My rollercoaster journey into Crypto, Mining and Investing - A brief guide for Newbie's :)

Hi Steemit community - welcome to my 1st post :)
This is my very brief story of how I became interested in Crypto and ultimately how I ended up putting my 1st post on Steemit. Hopefully new comers to this space will find this interesting and hopefully useful and you can see how I decided to get involved in this space and the route I took.

My background is in design, I am a Graphic Designer / 3D Designer (https://www.andrewshillito.com) and work for myself in the UK, so I have a sizeable amount of PC hardware, both Mac and PC. I have always wondered about how to make the 'kit' earn money when i'm not using it and had heard of Bitcoin etc - but never really taken the time to get my head around it all. Then in May 2017 - a friend told me about a new coin that was growing in popularity - Ethereum.

At this time Ethereum had just jumped in price and was trading at around $70 - which made it profitable to mine and actually get a return as opposed to it costing the miner money in electricity and obviously hardware. I was interested when I saw the numbers and decided to repurpose an old PC and use it to learn how to mine.

My friend had already done a little research - and his advice was to buy Ethereum and hold it as the value looked like it was set to go up. So with this is mind I took a two staged approach, I would buy some Ethereum and also set up a little bit of mining, as I was interested to learn about this area anyway. So this brings me onto step 1 of what you need to do, if you want to get on board in any way with this endeavour:)

Step1 - Set up and an account with Coinbase.

I am based in the UK - so there are limited options for setting up an account to buy Ethereum, and https://www.Coinbase.com is the most well known. It does take time and you have to upload proof of identity and also link the account to a bank account - so be prepared for a wait of a few days whilst this all goes through and is verified. Also, as I found out to my detriment, your bank may take a bleak view of transactions coming through from Coinbase... So I would recommend trying to buy a small amount of Bitcoin, Ethereum or Litecoin (the only 3 coins you can buy) as soon as your account is live. This is simply to test that a transaction will go through. It took me nearly 2 weeks of speaking to my bank and getting them to 'unblock' transaction attempts by Coinbase before I could buy anything. In this time the price of Ethereum had shot up and had broken the £100 barrier - obviously I was not happy - but I managed to buy my 1st coin before the price skyrocketed.

Step2 - Set up a Wallet.

Ok - so i'd managed to buy a single coin, and it was sat with Coinbase - but I wanted to move it into my own wallet. There are lots of posts online about wallets - so i'll keep this brief. Avoid the Mist / Geth wallet as it downloads the entire blockchain - it's what's called a Full-Node - and will consume 60gig as of today (June 2017) and will just keep rising. Personally i'm using https://www.exodus.io and liking it - although https://jaxx.io looks promising too. Ideally if you are going to store any real value you need a hardware wallet - this is the one i'm going for ledger Nano S - but it's currently out of stock until September!

https://www.ledgerwallet.com

Ok - so with a Coinbase account setup you can buy the 3 afore mentioned coins and with a wallet - you can store them. Pretty simple really. But what if you want to mine some coins too?

Step3 - Set up a mining PC

You may want to do some initial homework here as the price of kit versus the returns is becoming increasingly difficult - there are no quick wins really - I got into mining for the long term to generate a few coins and learn - not to get rich quick! Also be aware that if you intend to mine only Ethereum, it is moving from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake - so mining will end at some point. http://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-big-switch-the-new-roadmap-to-proof-of-stake/

Essential links are:
CryptoCompare allows you to see your ROI for a given GPU - with 1 GPU with a hash rate of 30 (maybe a 580 or a 1070) the chart shows that it will earn around $88 a month - but this WILL reduce as difficulty rises. Also as the value of Eth rises or falls - this will change!!

https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/eth?

