Category: #SAPERE AUDE

Running bitcoin – Hal Finney

Wonder In Peace Bright Mind

Join Honorary Chair Fran Finney and the Running Bitcoin Challenge Committee as we honor legendary cypher punk, Hal Finney.

This is THE EVENT that combines Hal Finney’s love of running and Bitcoin and is raising funds and awareness to help defeat ALS, which ultimately claimed his life in 2014.

You are challenged to run (or walk, roll, or hike) the equivalent of a half marathon — cumulatively or all at once — by the end of January 10, 2023.

From wherever you are, spread the word about Bitcoin, participate in a healthy activity, feel good about doing your part to defeat ALS, and start the year off right

Hal Finney, one of the earliest bitcoin contributors, died eight years ago from complications of nervous system disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

His spouse, Fran Finney, is now organizing a half marathon to raise funds for ALS research via bitcoin.

The “Running Bitcoin Challenge” is set to take place between Jan. 1 and Jan. 10. The timing of the occasion leads up to the anniversary of Hal Finney’s “Running bitcoin” tweet, in which Finney famously disclosed he was deploying a Bitcoin node.

There is no set location — participants can choose to join anywhere they wish. Players are encouraged to either run, walk, roll or hike the equivalent of a half marathon (Hal’s favorite distance) either in one go or over the entire 10-day period.

Donors contributing at least $100 will receive an official shirt with the half marathon’s logo, while the event’s top 25 fundraisers will get a Hal Finney collectible signed by his wife.

As of Wednesday morning, the event has already managed to secure nearly $10,000 in bitcoin donations.

An advocate of cryptography and digital privacy, Finney was the recipient of the first-ever bitcoin transfer from the network’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

The bitcoin community often suspected Finney was Nakamoto, a claim he consistently denied. He reportedly found out about his condition in 2009 and decided to move away from the project.

Hal’s name is high in the Bitcoin pantheon as one of the first people to voice support for Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention and for being the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi.

He was, for a time, considered one of the top contenders on the list of potential Satoshis himself (many in blockchain who reject Dr. Craig Wright’s statements still falsely believe Finney to be Bitcoin’s real creator).

Hal, who referred to himself as a “cypherpunk,” was a cryptographic activist who went from developing video games to working on the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) project in the 1990s. He described his PGP work as “dedicated to the goal of making Big Brother obsolete.”

PGP creator Phil Zimmerman hired Hal as his first employee when PGP became PGP Corporation in the early 2000s. He described Hal as a “gregarious man” who loved skiing and long-distance running.

Despite gradual paralysis that eventually forced him to stop working, Hal continued to code software and follow the Bitcoin project.

Almost as famous as his 2009 tweet is his “Bitcoin and me” post on BitcoinTalk.org in March 2013, the last he’d ever make.

It’s a long post, and Hal was “essentially paralyzed” at the time, using an eye tracker to type. Forum stats show the post has been read over 278,000 times.

“When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away,” he wrote. “I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test.

I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.”

Hal himself always denied being Satoshi Nakamoto, adding later that he’d sold most of the Bitcoins he mined (at pre-2014 prices) to pay for his treatments. He also mentioned putting some in a safe deposit box for his children.

“And, of course, the price gyrations of bitcoins are entertaining to me.

I have skin in the game.

But I came by my bitcoins through luck, with little credit to me.

I lived through the crash of 2011.

So I’ve seen it before.

Easy come, easy go.”

Hal Finney
www.runningbitcoin.us
Admiration and great Respect
With 🧡

Happy Holidays 2022

To all of you out there, white, black, yellow , green and avatar 😁😋🤣😁😋

I wish you all Happy Holidays, Joy and Happiness, with family, friends and loved ones !!!

Remember thou, you don’t need a certain day to be good, but be good and kind All Year Around and maybe like this together the world with change…

It starts deep within, with you and me… Don’t delude yourself saying who am I ? or I’m too little to change something…

Please do remember, in 2010 there where only 2 dots… Two “insignificant” • • ‘s that mined bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney !

Take a look at the network now… Take a look at what 2 • • ‘s did 🙂 😉

238.431 Ehash/s Total HashRate from 2 Cpu mining computers !!!

You tend to FORGET :

We Are The People !!!

Beware of Scams !!!

Beware !!!

