Share your experiences trading or mining crypto currencies (+in app mining)

I would like to hear about your personal hands-on experience with trading or mining crypto currencies.

For general thoughts about why you think crypto currency is good/bad I would suggest you continue this thread, to keep all related information in one place:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/stratis-blockchain-and-unity-integration.447582/

I was contemplating whether I should just necro and derail that one, but I don't really care all that much about the ideology behind it, I'm mainly interested in the feasibilty to use crypto currency to earn fiat currency like USD or EUR. Does anyone here have first-hand experience to share?

@Arowx: a while ago I remember you talking about mining Etherium. Did you follow through with that?

Back then I suggested to just buy and trade it instead, for a slightly lower upfront investment risk. I have since watched a few videos on the topic and thought I should give it a try. So I made an account on kraken, went through their verification process, and because that took friggin forever and was a huge hassle, I've already missed out on some good trading opportunities.
I've registered my account when BTC was just below 3000 EUR, and I had no opportunity to buy any till past the 3800 EUR peak. Currently I own tiny amounts of Etherium and BTC, and I can't log into kraken because their website seems to be having problems. So far I find the whole thing to be a rather underwhelming experience.

I was thinking that on paper day-trading sounds like a really fun thing to do, because I have an affinity for dealing with numbers and graph patterns and I really like "numerically quantifiable success". One of the traders I've watched videos from calls it his "24/7 money making video game". He seems to be a fulltime trader who also trades penny stocks etc. and genuinely enjoys that kind of work.
I can see some appeal, but considering the stress and risks involved and comparing it to my freelance work... I don't think trading is that good of a deal for me. It might be different if this all was a more secure and stable system like you know... an actual bank.

How have your dealings with crypto currencies worked out? How do you deal with "fear of missing out" ?

 

Never mined, but I have day traded and I see no similarities AT ALL.

Doesn't take a rocket scientist or someone with experience to tell you what you can make mining. There is a ton of info on it out there. If I was going to get into that, I would be selling systems or something to the suckers who think they can just buy some piece of hardware, let it sit, and make $$$ for them.

Day trading is not about numbers. It's about knowing markets and people.

 

Yeah, I totally agree on mining not being a good idea. I just didn't want to exclude anyone who tried it from the thread.

If you stopped day trading, what was your reason for it?

 

I got into it out of curiosity. I opened an account with a few thousand and traded for about 6 months. What I found is you need a lot more invested and you have to spend a lot of time with it. There are a lot of people in the financial services industry day trading, like how can I compete with them? They have a built in advantage really.

Kind of like all the people that come to these forums with no game dev experience but this great game idea. That's what we look like day trading to the professionals I think

It was fun while it lasted though. I lost my ass, close to half of what I started with.

 

Yeah, probably. From a pure time/money risk factor I'm still leaning towards gamedev being riskier. But at least after making a commercially failed game you've got skills that you learned along the way and can be applied to other projects. I can't think of much uses for daytrading experiences outside of doing more daytrading.

I've seriously underestimated the time investment factor. At this rate I'm losing more money from opportunity cost than from bad investment.

Yikes. Sorry to hear that. We'll at least you haven't invested and lost as much as this guy:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6tfxq4/how_i_fucked_up_and_turned_600_btc_into_200_btc/


Did anyone here ever try bot-based automated day-trading?

 

This topic is quite interesting, as long as you can convince hippo and gorilla not to lock it up.

Based on my experiences, mining bitcoin and etherium (on my hardware) is largely a waste of time. Both bitcoin and etherium require ridiculous amount of time to sync the chain. For example Ehterium blockchain data is 20 or 25 gigabytes (I think it takes 2 or 3 days for intiial sync, and it can glitch out). Bitcoin has similar size if not bigger. The thing is that both of those will apparently continue growing with every new transaction, and in the end the size of the blockchain will be infinite... which makes me doubt usefullness of such system.