Ethereal difficulty chart - as you can see it's getting harder to mine Ethereum every day....
https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-difficulty-chart

Now there are just tons of mining tutorials and lots of software / hardware to use etc - I will simply state what I use and my experience to date and what I use. The PC you use needs PCIE slots - basically GPU slots, so you need a board with a few of these. You also need a decent GPU. If your GPU is a high end gaming one - then it's likely that you will have what you need already. The best GPU's are the Radeon 570 and 580 and also the Nvidia 1060 and 1070. Avoid the 1080 as the memory used on these isn't great for mining. The actual PC needs the cheapest CPU you can find and also 4gig of memory is plenty. You will need an OS - there are options here - but for simplicity I use Windows 7 as it's cheap as chips for a licence these days - I bought my copy from here https://softwaregeeks.co.uk. If you are going to use the PC exclusively for mining, then an open frame design is best to let it all breath - as the GPU's will generate a lot of heat. Here is my 1st attempt!

Mining is (very simply put) - using your PC / GPU's to help validate transactions on the blockchain - for which you are rewarded with a small amount of the coin you are 'mining'. Do not try to 'solo' mine - you need to join a pool. I use this pool https://nanopool.org and recently they have made it really easy to setup with a UI that populates some of the required files for you - if you follow the instructions it's really simple to download the required software and begin mining. You will need the address of your wallet, make sure you use the address for the relevant coin. So - for example in Exodus wallet you would go to your Ethereum wallet / page and copy the address as you will need to input it into the mining software so it knows where to send the coins. This is currently what I do - I mine Ethereum only - but i'm looking at other coins now too. I won't go into detail on the mining software side - but suffice to say, when it runs the .bat file to begin mining, it will report the speed and also how many GPU's it sees. You may need to 'trouble shoot' here if things are not what you expected. A 'Hash-rate' of around 20 to 30 on the GPU's I mentioned is correct - if you see a Hash rate of 1 or 2 - then something needs updating. A great youtube channel on building rigs from start to finish and everything in between is these guys.

https://www.youtube.com/user/BitsBeTrippin

Here is a link to these guys building a rig using the 1060 cards.

Step4 - Check on your Miner

As i'm using https://ethermine.org this is simply a case of firing up the website and entering your wallet address in the top search bar - this takes you to a screen where you can see how your miner is doing.

Step5 - Relax and wait

So, for me at least - I have set up my miner, and i'm letting it run. For reference I have 5 x 1070 GPU's and 1 x 1060 GPU as well as a Radeon 570 and a nvidia 970 - so 8 GPU's in total and i'm only going to mine around 2.7 Ethereum a month. I think that from this you can see that buying a lot of GPU power now may not be a wise investment? I already had many of the GPU's and most of the kit, so my investment wasn't too great and in 2 months I have almost seen a full RIO on my kit, but that's due to me getting in just before the price spike and the mining boom and also because I bought GPU's before the prices went up.

My long term goal - at al least until mining Eth becomes unviable - is simply to build up as many coins as I can - and hold them long term. When mining Eth isn't worth it I will mine something else. There is a third option which is to buy Hashing power from somewhere like https://www.genesis-mining.com but personally I don't think it's worth it for me as I already have my own kit.

Step6 - Diversify

Lastly, after learning about mining, Coinbase, Ethereum etc and feeling more confident, I started to look into other 'alt coins' - the best website / exchange I have found is https://bittrex.com

You can fire across some bought Bitcoin from your Coinbase account to your Bittrex account and buy into the many new alt coins - like Steem and Antcoin for example. I've done a little bit of this - for fun and just to see what happens.

I hope you found this interesting - there is lots online about this - obviously - but this is my experience, and I hope it helps. I was too late to the party to buy Ethereum - thanks to my bank and Coinbase - but I managed to get in on mining just before it all blew up. I will continue to mine as long as I can, and my strategy is to simply 'Hold' and hope that one day my small pot of coins will be worth something.

Step7 - Keep learning!

There a lots of youtube channels - if you do a quick search, there's lots to watch - so find a few you like and subscribe. Personally I found this guy and I really like his views and take on the whole scene - so I would defiantly recommend you check him out :)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKqt2fhBdBs5ckOkuTl3edA

Step8 - be Careful

Crypto currencies are super volatile - do not do anything rash and only invest / spend what you can afford to loose - be safe people :)