maybe I wasn’t quite rich yet, but $0.5 isn’t a bad start. Everyone has to start somewhere, right?

* (definition from bitcoin.org)

In case somebody else wonders

So I left MinerGate running on my desktop and started thinking. There are usually 2 or 3 computers switched on at any time in my house. After installing the software on the other machines, I officially made myself my own mining farm, kind of. It wasn’t exactly what you think of when you hear mining farm but it was easy and it nearly doubled my Hashrate (I googled H/s). Once again I was on my way to the big money.

The excitement gave me a little motivation to research. I started looking into the coins I could be buying and selling. After a while, I realized they were mostly the same, but there were a couple that stood out to me. I found myself constantly transferring from MinerGate to the exchange. I started exchanging for the coins I liked the sound of. Not just ones with fancy names, but coins that sounded like they could have a promising future. After about a week of this, I started to get a little bored again. About that time my electricity bill came and I realized that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have all the computers running at the same time, either that or someone was stealing my electricity. Maybe it was time to cool down. I kept MinerGate running but only when I was using the computer, since that electricity bill had kind of eaten into my profit a little bit.

Don’ forget to have MinerGate running at all times

A couple of days later I logged into my exchange account to see one of my coins had skyrocketed. I quickly exchanged them all for bitcoin, went to my balance page and saw $30 worth of bitcoin. I did it, I made something. Maybe a long way to a Ferrari, but I could buy myself something. The next day I logged in to see the price of the coin had nearly doubled again. What had I done?! I’d made the same mistake again, sold too early.

But it turned out that my research paid off. Quite a few coins I’d decided to invest in increased in value and after a few weeks of mining and exchanging I made myself a few hundred dollars. Most of that was down to luck, and I was lazy at every step of the way. To be honest, if I’d never found MinerGate that day, I’d have probably given up. Although I wasn’t running a huge mining farm, I still made a decent profit. Enough for me to still use and recommend MinerGate. Even writing this, I have MinerGate running in the background, using all but one core of my CPU and I don’t even notice it, pretty much the simplicity someone as lazy as myself needs.

Miner’s bare necessities

Richard is our next lucky miner who actually wasn’t too lazy to describe his mining story – and he was right to do so. Don’t waste your time, spend less and earn more with MinerGate!