How do you provide for your family?

[igasp4air]

hey greenmachin! It's pretty awesome that your one job provides enough to live on! yay. as for us..My husband works his full time job for the city schools...AND he builds computers AND he works for one of his retired coworkers mowing lawns and cleaning move out rentals. I run my own business. I sew specialty dresses for Renascence and for cosplay types. I also teach voice and piano. I also have a small animal rescue but I suppose in the grand scheme the rescue costs me money! lol. The hubby also has retirement investments but they give no income yet. We are eventually going completely off grid in NorCal. The goal is to be 100% self-sustaining. Our kids are all moving out this summer and the past 30 years have literally been a fight to keep afloat! now it's time to be able to have some fun and I still feel young enough to do it! woot.

Happy day from Humboldt!

[Sccoupe]

Originally Posted by Daox

Yep, I have a bunch of forms (I think ~5 right now) of income besides my 9-5. I think its very wise to have multiple streams of income. None make as much as my 9-5, but I could probably live off them if absolutely necessary.

Same boat. 9-5 pays the bills and savings, but playing requires a side business. Its small and growing, but no need to over extend. Let it grow on its own. Nice to have the extra cash, but it wouldnt keep me in my house. Need some ideas for a 3rd stream.

[Merti56]

I have a job, and try to invest when I can, so I can have multiple sources of income. I also try to save as much as I can (including not having a car and using public transport to save).

[ecomodded]

Buying stock in a start up company or even a apparently failing company thats too big to fail with rock bottom stock prices can line your pockets , there is more then luck at play but a educated guess is often all it takes.
Many corporations have government backing keeping them alive stock prices can be cheap one day high the next. Buy cheap sell high

tip don't listen to investment brokers they want to milk you for your money !

[NiHaoMike]

Just an update on my cryptocurrency mining - I broke a personal record for profit from one device. My old Kindle Fire managed to mine $100 of coins last month and $75 so far this month. The difficulty level is creeping up like it almost always does. The coin it's mining has somehow managed to survive a number of issues, but it seems like it could crash at any time. (A lot of coiners apparently thought the coin was going to crash and panic sold all they had, causing a backlog of transactions that then caused one of the pools to "temporarily" disable the daily mining limit per IP. Hence the "gold rush"!)

Meanwhile, my cluster of three Moto Es and a ZTE Speed has went down to $30-35/month thanks to the difficulty increasing. And my little ASIC board (Jameson Hasher, RK3288CX ASIC) went down to $5/month. All of those are still worth running, so they'll stay running.

As for the Avalon 4.1, it turns out to be a collectible since it was the first Avalon 4.1 sold to a medical student (not my friend, one of her friends who sold it to her, then my friend sold it to me). It's currently making about $40/month of Bitcoin, but unlike most altcoins, Bitcoin is actually worth holding on to. Without accounting for the Bitcoin price rising, break even happened about a week ago, but actual break even happened well before that.

[ecomodded]

Interesting stuff NiHaoMike.

[NiHaoMike]

The difficulty level is continuing to rise, faster than expected in fact. However, I was able to counter that. Or rather, I found an online friend who happens to be a programmer.

Long story short, the coin I was mining with the Kindle Fire turns out to be not so ASIC resistant after all. It defeats the simpler, large scale ASICs (e.g. Antminers) quite well, but smaller, higher complexity ASICs like my RK3288CX can still mine it quite well. (Large scale ASICs exploit parallelism, which ASIC resistant algorithms try to impede by increasing the logic complexity so that it would make building a large ASIC for it uneconomical.)

Basically, I plug my tablet into the USB port on the ASIC board, then my friend wrote a daemon running on the ASIC to accept requests over USB. On the tablet (already rooted and running Cyanogenmod), she replaced a library with a hacked version to forward the requests to the ASIC, then get the "nonces" much faster than calculating them locally. There's a latency penalty going over USB, but that becomes less and less significant as the difficulty keeps going up.

I then discovered another bonus. When I first got the ASIC, I tried merge mining to boost profits. That worked initially, but there was a bug that caused that to stop working after the difficulty increased. It turns out that whatever my friend did on the ASIC fixed the bug so now I'm merge mining *and* dual mining on it. (Merge mining is mining multiple coins with the same algorithm, while dual mining is mining multiple coins with different algorithms, so as to maximize utilization of the miner.)

[Fornax]

Main source of income is my steady job.

