Wednesday, March 26, 2014

My home is turning into something like a data center

Following my previous post on Bitcoin......

So LiteBanc (our project name) has been steadily making its way to full power...steadily.... One thing about this project is that if you aren't familiar with computers and have to learn from the basics, its such a pain to figure out why certain things just won't work. I can't recall how many times my partner and I broke night just to figure out the problem and ended up not being able to figure itout until one morning, it just suddenly works. I mean suddenly. Like, you just turn on the power and viola! it just worked! Mind you, my partner is very familiar with computers.

So after all the painful hours of getting these rigs to start, we've steadily progressed to building more and more, to the point where these rigs are taking over the house. (pictured here)

7 MSI R9 280X and 4 Asus R9 290X in the office room
If you were one of those serious PC gamers, you would drool over the amount of GPU power I am capable of running.

15 quality GPU's (9 on standby at the moment) are waiting to hash out as many Alt coins as it possibly can. Of course, the current rates are a little under, but, we are micro-managing these coins so we are hopeful to obtain a better result than just mining coins.

One positive from all this computing power is that I am currently quite cozy in the room as one of the rig is turned on.

If all three were on, it would be a free sauna. The setback, if all of them were running, is that my electricity bill will be off the charts and I will be waiting for the utility company to notify the local police about a suspicious spike in electricity, hence leading to them ringing my doorbell and explaining to them that, no, I am not running a drug scheme, but merely computers making me money.

These rigs are running 24/7, like a server, so the electricity bill is quite expensive. Each GPU runs about 300-350 watts. Having 3 of these running can cost you near $100/month at the rate of $0.12/kWh. So yeah, if you have free electricity, than its a great investment.

My other rig in the guest room (another 4 MSI R9 280X)
I am seriously considering solar panels. Anything to lower the cost of electricity will benefit to your profitability at a large rate. At this moment, we are dealing with paying the electricity bill. What surprised me was that New York, where the other 25 GPU's are currently located, has a much higher electricity rate than New Jersey does. It was quite a surprise to hear that my partner pays 4-5 cents more than I do. In mining, that's a huge difference.

So here we are, steadily growing and moving along. This post seemed like I was everywhere, but honestly, my brain is all over the place right now and with the lack of sleep, I need to let it all out somewhere.

5 years from now, when all these coins will be valued at a much higher rate, I'll look back at this and smile.

Yes, I'm quite optimistic.





Thursday, March 20, 2014

A little about Bitcoin

As an aspiring entrepreneur, you always dig in to new ventures. As of 2014, with a number of initial investors, we started LiteBanc, a cryptocurrency mining farm.

As I begin writing about this project (as much as I can, since I tend to slack off on the writing...), I will start off by the basics and work my way into our current project. There are hundreds of forums that you can read about this industry so I'll be very simple and basic.

For details, you can go to www.bitcoin.org ; www.litecoin.org ; or Reddit to obtain a lot of information.

I'm sure you've heard of Bitcoin by now. It's been all over the news. LiteBanc trades and mines a form of currency called cryptocurrency (i.e. Bitcoin) by using methods of cryptography and solve algorithms to obtain these specific coins, hence we are "mining". Following this new type of currency, enthusiasts created a special exchange to trade these coins similar to FOREX in which we actively trade to profit from other forms of cryptocurrency. Confused yet?

So what exactly is cryptocurrency? Well, for starters, its a virtual currency that is not regulated by any banks or government and moved or traded by a decentralized market. There is no physical form, like a dollar bill, and is based on cryptography. The first cryptocurrency that started trading was Bitcoin back in 2009 and by present day, there are many different alternatives to bitcoin (i.e., Litecoin, Dogecoin, Namecoin, etc).

To give you an example of why this digital currency took off by storm, Bitcoin when it first came out was worth practically a fraction of a dollar (the first ever trade was $1.00 = 1200+ BTC). The coins value took off on news about this so-called digital coin and once the demand picked up the value of these coins skyrocketed to highs of $1200 for one single coin. Today, 1 BTC is worth about $660. Those that were able to mine or purchase in the 1000's between 2010 and 2011 are millionaires, mind you, without paying a single penny in tax. Aside from the risk factor and other security issues that will be mentioned throughout my project, this simply creates a whole new world in global currency and will likely change the industry in the future.

So to put it all together, it's money you print out that is not taxable and able to purchase real goods or change to real currency with it. A scam? that's what you might think, but there's a whole different depth that goes into this and fortunately, a lot of big investors (Google Venture, Y Combinator, Reddit, Fortress, Winklevoss Bro, etc.) and global CEO's (Charles Branson, Patrick Byrne, Lars Seier Christensen, etc.) are liking the idea.

About LiteBanc

LiteBanc is a boutique cryptocurrency mining company that mines the most productive Altcoins to benefit the ROI of the company. The trading arm of the company then micromanages the coins on specific cryptocurrency exchanges to ultimately hold onto Litecoin or Bitcoin.