Billy Young's Blog - Posts Tagged "bitcoin"

The graphics card has been mining away nicely over the past week. Unfortunately there was a ddos attack on the pool I mine with which caused a couple of days down time. To add to this I had the stressful experience again of my wallet malfunctioning. Last weekend I searched for answers trolling through forums into the early hours. After trying everything suggested and failing it was my son’s original idea that worked. He copied his files for the wallet folder minus the wallet which we then copied to my folder. After a rescan it is finally up and running for now. I have decided to try another wallet because of the problems I have suffered from the one I use now. There are several to choose from so it is just a matter of picking one and send my coins to it. Then of course change the payment details at the pool and everything will be good again.
To distress this week I will load up CivV. Though I do have to start some seeds for the garden plus check all the things I have planted already. I will also need to feed my tomatoes and pepper plants, which survived the winter indoors. Not the tomatoes by the way they were bought from the garden centre when I was on holiday.
As for writing it seems to have dried up at the moment. That happens from time to time. I’m sure that the muses will visit eventually. Not sure when. I only hope that it is soon as I have a lot of poetry to catch up with and the short that I started needs finishing. If it wasn’t for the stress of this week as well as work my mind might be more in the frame to create. That’s life though.

With the rise in the price of bitcoins I ordered Magz her laptop as well as a new SSD drive for my computer from the Bitcoinstore.com site. Yes it will mean paying the import tax again and a lot more than last time though it is worth it. After all I mined the coins on my computer for nothing. Well you could say it cost the electricity that I used to run the computer but in my terms it cost nothing. So that means I get Magz her new laptop with all the bells and whistles plus my SSD for the import tax which is a real saving. Five hundred gigs of space for a main drive is just what I need as the sixty I have is already almost full. And as I have said in the past Magz needs a new computer as hers is getting a bit stressed under the load placed on it. I did get her an external drive a couple of years ago but even that is filling up fast. The new machine comes with a full terabyte of space. That and the external should keep her rolling for a bit yet. Add in the i7 with a dedicated HD7870M graphics she’ll have the power to use the BD drive to full HD brilliance. I sound like a add, hehehe.
I have to start planting some more seed this weekend. I have carrots to plant and need to look through my stock to see what else I might give a go this year. Coriander is a cert maybe even some broccoli. I’ll see what I have. My onions have started to spout though no sign of the corn or potatoes. While my trees are starting to show spring is finally with us. I t has been a long winter and it is good to finally see the sun bringing some warmth to the soil.

My seedlings are come up. I have lettuce, basil, coriander, and carrots so far. I still have to plant some peas they are always good. There is still no sign of my corn or potatoes though I’m not concerned about the potatoes as they always take their time but the corn I thought would have started to show. Maybe the birds got to them so I might just start them off again in doors. I’ll leave it till Sunday to see as I have the day off on Monday.
Yes it’s a bank holiday this weekend so an extra day to have a long lie-in. That is of course that don’t wake up early. After getting up for so long to go to work every morning you end up finding that sleeping in of a morn is a hard thing to achieve. Strange I don’t remember having that problem when I was at school. Is it a sign of age that? Could be as I have heard that as you get older you get less sleep more often.
My package that I ordered for Magz is on the way along with my larger SSD. It will take a week or two for it to arrive as you know because it is coming from the US. At the moment it is in the sorting office in California so has a long ways to travel to get to us. Considering the distance it is amazing how quickly it will get here.
With some of the remainder of my bitcoins I ordered a couple of ASIC miners from Butterfly Labs so I can keep up with the curve of difficulty that mining is undergoing. Over time it gets harder to mine coins and with the new ASIC chips starting to be felt on the market I thought I should keep up. Sadly mine won’t be with me until at least July at the earliest as the company has a lot of back orders to fill before they get to the newer orders. Still that should keep me in the game for a bit.

It has been a big week for the Bitcoin markets this week. As you would have heard on the news, maybe, one of the biggest exchanges crashed and burned this week. Of course I was one of the ones trading through MT Gox. Yes I lost the coin I had invested but I had already lost most of my investment through bad discipline. I got caught out last summer. Yeah June was a bad month in speculation for me. It didn't help when I missed my footing in the last bubble as well. In total I was able to turn four bitcoins into point seven five. What can I say? Not a lot the figures show I'm not very good at speculating though it is fun. Anyways I have begun again at another exchange but I have started with only point one as I still wish to keep what little I have left.
With Mt Gox going bankrupt a lot of people have lost a great deal more than myself. I at least didn't lose any real cash as such as the coin I had invested was mined. Unfortunately many how have lost actually put real cash into bitcoin. Not that I am not saddened overt my own losses but it is a gamble which I have known from the start. Therefore I can only blame myself on losses as I would have taken any credit if I had made a profit. Of course by registering with another exchange and taking the gamble again might show that I haven't learnt much over the past few months. Or it might tell you something else about me. I have a thick skull, hehehe.
As I said above I made bitcoins through mining them but with mining difficulty having increased I was unable to do this any longer. It was for this reason I first got into speculating on Mt Gox. I do wish I had the money to afford some of the mining hardware that has come to market over the past few months. Unfortunately the asking price for a descent amount of power to make a profit is well above anything I could afford. Not a lot I can do about that then.

The weather has been great for the most part meaning the weeding has been done and then done again. It also means that it needs more wore in that area. I will also need to trim the hedges in the coming week. Of course the garden hasn't been my only pursuit this last week. I have been trying all week to get the ASIC miner working with no joy. I have even tried to re-flash the unit with the same results as before. No it is looking more and more like it will never work. But me being me I can't stop myself from continuing to bang my head of the proverbial wall. BFL forums have been no help at all. You would think that it being their product they would be looking to aide in getting it up and running. I know that is naive as why should they be bothered. After all they have already been paid and they don't care about the reputation their company has created over the past few years. I have received more help from the users of the Bitcoin Forum at bitcointalk.org.
Well I have another week off of work. I will more than likely try again with the Jally but I don't plan on wasting the rest of the week on it. No I want some time to just laze. Well I am on holiday, hehehe.

Well I go back to work on Monday. In a way I am looking forward to getting back but at the same time. Well you know how it is. You enjoy the time off with the family and yet as the holiday reaches its end you are beginning to run out of things to do. That is when the boredom takes over. Saying that I didn't get everything done this time round. I did fail to get the BFL Jalapeno ASIC working. I tried to re-flash the unit to no effect. I did finally get a reply on the companies forum. Not that it was of any use. Basically it was telling me to test the Jally on another system which I had already done. I know they need to go through the basics. The Mod that replied also suggested the same thing in another Bitcoin forum where I had posted. Obviously he hadn't read my post fully or he would have gotten that I had already done what he had suggested. Of course if you were to search BFL's forums now you won't find my post. It got deleted because I told them I had used the Jally as a baseball. I also said that it made as good a baseball as a miner as well as that BFL's, in my opinion, products only work 50% of the time. Well I got two and only one worked. If I was the only one to have said this I could say I was biased but I have read lots of similar tales in the forums. For a company that is not a good record to have.
My son decided to buy me another miner. This one comes in the next few days and isn't a BFL product. No the new one is an Antminer S1. A big boost in overall Gh/s which will be needed as the difficulty has certainly gone up a lot since I was last able to mine. Yeah I know I'm talking geek now aren't I and I haven't even told you how hard it looks setting one of these up. I swear I saw a soldering iron in one picture I looked at on the web. And I thought it would be plug and play, hehehe.