Regarding actual mining... bitcoin mining is dead. Basicallhy, it processed through CPU minign, GPU minign, ASIC minign, and right now apparently it requires a cluster because difficulty goes up. Also bitcoin guys experienced internal conflict and are planning to fork the blockchain in novemeber.

Etherium on nvidia hardware is unprofitable, based on my calculations I'd get something around $15 or $20 per month if I could keep my computer mining 24 hours per day.

Basically... all currencies seem to follow the pattern where they experience initial gold rush, where mining can be done on CPU, then someone creates GPU/OpenCL/CUDA miner that is significantly more profitable, and after that it'll be all about specialized FPGA hardware. Then difficulty of mining goes up and it is no longer profitable for anyone who doesn't have a cluster.

You can earn something if you spot a promising new currency and ride the trend while it gains popularity, but as a long term perspective it is not viable. Reddit had a thread where somebody said "don't mine for profit, mine for fun". Or something.

So, my experience of briefly looking into cryptocurrencies left me skeptical about the whole idea.

That's the rough idea.

 

I had dabbled with day trading on a stock market, and it is nerve wracking, to the point where it wouldn't be surprising if your hair went fully gray one year later. I wouldn't touch crypto trading, due to their uncertain legal status. Stocks are at least legally recognized, in case of currencies someone can screw your over and there's very little you can do about it. Also, survival rate in day trading (stocks) is below 5%. Not a good idea.

 

I've day traded on a few simulators. Some of the local markets have them, you can basically trade fake money on a mirror of the actual market. I lost money more often then I gained it, and it was enough to convince me to leave it to the professionals.

I would strongly suggest trying a similar simulator first to see how you actually perform before investing real money.

 

I actually used real cash but a small sum, and in my opinion the one who profits from stock transactiosn the most is the broker. They get a cut from all transactions. So, while trading over small price fluctuations you need to keep the cut in mind. The stock exchange may also has its own subscription fees you'll need to pay for accessing it.

 

About the only time I have been tempted to buy stock would be after AMD showed benchmarks for Ryzen. AMD's stock value just shot way up (AMD last year was sub $2 and now it's hovering around $12). Past that though I feel like it I would end up losing money rather than making any so I've never bothered to learn how.

 

For me it all is directly related to making games, because I don't think "making games to make money" is gonna work well for me, for a number of reasons. But I still really want to make games, so I need to "make money to make games". I've worked freelance for over 10 years, I know how to make money, and theoretically I would have enough time on the side to make games, but I don't have the energy to do it. Doing creative work for a living means for me that I expend all creative drive I have on other people's projects, and after a week of freelance work the last thing I want to do is make art assets, UI designs, new prefabs etc. etc. for my own game. It might be different if I could focus creatively on making games and earn my living with something less creative.

I talked with a friend about crypto mining many years ago, we did the math and it roughly came out at converting money via electricity into bitcoin without any profit. The thing is though, if I had bought or farmed bitcoin back then, they'd be worth a fortune right now. Though knowing myself I'm not so sure I would have had the faith in Bitcoin to hold for the looong periods of time where the price constantly went down.

The lack of protection for crypto funds is a major downside. Basically the only place where I'd feel the money to be sort of safe would be if put into a paperwallet and stored in a bank vault (I'm actually renting space in a bank vault to store backup drives already - it's not that expensive).

I did the simulator thing with forex trading and was losing virtual money so quickly that I gave up on that. I was contemplating it for crypto daytrade too, but a) I didn't find a simulator/demo account on an exchange, and b) had some serious FOMO, which hindsight justifies, given that I've missed out on the 3000 to 3800 EUR price increase due to delays in the verification and funding process on kraken.

