First let's start at my first interaction with Bitcoin. Back in 2016, I was trading Minecraft accounts, you could find my story about that in one of my previous post. Long story short, a buyer had offered to buy one of my accounts for a fair amount of Bitcoin. I declined not knowing what that is and not caring.
Fast forward a little over a year, May 2017, I find out that you could actually mine cryptocurrency and profit from it. I talk to my techy uncle about it, he looks into it, decides to build a rig. This was easy for him since he had built computers before. Meanwhile summer, I am currently in New Zealand enjoying a vacation. When I come back, I look for ways to get this thing started. My uncle lives hundreds of miles away from me but luckily my mother knows someone who had mined crypto for a while. His name was CryptoNinja.
Crypto Ninja was a cool guy, he was a security analyst for a contracting firm. Knew lots about computers and programming. This was easy for him to grasp. When I met him, he had 2 rigs, one consisting of 6 1080ti's and the other with 4 1070's. If you don't know what these are, a 1080ti is or was the top of the line mining graphics card that you could get. Best of the best. Each costed about $550 at the time. 1070's market value were around $300-400 which at the time made mining extremely and easily profitable. This guy taught me how to do everything and when I say everything I mean it all. We started off with ordering the parts, He told me which parts were good for what and bad for this. We ordered from all over the place, Amazon, Newegg, and Microcenter. I gathered a list of parts, SSD, HD, GPU, CPU, MOTHERBOARD, RAM, ETC. All totaling out to about 3.5k. I had 6 1080's that I bought for around 500 each. This was the first time I've built a computer. I was a complete noob. He guided me through the process of starting with software, finding a mining pool, starting up your operating system, and taught me how to manage and maintain the mining program, hardware, and external factors. The whole process of ordering/shipping was about a week, building the computer took about 3 days, setting up programs took about a day. After that, boom. I'm running the mining program with a pool on Zcash. A pool is pretty much a group of miners collectively putting their computing force to get more results.
Meanwhile, I'm a senior in High School, bringing my macbook to school everyday to check up on the rig through Remote Desktop after every class. All of this was occuring around Sept. 2017 where BTC was going up up. And I'm talking around 10k. Boy was I racking in a ton of Zcash. Everytime after I'd rack in a good amount, I'd transfer my Zcash directly into my Bittrex account which then I traded for bitcoin and altcoins like OMG, OmiseGO, NEM, ETC. But there was this one time when I got on Bittrex at school and I saw Zcash had mysteriously went up to $400 in 10-15 minutes, the timing had never been better. Guess what I did? Sell all my Zcash yep. Made a good amount of money off of that. Every coin was going up. I continuously made successful trades because prices were going up. I felt like the man. By the time December came around, I had 10k worth of crypto in my exchange account. I know, dumb to keep it in the exchange account but hey I did it. I was the only one mining crypto at my school and people knew me for that but they didn't know how much I made, I joined the investment club. They talked about investing in crypto, what is it? is it safe? they wanted me to speak, i didn't out of fear. They all thought it was a fad. These were traditional stock trader type kids.
It was hard for them to understand the concept but by the time they wanted in it was too late. I already cashed out $12.2k. Bitcoin was like 18k at the time and I needed somewhere else to put my money. I decided to buy a whole new gaming setup. Which costed me around 2.5k and a new desk and cool random stuff for my room which costed a few hundred. I spent a lil more money than I wanted to but it was okay. then it came time to sell my mining rig, Bitcoin was falling. People were freaking out. I was out already. The prices of GPU's multiplied by 2. This was insane. I sold my gpu's on ebay for 3k and gave the rest of parts to either friends and kept RAM for myself. At the time, I was still 17. People would look at my computer and say what is that? Oh Bitcoin? That's Stupid. Welp. Not anymore words.
What am I doing now? Well I invested in some Quantum Computer Stocks, put some back into Crypto, and put some money into OG accounts which I have a whole story on on a previous reddit post. I learned a lot from this and look back smiling.
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