Thursday, December 8, 2011

Something a bit different...

I'm the moderator of and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chat channel called #new_world_order on EFNet. It's been around in some form for close to 10 years and I've been in it since then. I used to be heavily into IRC many years ago but have taken to just hanging out only in a few small channels. I'm also in #bitcoin on EFNet however discussion has died down there lately.

However, that's not really the point of this post. The point is that out of this chat channel (#new_world_order) we have man different people, with different unique skills. Many of them run related websites that have been rather useful and become rather popular. Whilst I've got a website for the chat channel, I decided to take a different turn.

I've wanted to for some time start a radio show but never really figured out what I could talk about. I didn't really think that I could do the show any better than anyone else. However of the past few months things seem to escalate in society to the point that many of us in the channel talk about "prepping". With that in mind I started a small radio show/podcast and last week was the first pilot episode.

If you would like some more information about it you can visit the website and download the radio show to listen to. If you enjoy it please let me know, and give us some feedback.

We hope to discuss a large number of topics that relate to disaster preparedness and right now scheduled to only do 10 episodes. I wanted to keep the goal small so it was achievable, however after doing my first show I'm actually very excited about continuing.

http://www.nwochat.info - The website for the chat channel.

http://www.nwochat.info/radio.html - Page for the radio show.


Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Time for an update - Youtube Videos

It has been a while since I posted anything recently and this will be a short one for my youtube followers, and bitcoin enthusiasts. I've been working on upgrading my PC and things so I've been down for a bit. I'm getting messages on youtube from people excitedly requesting that I do another video.

I would like to do an update but things have been rather hectic the last few months or so and I hope to be able to get another one going here soon. However I'm not sure what topic to focus on.

If you are interested in me doing another video please comment below with what topics you would like to see.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Bitcoin Mining at an end.

Well I don't know if you're still mining but if you haven't been it isn't time to start. It is no longer profitable to continue to mine bitcoins. The difficulty has climbed too high to even begin to make a decient profit on it with the price of BTC hovering around about $13 - $14.

The good thing is that the price seems to have stablized and in my opinion this will allow more business to jump in to this area. Nothing like having a volitile market when trying to sell goods. If you price it at say 5 BTC and you're expecting to get $13 USD per BTC that's about $70. If it is volitile then it means that your 5 BTC could become only $50 if the market is at $10. Then if you don't spend it or convert, you risk losing all of it.

I don't know how wide spread adoption will be until they come out with a good point of sale option. Also distributors/manufacturers of goods would need to start taking bitcoins. So if I run a bitcoin shop I can buy with bitcoin my goods and then sell them for bitcoin.

Anyway that's my update for now it has been a while since I've posted and right now I've also stopped mining mostly. I may mine again to get my Bitcoins up to a nice round number but that only brings in about .3 BTC a day if that.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Mining becoming impractical?

So I finally did my calculations this morning and this is what is currently projected when difficulty increases on the 6th


CoinsDollars
per Day฿0.38$5.76
per Week฿2.69$40.33
per Month฿11.68$175.15

Difficulty should increase to about 1571212.0. So it is possible that my mining days are not yet over... However I do feel that it is no longer profitable to mine bitcoins in any fashion now if you are new to the game. My goal has been to get about 10 bitcoins then stop. I will most likely end up mining namecoins a lot more now though.

I keep wanting to come up with some type of side business dealing in bitcoin but I just can't think of anything good, or that someone hasn't already done yet, or that will take a lot of programming time. Programming time isn't an issue for me though its more for the fact that when I have an idea and finally get it working I find someone else has already written it up.

However, I do have a small project that I'm working on and would be interested in some feedback and perhaps a few testers. So if you're interested please post in the comments below and I will try to contact you.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Back from a break...

I took a small 4 day vacation or long weekend this weekend. I had a really good time, especially seeing the wolf sanctuary where I learned quite a few interesting things about wolfs I hadn't known before and how they differ from dogs.

As for bitcoin whilst I was away difficulty increased. So instead of making about half a coin a day it looks like I'm down to making only .2 coins a day. I'll be doing some calculations this afternoon to see if it is worth it to keep going. I was hoping to make it about 10 coins and then stop but it would take me forever to get to that point the way difficulty increases. Also it looks like MtGox is back up and the market has stabilized again and hasn't really collapsed which is usually what you would expect to happen.