I've made my first test trade on EOS (green dot is buy, red dot is sell):





With ETH I tried to buy in the dip, but after it did't bounce back as far as I had expected, I just wanted to sell it without a loss. I think I had already placed a limit sell order right after buying it, but the price dropped again very shortly before the limit that I had set, so it didn't execute. I think I still have two small limit buy orders for when the price drops below 200 EUR and 150 EUR, but I can't check because kraken is down again (I think it might be literally the least reliable website I've ever seen at this moment, I can't imagine that to be normal for them because I did at least a bit of research when choosing an exchange):




And with BTC I have slightly more faith that it will recover, so I only bought, bought, bought. But after being so fed up with how crappy kraken is and having had many many problems logging in or getting orders placed today, I've set two sell limits when I had the chance (red circles on right axis) that would sell most of the BTC that I bought:




If I just cash out and ragequit now, I've lost less than 1% of the money I've put onto the exchange initially. Stubbornness compels me to want to wait and get out with at least a tiny plus.

By the way, someone has made a website that posts alerts for price drops on some exchanges (not kraken though):
http://cryptomarketscanner.com/
The idea is to only buy the dips and then quickly sell again when there is a bounce back to the usual price. The thing isn't able to spot pump&dump scams though, so it'll go off after those too.
I can see how this could be useful for someone trading altcoins, but I know so little about those and I don't want to get into that.

 

Isn't it still way higher than indie dev though? x]

A friend of mine does some stock trading and says he's getting fairly good percentages out on the bottom line, but I've also once heard him be rather frustrated from losing around 10k EUR in stock value...

 

Be honest with yourself. This post is about as related to game dev as if I made a post about improving the tatk time of a factory and asked for advice and experience on debottlenecking filling machines.

Many of us have day jobs which we use to fund game development. That doesn't mean any of those day jobs are directly related to game dev.

If I paid attention to the financial markets all day every day, I did end up making money. But the simulator was enough to show me I wasn't interested in doing that, without loosing me any real world cash.

It doesn't take many 1% losses to erode away your capital. You are welcome to do this of course, but I'm convinced you will find it just as much a full time job as anything else you could do to make money.

 

Indie developer will have hard time making all their money go poof over course of one day. It can be done with stocks. Also indie developer can usually get employed in an area that is related to their skills.

Stock traders usually recommend to figure out strategy that works for you and stick with that no matter what happens. For example, you could buy, and then place two stop orders - one that will sell the stock/currency if it goes below acceptable losss thresold and another one if it goes above desired profit. There are also tools like stock options, which allow you to earn more and burn through your money faster.

 

Technically it never will I'm reminded of the joke about the engineer.

An engineer walks into a bar. He says, "I want a full glass of beer. My buddy wants half of that. My next buddy wants half of that. My next buddy wants half of that..." The bartender rolls his eyes and pours two glasses.

As far as stocks are concerned, are programs illegal? My knowledge of them is pretty much limited to World End Economica...

I remember once I saw this stock, I feel like it was bentley or something, and it was $0.03. I thought to myself, "Oh, I should buy this!" A few months later it was $3.00. I'm sure I'd lose money if I tried doing it for real though.

 

They should be legal, as long as the broker provides API. A lot of trades are performed by robots.

However, "Buy our trading robot and get rich" is a popular scam.

 

We just need to insert a tangent into the thread that makes it relevant enough. Building economies in video games, the effect cryptocurrency mining has on target system requirements due to GPU shortages, etc. That last one is particularly annoying because it's resulted in brief periods of absurd prices for even mainstream cards.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/graphics-cards-prices-mining-cryptocurrency,34879.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ethereum-effect-graphics-card-prices,34928.html

 

RIP Vega.

I was thinking it would be interesting to program it and try to get the perfect buy and sell points.

 

I was thinking the same thing until I looked deeper into it. Basically, you need a trading expert, or spend 5..10 years looking deeper into it. There are TONs of different indicators, some of which are very well known, but the thing is that popular indicators will not work. As soon as some technique becomes widely known, it stops functioning, because market compensates for it.

 

Hmm.

I haven't looked deeply into blockchain, but I think it is not really suitable for in-game currency. The issue here is that it grows with each transaction, and appears to grow indefinitely. I already talked about Etherium taking several days for initial sync (not to mention it can glitch out during this phase).

 

A case I'm interested in would be using the blockchain for something in the vein of pokemon.