Just as the crypto industry is expanding and getting local adoption from individuals, co-operations, organisations and few countries  the same rate at which we have crypto enthusiast increasing in number which i see so worrisome and also a call for major concern.

Reason been that as more people get involved in the crypto business the more scammers are likely to increase their technique and the more scammers get recruited.

To avoid walking on scammers path, requires to be well informed of every new technique they can ever deploy against their potential victim.

To stay off scammers path users must:

  • Avoid phishing links.
  • Make sure to pay attention to the spelling of the website, as well as their URL as this can reveal whether it is a phishing site or not.
  • Never invest in a project without a well structured community
  • Pay close attention to the engagement within the community for suspicious activities
  • Ensure you assets are off CEX
  • Be more smart and less greedy
  • Don’t jump into a project/coin only based on the hype from advertisers (especially twitter)
  • Avoid any “too good to be true” investment
  • Avoid send me 1$ and I’ll send back 2$ scams, no matter how reputable is the account calling for that
  • Protect your coins (keep your coins on your wallet, use hardware wallet where possible, never give out wallet’s seed, keep backup seed offline)
  • Don’t be greedy and/or illiterate.
  • Be sure to feed yourself with necessary knowledge, if you want to invest.
  • Knowledge from experience is good but you can also take legitimate one from other people.
  • Not everything that is being offered to you is true. Do not be deceived.
  • Be careful who you are trusting.
  • Always be skeptical !!!
  • Enable Two-factor authentication for all your accounts.
  • Using of firewalls.
  • Installing an up to date anti virus software.
  • Use strong passwords and yet easily accessible ones for your convenience.
  • Stay away from malicious links or attachments you come across on the web.
  • Make sure your private keys are well stored and in hard wallet
  • Make sure your passwords are not vulnerable online to attacks i.e don’t store passwords online or any website
  • Whenever a stranger message you first for a business or an investment, it is a Red flag.
  • Someone who doesn’t know you would want you to make big money, another Red flag.
  • Whenever they introduce a” business opportunity” to you and then hasten you in order make you take a hasty decision it’s not  genuine, they are trying their best to make you take a fast decision without telling your loved ones and friends who will discourage you.
  • It is safer to  assume anyone you don’t know, communicating with you is a scammer until it is proven otherwise.
  • Read the whitepaper and research well of the company where you are going to invest because many scams are done by this method.
  • Check whether it is genuine or fake.
  • Scammers are constantly upgrading their scam methods and anyone can be the next target.
  • Loss doesn’t just happen due to an internal or intentional mistake, and when it does happen everyone has a similar sense of remorse and risks that are absolute consequences.
  • You’ll be fooled many times by those scammers that have maintained a well structured fake community.
  • They can hire those PRs and people talking inside their community to make it look like they’re a legit community.
  • As for their workers, they’ll just tell that they need engagement but the purpose of it, they’re not talking about it because that’s what the main purpose it.
  • And that’s to make it look genuine that they have real people inside the community. But in reality, it’s all fake people that they’ve hired just to make discussions all over their place.
  • It’s safe to say as well that it’s not just the crypto industry that is not safe for newbies, everything that talks about money is not safe for everyone.
  • Crypto is the latest thing and in the last 5 years it become so successful that scammers make this as their paradise as there are a lot of naive investors in the market.
  • Do your investigations, and don’t listen to influencers and believe them.
  • Think that this is your hard earn money so you need to be careful where you are going to invest it.
  • Don’t be Greedy.
  • Don’t jump on it like a hungry cow.
  • Don’t trust the sweet words they offer you. Most of them are too good to be true but they will always sound inviting to invest with.
  • Make a wall to not fully support them unless they have proven themselves worthy of that kind of respect.
  • Always be in doubt. That will be the shield that will protect you from being scammed.
  • Must simply assume that our coins are never really safe despite our best efforts, so it is important to always be on alert and protect our coins to the best of our ability.
  • Improve the security of your coins by an important margin by buying a hardware wallet, since they are very secure devices and they are relatively cheap, instead of risking storing our coins in our computers or at an exchange.
  • Always good to know how to make technical and fundamental analysis so that you can get specific information what is the situation of the projects you want to invest
  • Many projects are delivering a good testament, but they always ended into a scam , so we need to be smart enough and have a lot of preparation before investing or trading

Controlled Supply

Bitcoin

“A fixed money supply, or a supply altered only in accord with objective and calculable criteria, is a necessary condition to a meaningful just price of money.”