Also discovered whilst away that they're shutting down Star Wars Galaxies. I know a lot of people are upset over this. My wife has been playing and running my guild Future Droids and Weapons Systems www.futuredroids.com whilst I've been playing other games. I've not played Star Wars Galaxies in months. I was hoping that eventually I'd want to go back to it after a longer break but now I don't have that chance. It shuts down in December 15th. They chose not to renew the license fees. Which can only mean one of two things, not enough people play Star Wars Galaxies for Sony Online Entertainment to care, or the cost of the license was too high. I suspect a combination of both. Since it was Smedly (the retard that implemented the NGE) that decided this was the best course of action. I'm torn cause I figured I'd have more time to do some of the things I never got to do in the game. Most of the quests I never completed, I've had an idea for a few videos to do that will probably become my sole focus now. That's my goal to complete at least two videos. One chronicling FDWS' history in Star Wars Galaxies as a final tribute video, then finally a music video I've had an idea for and worked on a little bit but never finished. As far as the whole situation the other part of me is kind of happy, because it means my wife can spend more time with me instead. :)

Anyways I'm off update later...

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

It's all come to a crashing halt...

...well almost litterally. The BTC market suffered its first flash crash. Over the weekend the largest exchange Mt.Gox was hacked, and some how someone was able to execute a large sell order making the coin go from about ~$17/btc to $.01/btc. Right now a lot of rumours over Mt.Gox were they hacked, were they not hacked, who sold what, and does Mt.Gox actually control the BTC it claims to have on the market?

No idea, but after my few weeks experimenting with this and having this major hack happen who knows where the currency will go. I think this will pull a lot of people out of the market. I'm thinking about hitting 10btc in my mining and then stopping. I would love to do a btc business, but don't have the money to make money if you know what I mean. Also, I know that if I made a site with my poor coding skills it most likely would get ownd, and with instability such as this then we have larger issues.

The biggest issue for me with Bitcoin itself is that its idea started off as a grand alternative currency to buy and sell items over the internet. However, they really didn't provide any types of merchant services, api's or whatever for merchants to really adopt it as a means of payment. Of course exchanges are a large factor in this, but unfortunately it seems like other than a intermediary currrency for exchange it doesn't seem to be taking off in the buying selling arena. Heck even if you are a merchant, most have to update their prices at the given market rate from the exchange. In a proper economy it would be the other way around, but we have little to no places to purchase items with btc.

So I've taken the "bitcoin" out of my blog title simply because I hope to be able to post about other things besides bitcoin like I used to on my older site. Thinking about the whole flash crash one guy was able to buy up almost half of the 500K coins that were sold, for .00101 $ or basically he got just over 250K BTC for about $3000. He's getting accused of being in league with the hacker but has come forward to explain the situation. He was able to transfer out about 650 btc, as mtgox has a daily limit of no more than $1000 worth of btc. So basically when the market rebounded he got almost $10,000 worth of btc. I wish I'd been that fortunate would pay off my climbing credit card debt :P hah. Anyway my next update might be next week.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Believe it when I see it...

...so yesterday I didn't have anything major to tell you about my mining. The market has stablized around 18 to $20 per btc. However today a few things are occuring difficulty is set to increase to almost double making my mining at 620 mhash only produce .71 of a coin a day. Today though I've decided to mine namecoins as it has doubled over night from .04 to .08 to exchange for bitcions. That means it takes about 14-15 namecoins to equal a bit coin and I can mine about 40 a day. Makes more sense mathematically. Eventually it will hit 1 for 1 parity with a BTC I suspect.

However, the believe it when I see it comment comes from this article http://www.observer.com/2011/06/bit-omoney-whos-behind-the-bitcoin-bubble/ in which Wagner the guy that created bitcoinme.com says that by the end of the month Bitcoin will be $100, and by the end of the year it will be $10,000. Now with that in mind namecoin becomes rather enticing for right now but thinking about it if parity is reached who's going to pay $10,000 to register a .bit domain?