One year ago I read about a 'local' cryptocoin that looked promising to me and I invested some money into it (Refund on energy bill, yes extra insulation does pay off, and working overtime.) , it's value (and my investment) quadruppled by now.
Aside of that I had a look into trading with that coin on the exchange and with some bumps on the road I made ~$2000 in a year. (Trading on an exchange isn't that hard but it is also easy to loose money with it so I can't recommend that to just anybody.)

[NiHaoMike]

Cryptocurrency mining, in general, is not meant to be a primary source of income. (If you build up a big setup, keeping it running *is* a full time job in itself!) In my case, I like to think of it as my electronics hobby getting its own job. ("I heard you like to make money so here's a miner to leave running at home when you're at work, so you can make money while you make money.")

What my friend did might not have had anything to do with my ASIC not mining certain altcoins reliably. Strangely for something so low powered (rated 6W TDP!), it has a feature often called "auto tune". More or less it works by lowering the voltage to the crypto engine until it gets errors, then backs off a step or two. In doing so, it invariably misses some nonces and the pool for that altcoin doesn't like it, interpreting it as a broken miner. The fix for that, of course, is to disable auto tune. The extra fraction of a watt it uses is totally lost in the noise and I already replaced the small stock heatsink with a substantially bigger one I salvaged from an old motherboard.

I should have mentioned that I broke a personal record for time to break even on investment. I paid my friend $5 to write the software, which paid for itself in just a day and a half. In return, I managed to boost the effective hashrate by about 50x, half of which is more or less going to my friend so I end up with 25x. (That's how I got her to accept such a low initial payment *and* give her an incentive to make something that actually works well.) How that's going to map to actual profit remains to be seen, especially since the effective hashrate increases with difficulty. The coin in question is rather unstable and might crash soon, but given the difficulty has already increased to the point where it would no longer be worth mining with the tablet alone, there's little to lose. Currently trending at about $65/month, not bad for a setup that uses about as much power as an energy saving light bulb.

[NiHaoMike]

Difficulty has went up but the rate of increase is tapering off. My ASIC is handling it quite well, currently getting $50/month or so. It seems like the coin is getting dominated by GPU miners. Looks like that while there are altcoins that are more profitable to mine on a GPU, dual mining ends up with a higher total profit.

What is significant is the record high "stake payout" at the beginning of the month - a little more than $7 or nearly double what I normally get. The stake payout (for that coin at least) has to do with how the mining pool works. The pool is "pay per share" which means miners get paid for "shares" or "partial solutions". Only a tiny percentage of "partial solutions" actually solve the block. A miner that does solve the block gets a bonus on that round, but most of the block reward is shared with other miners with the remainder "staked" by the pool. After the end of the month, the staked coins get distributed to the miners based on their number of shares and hashrate consistency. (The latter discourages "coin hopping".)

The reason for the high stake payout has to do with a trick my friend coded up. The ASIC is capable of calculating nonces faster than the pool is able to accept. Thus the pool was the bottleneck. The solution was ingenious - calculate more nonces than could be submitted, then submit the ones that lead to the most favorable "Hamming distances". Alas, that trick is becoming obsolete as the difficulty increases. (If you're wondering why not just search if any of the nonces lead to solving the block, the miners don't know they solved a block until some time after they submit the winning nonce to the pool. That is to prevent an attack where rogue miners discard winning nonces in order to "steal" from the pool while losing almost nothing themselves. Miners can only statistically guess if a nonce is going to win, which means they'll lose a lot if they tried that attack.)

What gets interesting is that the fast rise in difficulty happened shortly after the exchange announced that users can donate their coins to help the hurricane victims. Also remember that the stake payouts are distributed based on shares and consistency. Therefore, at one point, my ASIC was making an estimated profit of several hundred dollars of coins per month, although I was only able to get about 1/8 of it since that's what the pool thinks it was making. I got a tiny amount of the remainder, but most of it went to other miners. A large percentage of that presumably ended up going to the hurricane victims. In other words, my friend, as beautiful as she is on the outside, is even more beautiful on the inside and her code is helping to make the world a more beautiful place. (Can't post pictures because she wants to stay anonymous. I can understand because a lot of the coiners who used to mine with their old smartphones are upset that it's no longer profitable for them and would be hostile towards the ones who made it that way. I'll just say that if you met her in the city and tried to guess what she does, you'll guess "actress" or "rock star" and not "programmer".)

I had to buy something special with the profits made from that mining venture. It had to be something I actually want and something that lasts a long time to make it memorable. The answer is obvious - a 100W solar panel. And yes, among other things, I'm planning to run my mining setups from solar.