Fr. Bernard W. Dempsey, S.J. (1903-1960)

In a centralized economy, currency is issued by a central bank at a rate that is supposed to match the growth of the amount of goods that are exchanged so that these goods can be traded with stable prices. The monetary base is controlled by a central bank. In the United States, the Fed increases the monetary base by issuing currency, increasing the amount banks have on reserve or by a process called Quantitative Easing.

In a fully decentralized monetary system, there is no central authority that regulates the monetary base. Instead, currency is created by the nodes of a peer-to-peer network.

The Bitcoin generation algorithm defines, in advance, how currency will be created and at what rate. Any currency that is generated by a malicious user that does not follow the rules will be rejected by the network and thus is worthless.

Currency with Finite Supply

Block reward halving
Controlled supply

Bitcoins are created each time a user discovers a new block. The rate of block creation is adjusted every 2016 blocks to aim for a constant two week adjustment period (equivalent to 6 per hour.)

The number of bitcoins generated per block is set to decrease geometrically, with a 50% reduction every 210,000 blocks, or approximately four years. The result is that the number of bitcoins in existence will not exceed slightly less than 21 million.

Speculated justifications for the unintuitive value “21 million” are that it matches a 4-year reward halving schedule; or the ultimate total number of Satoshis that will be mined is close to the maximum capacity of a 64-bit floating point number. Satoshi has never really justified or explained many of these constants.

Cumulated bitcoin supply

This decreasing-supply algorithm was chosen because it approximates the rate at which commodities like gold are mined. Users who use their computers to perform calculations to try and discover a block are thus called Miners.

21M or Death

21 Million or Death
Arise…

The supply of Bitcoin is fixed at 21 million BTC, and as a hard coded monetary policy of the protocol, the fixed supply of the dominant cryptocurrency cannot be altered.

Former Google Product Director Steve Lee stated that only 1 percent of the world’s population can own more than 0.28 BTC, due to the fixed supply of Bitcoin.

In late 2017, Chainalysis, a blockchain forensics company that monitors and investigates cryptocurrency transactions, revealed in a research paper that up to four million BTC are permanently lost on the blockchain as a result of theft, loss of wallets and private keys, and the dormant wallet of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, which experts have said is no longer accessible.

Kim Grauer, Senior Economist at Chainalysis, said at the time, that the lost supply of BTC is not taken into consideration by the market cap.That means, the real price of BTC could be substantially higher, as 4 to 6 million BTC are estimated to be lost.

Based on the estimate that the supply of Bitcoin is around 17 million, only 0.8 percent of the world population can own more than 0.28 BTC and less than 0.2 of the world population can own more than 1 BTC.

The 0.28 BTC figure introduced by Lee assumes the supply of Bitcoin to be 21 million, as it divides 21 million by 0.28 and divides the outcome of that by the world population that is 7.442 billion. If the research of Chainalysis is accurate and that 4 to 6 million BTC are lost on the blockchain, the supply of Bitcoin should be closer to around 16 to 17 million

The fact that any investor in the global market can be within the 1 percent of the world population with a $1,830 investment demonstrates that the cryptocurrency market is still at its early phase, and in terms of adoption, market development, infrastructure, and regulation, the sector can still grow significantly in the mid to long-term.

Hal Finney
There is no “Whole Coin”

Truth Quotes

In Roman mythology, Veritas, meaning Truth, is the goddess of Truth, a daughter of Chronos, the God of Time.

For my dearest copăcel Emily,

Wish that you’ll find a drop of wisdom in an ocean of words!

Because never forget Papi, the ocean was formed drop by drop 🙂🥰🙃

“Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.

Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.

Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another.

Sapere aude!

‘Have courage to use your own reason!’- that is the motto of enlightenment.”

Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”

“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”

Thomas Jefferson

“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it.

I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against.

I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”

Malcolm X

“The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.”

George Carlin

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

Oscar Wilde, “The Importance of Being Earnest”

“I believe in everything until it’s disproved.

So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind.

Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?”

John Lennon

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

George Orwell

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

Aldous Huxley

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Socrates

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.

Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

Oscar Wilde

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed.

If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.”

William Faulkner

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are.

You trade in your reality for a role.

You trade in your sense for an act.

You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.

There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level.

It’s got to happen inside first.”