I generally have a hop around make a few namecoins make a few bitcoins back and forth. So as I as I said difficulty is set to increase soon. Like in less than 10 blocks so we'll see how it affects the price. Price and difficulty are typically not linked however I feel just like a stock that is about to split it creates a psychological connection and that's what drives up price.

Monday, June 13, 2011

What a rollercoaster

This weekend many things occurred in the bitcoin world. Especially on my end. I got so involved in it this Saturday that I kept refreshing almost every 15 minutes to see where my coins were at. The introduction of namecoins got me thinking that mathematically I should be mining those as I could transfer them for more bitcions. However the price of bitcion was pretty good at about 31 on Friday. Well as I'm panicking over which to mine the market takes a big tumble fueling my desperation and indecision. I ended up switching back and forth from a bitcoin pool, to a mining pool, to try and distract myself playing games. Nothing seemed to work. I ended up calming down on Sunday though and I think I'm alright for now. I'm most likely going to be mining BTC until difficulty gets to be too much then I will switch to namecoin.

Today is kind of interesting I'm having heat problems with my PC that I was not having earlier in the week. The temp outside started in the 70s and didn't hit the 80s/90s till later in the afternoon. The temp on my video card climbed to about 80C today, but what I find odd is earlier in the week when it was high 90s the video card temp was reasonable at about 70 degrees C. So I've lowered my GPU speed to allow the temperature to go to my acceptable level. Also I think what might be an issue is I hooked up one of the two front fans in my case I forgot to plug in. I think I may have installed this backwards as one side is blowing in cool air from outside the case and the other seems to be sucking out warm air. So I think I'm defeating my purpose and not getting a good airflow over the card.

Right now the market (according to mtgox) is between 19-20$/BTC. So not too bad just not as high as it was in the past. Also difficulty is expected to go up, which will cut my mining ability almost in half. I've ordered a new 850w powersupply to hopefully allow me to get my 2nd 6950 in and get at least a day of mining at the current difficulty but it is increasing fast.

Anyway that's my update for the day, I may change the title of the blog from my bitcoin log since I also want to comment about other things.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Bitcoin update and namecoin discovery

So yesterday I started to mine a full day from 7:00 to 7:40 (with a small crash in between) and I averaged about .21 in payout to my wallet from slush's pool, with about another .04 btc. So in a 12 hour period I mined about .25 btc from 1 ~280mhash/s card. I found some more power supply cables so I can add my second card which I may do tomorrow. Tonight I'll be going out. Once I put the second card in I expect to get about 1 coin a day from it. With any luck I'll be able to leave it up for about a month or so.

So then yesterday I discovered a new type of digital currency. It's called namecoin based off of bitcoin protocal, but it ads a dns registration and distributed dns to the system. DNS registration is not decentralized from what I can tell so far, but the dns resolution is? We'll see but at current difficulty of ~2500 I could mine about 100 namecoin a day. They're convertable to BTC, but I'm not exactly sure the going rate yet. They have an exchange but prices seem a bit low right now. I suspect that once difficulty increases comparable to the current bitcoin difficulty it will increase in price. What I like about namecoin is two things, I'm getting in early, and it has an actual purpose for the coins which isn't something that bitcoin has other than a medium of exchange.

Will have to keep an eye on this as I may snag one of my brothers old computers put in my old video card and set that in the basement to mine namecoins.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

A new day of mining.

Well I got my new video card and set it up last night to begin mining. I had some issues with it playing APB, but that game is so buggy. I tried EVE but didn't undock but didn't see any major issues. I started out by not updating the drivers and I was getting around 280 mhash/s using the guiminer. Tried some switches and didn't really see much of a major improvement. At this point I think is when APB crashed after a little while. I don't know if the switches themselves changes the cards settings until reboot or not.



Anyway I turned my PC off for the night to let any outstanding balance with Slush's Pool catch up. This morning I started at about 7:00AM and have been mining at about 270 to 280mhash/s. According to the calculator this should get me about roughly .5 coins per day. Which is pretty good so that's about $15 a day at current rates since we're at $31ish to the BTC. So started at 7, with 0 and now at about 9:45 I'm at about .28 BTC. Going to leave it running for the rest of the day. I'll be home at about 6:30 so that will be almost 12 hours worth of mining. Should give me a good basis for projecting income.