 

I am going to buy some bitcoin tomorrow. its gone from 1k to 4k and its expected to hit 15k by the end of the year. Putting it in the bank is worthless investing in stocks garbage, might as well buy some BC but only if you have some disposable throwaround money. My friend was saying its going to 55k by 2025, so might as well start saving up some coins

 

Very true. In a way... that's a very efficient way of failing at something. Barely any time investment lost in that case.
And if someone puts all their money into volatile stuff like crypto currency, then imho they're crazy enough to bankrupt themselves making games as well. E.g. take a bank loan to solo start your dream MMO and end up with nothing but debt.

Interesting idea. Could it maybe have some applications in MMOs that deal with highly valuable assets like Eve online?

I wonder if it would be feasible to make a game that is monetized via crypto mining on the clients. I don't know how that stuff works, but what @neginfinity wrote sounded like there's no way to make that work in a background task that doesn't bother the user otherwise.

But what if we gamify crypto mining by dressing it up similarly to Progress Quest? Or what about putting crypto mining as a game mechanic into something like Dwarf Fortress, which would leave the GPU mostly idle anyway. It could earn you ingame currency to the same extend it earns crypto currency for the devs.

#ToTheMoon

How exactly will you store your Bitcoin investment securely? I'm genuinely interested after having read some stories of how people lost their Bitcoins or got them stolen. I'm not sure how those hardware storages work, but to me the idea of storing money on a storage device that can break is crazy. I'd much rather go with paper. Or am I overlooking an obvious advantage of the hardware storages here?

I've once met a guy on a LAN party who wanted to be an indie game dev, and got hired by a company to write a trading bot for them. They had some analysts there that fed the bot with the right data and gave the right specifications of how it should act, and he implemented it accordingly. Don't know how well that worked out though.

 

My experience with cryptocurrency miners is "I hate these people. I'd like graphics card prices to be normal for once."

 

If you're going to leave the GPU idling how are you going to mine?

Unless you're referring to some other non-etherium type of mining. Either way you're going to be costing the user's PC something. And I don't imagine that would go over well at all.

 

Value is less of the issue. Rather it's more about having it's complete history/capacity recorded.

On a thumb drive, unplugged from the internet, in a vault.

 

I meant ASCII art games have no need to have the GPU do much work so that "idle" GPU time could be utilized to do something "useful" on the side.

Yeah, it would cost energy. Probably a bit more than a regular high-end game can consume. Of course this is something that would need to be transparent and the deal would be that the game is f2p without any microtransaction. Or rather the mining being the microtransaction...

On my rig 10 hours of gaming should cost me roughly between 0.25 and 0.50 EUR above the energy price of just having the pc be on and doing light tasks like browsing the web. I actually measured the difference in power consumption once with one of those devices that you plug into the mains socket.

I always buy Nvidia cards, so I never noticed anything like that. Maybe in terms of price/performance they already always were at the inflated price points the miners drive them to .

I wonder why there are no cards built 100% for mining (or are there?). Wouldn't this make more sense? If those guys can buy enough to cause shortages, then the market seems to be big enough to warrant dedicated product lines.

I thought thumb drives are bad for long term storage because they can go bad over time. Hard disks too by the way, but for different reasons iirc. I really have more confidence in paper. Even better might be engraving into metal, that's even fire/water proof to a degree. I mean, the private keys aren't thaaaaat long, aren't they? Sheet of metal, engrave it with a Dremel, and put it into a vault? How could any digital device be more secure than that?

 

If you were going to do something like this, you would want to limit the GPU usage. Because using a card for mining like normal (at 100% usage) will beat it up. And I don't think anyone would be okay with that.

AMD seems to be struggling to keep their head above the water in the GPU market already. I don't know that they've had time to develop a mining card. You might see one next year or the year after that, possibly.

Additionally, it's not like these guys aren't being served by the current product. It's just that there isn't enough. In that sense, they don't need a dedicated card (it's possible a dedicated card could be hardwired differently to make it better for mining, in which case this point is no longer valid), AMD just needs to increase their supply.

