Users

I’ll give you three examples…

1. You’re a Malaysian and the currency that you primarily use in Malaysia is the Malaysian Ringgit, MYR. Suppose you go on a holiday to Australia, you landed, you chartered a cab… cab brought you to the destination you wanted to go to and you paid him MYR… what happens?

2. You have a very very old coin that is dated back to the 16 hundreds, during the reign of so and so, and that coin is said to be worth a lot, thousands of US Dollars. You have no use for the coin, but you have much use for thousands of US Dollars. You decide to sell the coin. What do you think happens next?

3. You have something for sale, let’s say a limited edition watch, you advertised it on some forums and someone contacted you that he is interested in buying it at the price you’re comfortable to let it go. This man added that he will bank you the money after he has received the watch from you. Will you ship him the watch?

In the 1st example: The coin is of value only to a certain people, at certain places. Not all countries accept cryptocurrency as a form of fiat currency.

In the 2nd example: Even though the coin you hold may be worth thousands of US Dollars, e.g. 1 BitCoin, you will need to find a platform to trade it away to an interested buyer, and your trade is bound by a transaction fee, depending on your privileges on the platform you are trading on, and also the amount you are trading. Some platforms also place a limitation to how much you can trade daily.

In the 3rd example: Cryptocurrency boasts of being anonymous in it’s dealings. You need to find a credible platform to trade on with trustworthy (ranked) people who agrees with your asking price.

Cryptocurrency also talks much about volume; how many people in the crypto-market have the coin, how many people in the crypto-market who are interested in buying the coin, and how many of that particular coin are there in the crypto-market which affects the coin’s value, and how easy is it to “get-rid” of it.

Upkeep

Since you would be running at least (yea I said at least) an equipment set (also called as miner) to mine the coin you want, that will also correspond to these matters as well:

1. Base of Operation – You will need to find a secured place to station the miner. Some build some kind of shed or an enclosure outside of their houses. Some would also rent an area (could be a room, house, or shop lot). Anywhere other than home, you will then need to look into security.

2. Units in Operation – Most of the time, one miner will not be enough to generate the “daily figures” you desire. Some even run in “farms”. Each farm possibly has at least 10 miners running at the same time.

3. Noise – Each miner generates a lot of noise. Think of it like the sound of a vacuum cleaner running on high speeds, without the bass part of the noise. That’s for just one miner.

4. Heat – Noise comes with heat. Think again of the heat the vacuum cleaner would generate. If one already generates that much of noise and heat, what about running more than one miner? The room where the miner is placed will be generally warmer.

5. Cooling – When there’s heat generated, you will then need to think about the cooling needed so that the miner will not overheat. Miners will tend to shutdown or restart due to overheating which will affect the lifespan of your miner (chips overworking) and also your daily generated income versus the expenses spent on electricity and cooling.

6. Uptime – How long do you plan to run your miner(s)? Do you run them 24/7, or do you allow cooldown periods in between?

7. Electricity – Current is much needed to run your miner, and also your method cooling – doesn’t matter if it’s via exhaust fans and fans or air-conditioners. Each miner takes around the same amount of electricity as a 1 horsepower air-coinditioner. A miner taken in this context are GPU-based (graphic processing unit) miners, running on an average 6 GPUs (RX580s).

Some may be aware of this that air-conditioners run on wires with higher resistance. However, most of the basic wiring found in homes or shops alike are of lower resistance. So if you plan on running more than 1 miner, you will also need to look at the wiring so that it will not set your house (or shop) on fire… Just joking… I was told that at most it will just blow a/some fuse(s) in the fuse box (or worse case scenario the fuse at the meter), or the wire insulation will melt.

Do also consider should you run the miner 24/7, it will be similar to running an air-conditioner 24/7. You may not like receiving the next electricity bill.

3. Update

You need to have a place to store your coins. You call them… wallet… like duh…

The thing is, not all coins have an online wallet. And even if they have an online wallet, you may not be so trusting to place your wallet on the drive way… right? You will want to place your wallet somewhere close to you, like your room, but in this case, on your personal computer. So if you want to place your wallet in your computer, then you will need to know this word… Blockchain.

Blockchain is like a… digital ledger that records all transaction that took place. Each, yes and I mean each coin, runs on a blockchain. The blockchain requires constant, regular, frequent, all the time (you get the idea) updating from the main server which takes up not only a lot of storage space on your computer’s hard disk but also internet bandwidth, depending on what coin you are mining. For the more popular coins, the blockchain is bigger, e.g. 30+ GBs (Giga not Mega), smaller/newer coins around 8-10 GBs.

Not fun… at all…

#toomuchwork