Also as a note I haven't installed the second card as I don't have enough plugs in my PC for power to the 2nd card. So I may end up buying a new power supply unit that can accommodate the card along with the extra draw on power.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Out for Derivery!

My two 6950s will be arriving today, but I need to get a new PSU. So I have to find a PSU calculator or something to determine what the best one to get would be. Especially since I'll be running two cards at the same time from the same machine. I seem to be doing well on Slush's Pool, getting close to .20 a day even though the calc says I should be getting something like .15. I am curious to see what will happen with one card, as I'll probably start out that way. BTC Price is currently at about $30 it's pretty crazy. We will see how high it goes, but I am in this for the hobby not the money and may as well have my PC do something whilst I'm at work.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Bitcoin low...

Well, I've been obsessing over bitcoin for about two or three weeks and I think it is wearing off. The whole issue with the video card situation, along with difficulty increasing making my earnings drop 25% has got me kind of re-evaluating. I'm expecting to get the two cards, and I will especailly since I enjoy video gaming. I am going to try and save up another coin and see what I can sell it for on the market so that I can figure out the process and what people actually require you to enter in terms of bank information if you're doing a bank transfer type of thing. I may setup a separate bank account simply for that express purpose but probably best if I do it with a bank that isn't associated with my main accounts. Anyone that is the update for today, looks like BTC is at about 18.5 still so I'm curious as to if it will go up again today or stabilize a bit. Bitcoin has been in the news a bit more with two Senators wanting to shut down Silk Road, which allows you to use Bitcoin to purchase drugs, and possibly shut down Bitcoin. Have to let that play out though. Anyway that's the update for today.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Backordered Damn it!

OK, So I purchased two 6950s for bitcoin mining. The website stated that they were currently in stock, and I had paid a little extra for the shipping. However now that I go to check on the order it says they're back ordered. So all I have to say is I hope the difficulty doesn't double by the time I get them. I may go on new egg today and see if I can purchase them and have them sent. Otherwise it looks like I'll be stuck waiting. Price of bitcoin went down a bit to about 16 something but now we're back up to 18.9. I wonder if we will see $100 for a coin. In my opinion I might have said this before. I think $10 a coin seems reasonable at the moment, but people horde them. I suspect in large part because this is new, people can speculate easily, there is no regulation, it's untraceable, you can launder money, and the world economy is inflating its currencies in order to maintain stability. Which is the complete opposite of what bitcoin is, which is deflationary. So expect a big run up, then a massive sell off/collapse of the bitcoin. Although we have till 2030 to see how that works out, or unless they outlaw it.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Bitcoin Log - June 3rd

So I just woke up checked the market and we're at about $17 for one Bitcoin. Seems pretty insane as I'm not exactly sure who would buy at this price. I think a good price for a bitcoin is probably 1 BTC for $10. However with that said the US/World economy is completely in shambles so I don't blame people for wanting to try a new thing. I'm interested in it more for the experiment it is, and actually being able to barter goods. There are a lot of legal questions still surrounding it though and there is a possibility that the various governments will try to shut it down.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Bitcoin Log.....

So I will be posting about bitcoin for a while as that's my latest interest. I will do a more complete update about what bitcion is in another one but I hope to make at least weekly posts. However I hope to be able to make some of them on a daily basis.

I'm newish to bitcoin. I got started a few months ago and never really bothered to get into the whole coin mining thing until a few weeks ago. Which leeds me to today.

Just bought two 6950s probably shouldn't have at a total of $500 (approx.) The market is skyrocketing right now I have a feeling it is in a bubble. It is now at about 1 BTC for $14. With my current card I can mine about .20 a day if I keep my PC on 24/7. With the new cards I will make according to the calculator 1.85 coins at the current difficulty of 434882.72175. Need to fix monitors and sell GI Joes to cover the expense for this.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Nothing to post...

I have checked the previous blog and there really isn't anything worth posting. Mostly old stuff that is completely irrelevant. So now I'm trying to figure out what I would like this to be.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

New Blog

So I've decided to move my blog....after it went down I think I'm going to start posting here.


I haven't posted/written for quite some time, but I feel like I need/want to get back into it. Over the next few weeks/months I will be reposting some of my old blog entries. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up with some new ones on different topics that are of interest to me (and hopefully you).

Dd