 

Oh, I didn't know that. Good point then!

 

The first thing to work out is "What is your cost to power your crypto currency mining computer?" Remember, the computer will be running non-stop at it's maximum power usage, similar (possibly even worse) than the load while playing the latest 3D game on your PC. You will draw a lot more power with it than that same PC will draw simply idling. Also, factor in additional cost costs, because it take extra power to cool your space if you have a mining system running. In many cases, you can make money mining if and only if you can get power cheap enough.

 

I have made solid money buying and selling AMD stock over the years. Since they are an underdog tech stock, the price bounces all over the place. Any time news says AMD is doomed, I scoop up some AMD stock and then sell it once it comes back up. Historically, there had always been enough volatility in the price of AMD stock to constantly create profit opportunities.

If you choose to try making some money that way, just keep in mind that investors are not computer enthusiasts. Investors want to hear about big marketing deals or large increases in clockspeeds (since clockspeed is often linked to marketing). Investors don't react as aggressively toward in depth benchmarks. If the latest AMD Theadripper handily beat Intel in a benchmark, investors won't largely care. But if AMD announces Dell, Microsoft, or Sony has made a massive purchase order for APUs, then investors will grab a bunch of AMD stock.

 

I imagine the market is still trying to catch up and still running cost benefit analysis for that. While it's true that graphics cards are getting bought up in droves now, it's pretty clear we're in what could very much be a bubble, and the damage of it bursting to hardware manufacturers could be significant.

 

AMD seems determined to throw fuel on the fire too.

http://www.pcgamer.com/amd-adds-to-cryptocurrency-craze-with-beta-driver-tuned-for-mining/

 

I feel this is a problem.

The thing about the miners is they don't have any influence on the market, apart from buying cards and driving up prices. Cards in their "hands" is good in the short term for AMD, but because at present it's a zero-sum game (the gamers (such as myself) can't buy cards), it's bad in the long term.

The fewer gamers able to buy AMD cards, the fewer games with AMD cards. The fewer gamers with AMD cards, the less likely developers are to build games around AMD features. Less devs with AMD features, and more with nVidia features...the more likely gamers will stick with or switch to nVidia next time.

After enough cards are in stock it makes sense to do stuff like this - it keeps prices up and allows the miners to get their cards. But right now it's not helping AMD because of the small stock, and it's actively decreasing their traction with any possible gamers who were #WaitingForVega.

 

Well, there's malware that install bitcoin miners on user's machine. At least there used to be such malware.

There are also hackers looking for accidnetally uploaded amazon passwords/keys on github for the same purpose.
See:
https://readwrite.com/2014/04/15/amazon-web-services-hack-bitcoin-miners-github/

IMO, I think using users machines in such way is highly amoral.

Well, such devices exist. Google "Bitcoin asic". It is basically a blackbox that sits there mining and eating your electricity. PC is not necessary.

 

Yeah, I just recently started getting recommendations for these on Amazon. They make a lot of bold claims as to mining speeds which I find dubious at best.

 

The typical claim is
"This device will pay its own cost back in X months, and then will bring profit indefinitely".
Meaning they offer free money forever.

The reality is that the device will pay off its cost back in X months and then bring profit indefinitely... only if cost/difficulty of mining bitcoin never goes up. This part is omitted from the advertising. In reality difficulty of mining will continue to go up, meaning over the time such device will lose value.

 

If the people don't know about it and don't get anything in return, then it's straight up theft, with no way to sugarcoat that.

Interesting. I googled and stumbled over an old German article from 2013
https://www.heise.de/ct/ausgabe/201...nd-nur-wenige-dabei-reich-werden-2310361.html
The guy had 5 very expensive (5k EUR each) rigs that farmed around 0.7 Bitcoin each per day. If he held onto those and sold now, he must have made mad bank. I guess today that just isn't possible anymore because the complexity has gone up so much. I've seen a video from BTC kyle today, where the stats on his new mining rig show a projected income of ~69 USD per month. I don't know why he even bothers with that. Just buying BTC seems so much easier to me.