Jim MORRISON

“There are three types of lies — lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

Benjamin Disraeli

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.

Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”

Marcus Aurelius , “Meditations”

“Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States.

Ask any Indian.”

Robert Orben

“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something.

Success and failure are for him answers above all.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”

Leo Tolstoy, “A Confession”

“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”

Carl Sagan

“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”

George Washington

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

Carl Sagan

“There are two ways to be fooled.

One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

Soren Kierkegaard

“1492.

As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America.

Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that.

1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.”

Kurt Vonnegut

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad.

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

George Orwell, “1984”

“If the road is easy, you’re likely going the wrong way.”

Terry Goodkind

“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed.

It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”

Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations”

“Believe those who are seeking the truth.

Doubt those who find it.”

Andre Gide

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”

C.S. Lewis

“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true.

I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.”

Abraham Lincoln

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”

Henry David Thoreau

“The truth is always an abyss.

One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”

Franz Kafka

“The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.”

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something.

Success and failure are for him answers above all.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Belief can be manipulated.

Only knowledge is dangerous.”

Frank Herbert

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

Carl Sagan

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

C.S. Lewis

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”

Leo Tolstoy, “A Confession”

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”

George Orwell

“Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”

Albert Camus

Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”

Voltaire

“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”

Niels Bohr

“You’re not obligated to win. You’re obligated to keep trying. To the best you can do everyday.”

Jason Mraz

“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”

René Descartes

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.”

Robert M. Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values” (Phaedrus, #1)

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Steve Jobs

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

Niels Bohr

“It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti, “The First and Last Freedom”

“Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.”

Jean Paul Sarte

“I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.”

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.

It is the source of all true art and all science.

He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

Albert Einstein

“Truth is not something outside to be discovered, it is something inside to be realized.”

Osho

“Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.”

Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion”

“You should not honor men more than truth.”

Plato

“Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines that everybody else is saying,… [o]r else you say something which in fact is true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.”

Noam Chomsky, “Propaganda and the Public Mind”

“The truth may be puzzling.

It may take some work to grapple with.

It may be counterintuitive.

It may contradict deeply held prejudices.

It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true.

But our preferences do not determine what’s true.”

Carl Sagan

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”

Arthur Conan Doyle

“We all know that Art is not truth.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand.

The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”

Pablo Picasso

“Honest is how I want to look.

The truth doesn’t glitter and shine.”

Chuck Palahniuk, “Survivor”

“Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.”

Benjamin Disraeli

“Above all, do not lie to yourself.

A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others.

Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete beastiality, and it all comes form lying continually to others and himself.

A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. it sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn’t it?

And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked up on a word and made a mountain out of a pea–he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility…”

Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Brothers Karamazov”

“Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.”

Nietzsche

“It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.”

Victor Hugo

“I always tell the truth.

Even when I lie.”

Al Pacino

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives.”

John Lennon

“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”

Blaise Pascal

“Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.”

Isaac Newton

“When everything gets answered, it’s fake.”

Sean Penn

“We are like chameleons, we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us.”

John Locke

“Beware:
Ignorance
Protects itself.
Ignorance
Promotes suspicion.
Suspicion
Engenders fear.
Fear quails,
Irrational and blind,
Or fear looms,
Defiant and closed.
Blind, closed,
Suspicious, afraid,
Ignorance
Protects itself,
And protected,
Ignorance grows.”

Octavia E. Butler, “Parable of the Talents”

“The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust.

The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him.

Only then, and not till then, will he have a glimpse of truth.”

Mahatma Gandhi

“I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time.

We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.”

Albert Einstein

“Knowledge is a destination.

Truth, the journey.”

Terry Goodkind

“But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue?

It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.”

Edmund Burke

“Love speaks in flowers.

Truth requires thorns.”

Leigh Bardugo, “The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic”

“We are what we believe we are!”

C.S. Lewis

“If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change.

I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one’s own self-deception and ignorance.”

Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations”

“People who fit don’t seek.

The seekers are those that don’t fit.”

Shannon L. Alder

“It is man’s natural sickness to believe that he possesses the truth.”

Blaise Pascal

“Errors do not cease to be errors simply because they’re ratified into law.”

E.A. Bucchianeri, “Brushstrokes of a Gadfly”

“Every beginning has an end and every end is a new beginning.”

Santosh Kalwar

Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”

Jules Verne, “Journey to the Center of the Earth”

“At times to be silent is to lie.

