My crypto journey, two months in

I started writing about cryptocurrency on Minds, back before I joined Steemit. Given the nature of the platform here, I figured this was a better place to continue my writing.

Truth be told, the plans I had in mind when I started are completely different from where I am now. My initial goal was to see if it was possible to mine any crypto without using my computer. And I started out halfway decently on that front. And then, in a moment of what I can only describe as abject stupidity, I panicked.

Right around a week into the whole "claim from the coinpot faucets and earn the teeny tiny bits to eventually turn into a mining contract" plan, I thought my computer had been compromised. I saw my Firefox apps using GPU processing power, and running multiple sub processes.

I saw the GPU usage and thought my computer was mining for someone else! And I freaked out. I wiped my desktop, my laptop, AND my phone! And then I learned why I was seeing that. Firefox made some updates with their new quantum tech, and now they're taking advantage of all CPU cores. And offloading some instruction work to the GPU, as well.

After licking my wounds and nursing my damaged pride, I decided to spin up a VM and study how these faucet sites worked. The result of said study was the threat assessments that I posted here on Steemit.

I'm glad I've been using a Virtual Machine these past two months, because I've had a few interesting things along the way.

These showed up a few days ago, when I would access MoonBitcoin. Thankfully, Microsoft Security Essentials caught them (MSE is actually one of the best when it comes to threat detection and heuristics. Incredibly difficult to bypass) and quarantined them. As best I can tell, it's coming from one of the banner ads that the site is serving up. What's odd is that they only show up on the MoonBitcoin site, and no others. I can't quite figure out why, but I'm not going to dig into that any further than I have to. I have my VM, if it gets super compromised, I'm just gonna nuke it and start fresh. The big takeaway, though, it that you can assume every password you're using on any of these sites is compromised.

In addition, I gave up on the mining contracts through cloud sites, for the most part. Of the three mining sites I was working with, two are almost not worth working with anymore. 5Star Mining went offline last week and I can only assume it's an exit scam at this point. E&E is still going, but only because it's something I can just allow to run and not have to worry about. Eobot, the one truly legitimate cloud mining site, stopped selling hashing power to US customers. Others have figured out a way around it, so you can mine more hashing power, but the return isn't what I would like on that. I'm still using it, trying to mine up a little bit of hashing power here and there, but it's not nearly as profitable as it could be.

I did, however, find another faucet that pays a hell of a lot more than MoonBitcoin: BonusBitcoin.

By selecting the average, I'm picking up about 30-36 satoshi every 15 minutes. This screenshot was taken at the time of writing, which is about 14:47 UTC on January 20, 2018. They track the total claimed in the last 72 hours, and pay out a 5% bonus on top of that. I haven't done a formal threat assessment yet, but it appears to just run a shipload of banner ads and no other malicious scripts. If you feel lucky and want to help me out, use my referral link. Just do it in a VM, that's all I ask. This stuff is risky, you know...

As for mining, I started in on this whole endeavor right around the time Nicehash got hacked. That was why I put the constraint on myself to begin with. Since then, Nicehash has come back online, and I decided to give it a go. As it turns out, I was turning about a 66% profit on mining, after electricity costs. My GTX970, combined with my CPU, is capable of mining about 0.0002 BTC/day. In about 4 weeks, I had enough BTC mined to start a mining contract. I found a pool and tried to mine litecoin. That all happened in the past 48 hours, so I haven't even seen the results yet. My mining contract ran for about 11 hours, and was pulling 11GHs at one point. If all goes well, I should turn roughly 0.3 LTC out of the mining. Hopefully...

As for actual payouts? Well, that's been kinda interesting. I have things spread out over multiple wallets, but the total amount earned in two months is about $3 USD from the faucets, spread out in 0.007LTC on Coinbase, 0.005 LTC on a hardware wallet, and 51DOGE on a hardware wallet. On coinpot, I currently have 43DOGE and 0.005LTC waiting to cash out. I'm holding off of the time being on that one.

As for the actual mining, I have accrued about $65USD from mining on NiceHash. Assuming the mining operation went as I anticipated, I will have approximately the same amount in LTC, minus fees. If it works, I'll continue using my rig to mine, then buy a contract for LTC. If not, I'll put my BTC into Coinbase and exchange there. Not worth futzing about with something that's not going to give me any ROI.

The one thing I want to point out, though, is the new Bitcoin Cash faucet. @clivingston005 put it on my radar, and I will be doing a threat assessment for that site, as well. Again, if you feel lucky, my referral link is above. Use a VM, protect yourself.

I'll keep posting updates every month or so, just to keep you guys abreast of what I've learned in this whole endeavor. Let me know if there's any other sites you want me to check out and assess, I'll help you guys out in any way I can.