I've looked at cloud mining, which sounds slightly more reasonable to me, because they do it in iceland where they have cheap and clean energy from geothermal heat and it's so cold that the heat from the miners is less of an issue. Another upside is that you don't have to invest time in setting stuff up yourself, it's all managed for you. But doing the math on the contracts they offer and reading some reviews on it, it just doesn't seem to be worth it financially.

 

To be fair though the value of the currency may go up as well, so it may balance itself out. I couldn't say where it will end up, however.

 

They're doing it for fun. Also, it is 69 usd they get for free, meaning pocket money.

They do have to make sure the apartment has air conditioner. Even one lone computer working at full power can raise room temperature by several degrees, and in a hot summer it can get quite unbearable. I recall reading a blog article made by a bitcoin miner - they said their landlord was unhappy with industrial-level electricity consumption and kicked them out.

I also recall that there were blogging platforms which somehow utilized crytpocurrency to provide monetary incentive for posters. I don't know how it works though. I think it was called steemit or something.

 

It was mid summer about 3 years ago or so. I decided to bite the bullet and fired up all my machines to mine the holy currency. (No AC btw)
After about an hour I have wasted about 3000Wh of power, got room temerature to 41°C and mined 6 eurocents worth of BTC.

 

IF you hate mining Krypto, the ai crowd will come for your precious gpu card too, they are slowly creeping in ...

 

I pictured a crowd of pale people without eyes strutting slowly and going "cooooores..." "EyyyAyyy..." "I will make an AI to do basic vector calculations..." "terafloooooops..." "this system needs more AI...".
Must have been all the zombie games I played. Or it might have been people I met at UNI that want to shove AI into everything because it's the cool new thing.

 

Is that before or after deducting the cost of electricity? Because for me 3000Wh cost about 75 eurocents I believe.

Yes, steemit is that one. Imagine you could cash in the "likes" you get by selling crypto currencty. That's the way I understood it. They look sort of like reddit, but instead of up/down votes there's a $ amount in front of your post.


I just got a mail from kraken. Seems like they at least take it serious how bad their site performance has gotten:

 

Before deducting. So you can guess why I didn't continue.

 

Have to say if there is one thing that is amusing me about this whole situation it is the hardware designs some of these companies are coming up with to cater to the miners. Check out this crazy motherboard from ASUS.

 

Had to laugh out loudly when I saw that.
I wonder if those would work well for Rendering in Blender.

Did you acually buy in? There was a nice dip down to 3100 EUR today.

 

After checking multiple results on Google (most of them at blenderartists.org), my conclusion is that not only does it work well but apparently some people have been building rigs for both mining and rendering with one happening when the other is not active.

 

True, but so are most of the other things people use.

No offense intended:

It is actually incredibly easy to assume that you're the one trolling when you start those.

All your threads follow the same pattern.
You usually start talking about double precision AI on the cloud and endless possibilities. That sparks replies from people who actually know the stuff in detail. You ignore them and keep repeating the same thing for a while. Someone gets pissed and the thread gets locked as a result. No useful information is learned. The threads also create impression that you're not interesting in actually LEARNING anything about the topic you picked, which adds to negative impression.

I mean, maybe you're even meaning well, but "buzzfeed clickbait" style you use doesn't help. If you stop trying to "spark dialogue" with clickbait titles and start actually discussing things and listening to what others have to say, then over course of several months you'd probably be able to reverse reputation damage you inflicted upon yourself.

 

No drama please, drama gets threads locked.


Kraken still seems to be overloaded, even with the measures they've announced in their mail. The delisting of certain trading pairs had an impact on the prices of these coins. Stuff like that can always happen with no warning.

Is there a way to set up email alerts on kraken? On a quick search I didn't find one, but there was a website that offers that as a service, so I assume at least back then it wasn't available. I'm sure there's like a million apps for things like that, but I don't have a smartphone.

I want to try if I can set it up so that I don't need to monitor the market all the time and can just get alerts when there's a huge dip or when a limit buy order executed.