You will win because you have enough brute force.

But you will not convince.

For to convince you need to persuade.

And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right.”

Miguel de Unamuno
…something to strive for.
…leave a trail.
Sapere Aude

First Time/Small Miner

First time/Small miner reference
for getting started.

If you want to start mining here is what you need… and what you need to know.

This is written for home miners/small farms, but can be used as a guideline for most operations. Use this as a reference for what you need to research, or what questions you need to ask before jumping in.

What you need to mine can be broken down into the following categories:

  • Hardware
  • Electricity
  • Location
  • Internet connection
  • Information

Mining BITCOIN is done exclusively with dedicated BITCOIN mining hardware based on ASICs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit .

You CAN NOT meaningfully mine bitcoin today with CPU, GPU or even FPGAs. Bitcoin difficulty adapts to match the amount of mining done on the network and has reached levels trillions of times too high to mine meaningfully with PCs, laptops, tablets, phones, webpages, javascript, GPUs, and even generalised SHA hardware.

Even if you combined all the computers in the world, including all known supercomputer, you would not even approach 0.1% of the bitcoin hashrate today.

There isn’t any point attempting to mine bitcoin with CPU or GPU even in the interests of learning as it shares almost nothing with how bitcoin is mined with ASICs and will not teach you anything.

Hardware

Asic Miner:

Here is a list of the companies currently manufacturing Miners for public purchase.

Each one has their Pro’s and Con’s it is up to you to do your research and decide what is best for you.

A few points to consider while researching are :

  • efficiency
  • reliability
  • warranty period/policy
  • power draw

Each company has a different way of handling warranty repairs, depending on your situation and the policy repairs can become cost prohibitive. I will touch more on efficiency and power draw in the electricity section.

• Current list of competitive hardware

Power supply: You will need to purchase a power supply to run your miners. You will find ATX and Server grade PSU’s, the latter being preferred for mining BTC. 

When it comes to selecting a PSU purchase something with a capacity 25% higher than your miner is rated to draw. This will have you operating within the 80% rule.(explained further in the electricity section)

EX. Miner draws 1000 PSU should be able to provide 1250W.

** Many current generation miners are now being manufactured with Integrated PSU. Again do your research to see if your unit comes with or without. Generally you will still need to source a power cable.**

Auxilliaries – Avalon miners require an external controller, 1 per 20 miners. You may have to run additional fans for intake and exhaust depending on your location.

PSU’s can be purchased large enough to run 2 Miners; or the opposite 1 Miner fed by 2 PSU’s. Ensure the PSU you have selected will have the correct amount of PCI-E connectors required to operate your miner(s)

You can also find a large supply of used miners and PSU’s. Again it’s up to you to do your research as these often are a no return transaction.

Electricity

Follow all local codes and regulations

This is the number 1 factor in whether mining is right for you. As discussed with Miners being a 24/7 machine drawing power those costs will make it cost prohibitive for some people to mine. You need to be aware of what your costs/kWh are and run the numbers.

This will be done in a profitability calculator. This is just an example of 1 there are many out there.

( Miner usage in kW ) * ( Hours run per day ) 24 * ( Cost/kWh ) = Cost per Day to Operate

( Ideally less than the FIAT value of BTC mined )

The second part to the electrical requirements of mining is the available service; written for North America.

You will need to figure out the amperage you can spare, what circuits and receptacles you have in place, are you setting up on 220V or 110V. You will need to make sure that you have the right cord end for your PSU to match the receptacle, picking the wrong one can cost you a few days of mining if it has to be shipped.

If you can try and set up on a 220V circuit for 2 reasons :

– You will pull half the amps, and it is more efficient.

– Doing so requires 2 breaker spaces in your panel. Breaker sizing will depend on how many miners you plan to run. Here is the formula for calculating amps.

Watts / Voltage = Amps

Here is where you will bring the 80% rule back into play by sizing the continuous miner load to 80% of the breaker rating. 12 Amps on a 15 Amp breaker, 16 Amps max on a 20 Amp breaker, 24 Amps on a 30 amp breaker.

If/when you increase the amount of miners you are running you may want to look into PDU’s, as opposed to more receptacles. 

Location

This is something that is often overlooked to the headache and frustration of many would be miners. These machines are loud and hot .
You essentially have an electric heater that also uses an industrial fan to keep it from melting itself. This space will need to have the electrical requirements as discussed previously.

So make sure you have a space that is well ventilated with a plan to exhaust heat, and bring in fresh dust free air. I say this as using AC to cool the room will eat into your profits and may even make mining unprofitable.

The noise issue is a consideration you can sort out depending on whats available. (garage, basement, remote building)

Both of these issues can be handled with hosting, which is further explained in the information section.

Internet connection

Some miner setups have the option to use wifi. It is advisable to use a wired connection where available. This will provide a more stable connection and ensure you are submitting the expected amount of shares which is directly related to your payouts.

Please note that mining uses a negligible amount of bandwidth, and will not affect your other internet usage.

Information

You can use this information in this post as a good baseline to get you going. In addition to this you will want to research network difficulty; this readjusts every 2016 blocks to maintain a 10 minute block time on average. While this can go down it generally increases.

Solo or Pool?

You can solo mine but this is essentially a lottery even as a large scale miner. Should you chose this you can check this out as a starting point.

solo.ckpool.org 1% fee solo mining USA/DE 250 blocks solved!

Odds are most of you will join a pool. I will only say that it is in your best interest to mine at a pool that pays transaction fees (miner rewards). Then you will want to consider the fees associated with the pool.

When it comes to these pools you want them to be large enough that they are getting at least 1 block every Difficulty adjustment period. Larger pools will offer smaller rewards paid out more frequently, and vice versa.

Leave a trail…

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.

He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and his ideology was disseminated through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay “Nature”.

Following this work, he gave a speech entitled “The American Scholar” in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays “Self-Reliance”, “The Over-Soul”, “Circles”, “The Poet”, and “Experience.” Together with “Nature”, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson’s most fertile period.

Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world.

Emerson’s “nature” was more philosophical than naturalistic: “Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.”

Emerson is one of several figures who “took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.”

He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him.

“In all my lectures,” he wrote, “I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.” Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.

As a lecturer and orator, Emerson—nicknamed the Sage of Concord — became the leading voice of intellectual culture in the United States.

James Russell Lowell, editor of the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review, commented in his book My Study Windows (1871), that Emerson was not only the “most steadily attractive lecturer in America,” but also “one of the pioneers of the lecturing system.”

Herman Melville, who had met Emerson in 1849, originally thought he had “a defect in the region of the heart” and a “self-conceit so intensely intellectual that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name”, though he later admitted Emerson was “a great man”.

Theodore Parker, a minister and transcendentalist, noted Emerson’s ability to influence and inspire others: “the brilliant genius of Emerson rose in the winter nights, and hung over Boston, drawing the eyes of ingenuous young people to look up to that great new star, a beauty and a mystery, which charmed for the moment, while it gave also perennial inspiration, as it led them forward along new paths, and towards new hopes”.

Emerson’s work not only influenced his contemporaries, such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, but would continue to influence thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world down to the present.

Notable thinkers who recognize Emerson’s influence include Nietzsche and William James, Emerson’s godson. There is little disagreement that Emerson was the most influential writer of 19th-century America, though these days he is largely the concern of scholars.

Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and William James were all positive Emersonians, while Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James were Emersonians in denial—while they set themselves in opposition to the sage, there was no escaping his influence.

To T. S. Eliot, Emerson’s essays were an “encumbrance”. Waldo the Sage was eclipsed from 1914 until 1965, when he returned to shine, after surviving in the work of major American poets like Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane.

In his book The American Religion, Harold Bloom repeatedly refers to Emerson as “The prophet of the American Religion”, which in the context of the book refers to indigenously American religions such as Mormonism and Christian Science, which arose largely in Emerson’s lifetime, but also to mainline Protestant churches that Bloom says have become in the United States more gnostic than their European counterparts.

In The Western Canon, Bloom compares Emerson to Michel de Montaigne: “The only equivalent reading experience that I know is to reread endlessly in the notebooks and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American version of Montaigne.”

Several of Emerson’s poems were included in Bloom’s The Best Poems of the English Language, although he wrote that none of the poems are as outstanding as the best of Emerson’s essays, which Bloom listed as “Self-Reliance”, “Circles”, “Experience”, and “nearly all of Conduct of Life”.

In his belief that line lengths, rhythms, and phrases are determined by breath, Emerson’s poetry foreshadowed the theories of Charles Olson.