R-Planet Rigs Sale - Aftermath

By 10am last Saturday I was getting nervous. There didn't seem to be a link to the R-Planet rigs sale on their web-site, on twitter or on AtomicHub. My Aether was trickling in and its value was already falling. I had a secret weapon though. Just over $120 between a couple of accounts. My strategy was simple - just try to get any rigs possible but the sale of the small packs before the large packs would be an issue. If I managed to get a single small pack, I would not have the funds to get a large pack too. If I couldn't get any small packs, I would have maybe 30 minutes to get the wax transferred over to the other wallet for the big pack.

I started to get ready for this sale last Wednesday, by un-staking a lot of wax which was staked to CPU and NET. I knew I would not be using my account much before the sale. I also knew it took 72 hours to un-stake and if I didn't get the packs I wanted, I could simply re-stake the wax back to CPU to be able to continue playing Alien Worlds. With no news of any links though, I was starting to worry.

I decided I had to infiltrate the community. It was a choice between using either the Telegram or Discord apps. Let me see... download a program from the internet and put my real phone number in? No thanks telegram so I headed for the Discord community. It became clear that these people were close to the game developers but the actual devs preferred the Telegram app (or maybe they're incognito in Discord?). It was clear though that some of the players in Discord were responsible for gambling aether in the search to uncover the unknown elements within the R-Planet game; and this is a gamble best made with deep pockets.

My experience on Saturday could have gone either way. I did not see this community at its best but who can blame them? Every minute or so new people would arrive in the general discussion channel, with varying levels of language competence and would ask the same questions. "When rigs?", "Where link?". Others would complain about experiences they were having transferring from another crypto-currency into wax and flooded the chat with questions about one exchange or another. Others would ask how much they could expect to earn from packs or how much they needed to have staked in CPU? The community handled these questions with varying levels of sympathy which is understandable since none of these issues have anything whatsoever to do with R-Planet. The community also wanted to buy rig packs, not just for profit but because it's an integral part of their favourite game. One of the moderators even set up a few in-chat games where he posted a link to a free NFT but you had to edit the link in some way to be able to claim it.

The sale arrived and thanks to my knowledge of wax and preparation, I was as ready for it as I could be. The link went live; I pressed buy. I didn't think I would get one but I did. My sons account did not (I used Anchor while his account uses the cloud wallet). I rushed to logout and log back in with another account which had just enough wax in it. I managed to get a second pack. At that point I was thinking "is this real? I did use the right link didn't I? did I get scammed because all these other people are complaining in the Discord channel?". To check, I logged into R-Planet and opened the pack I got for my son. Sure enough, out popped 6 shiny new rigs (4 x 150 ae/hr and 2 x 250 ae/hr for a total of 1100 ae/hr). At that point I decided I wouldn't stick around any longer and turned everything off for the day.

On Sunday, I logged back in and started to spread my unspent wax between accounts so I would be able to play again. I split the rigs too so my son would have a small passive income from half the pack. I was unsure about the second pack. When I mentioned to my wife the previous day that I'd managed to get the packs and they were selling for ten times the purchase price her immediate response was "Have you sold them yet?". I was quite shocked by this; no pause or hesitation. Of course our circumstances could be better so that thought began to fill my mind. I checked the prices on AtomicHub for the packs and the individual rigs. I went back to the discord server. Players were posting images of the lucky packs they had opened. There were still some people bringing their baggage and complaints to the chat. The guy posting the links to the free NFTs was there giving clues as to how to win again.

I decided I had to know what was in the second pack so I chose to open it. I got luckier than the first time (2x 400 ae/hr, 2x 250 and 2x150 for a total of 1600 ae/hr). With my original 400 ae/hr rig still staked, I logged in and staked the rest. At 2,000 ae/hr I had achieved a level-up in the discord ranks. Essentially the higher your staking power, the higher your rank on the server. I had gone from guppy (<2k hr) to crab (2k-10k). I still felt it was a game for whales and I would never earn enough aether to actually be able to craft any of the elements which award an NFT which can be staked. The cheapest to make seemed to require around 5 million aether which will take me 104 days (by which time the first 600 which give an NFT will all have been created). I did start looking into the game though and even started to craft some basic elements. I haven't got NFTs for these but there does seem to be a long-term game plan to make them useful. Then something happened which I didn't expect. The moderators did a drop for some free promo NFT cards. People in the chat got the links and because it was only seconds before the drop went live and it had a private key needed for claiming, everybody in the chat seemed to get one or more of these free NFTs. 

Apparently they do this drop every week and there is a plan to combine several of the set into another NFT which will have a staking value in R-Planet. Since Sunday, I have spent quite a bit of time on their discord server. It made me realise they are a community who just want to bring new players into their game. The trouble is they saw an influx of vultures who saw the chance to make money. A lot of those new rig packs are currently on sale in the AtomicHub market. Lots are not being bought yet because of peoples greed but having them listed instead of earning aether is helping nobody. I'm so glad I unpacked my second pack and while I may not be perfect and might occasionally sell off some aether when I need wax, I have chosen to be a part of this community as much as I can be. At least any aether I sell from now will be used to buy something which earns more aether until I hit that 10k aether per hour level.

With Great Opportunity Comes Great Risk

There is a second chance to get in on buying R-Planet rigs packs this weekend. A total of 108,000 more NFTs will potentially be minted which will see an increase in Aether supply by up to 18,000,000 per hour; that's 432,000,000 per day. 11,250 more people will get the chance to buy a rigs pack and possibly start staking to earn Aether for the first time.

I will be there, wallet-ready because I think the artwork of R-Planet is of the highest quality. Staking cards for passive income is something of a mixed blessing though. For example, I have just sold one of my most-prized NFT's below the market rate and now have the liquidity to buy more at the weekend. My staking power of 150 Aether per hour is gone but I now have the funds to get in on the next set and with 10 minutes of luck on my side will go from 150 Aether/hour to 2,000 Aether/hour as I now have the funds to get two packs with a guarantee of 1k+ staking reward per hour. There's also the risk that I might not get any at all.

Yesterday in his show, Cryptostache told his audience not to buy NFTs based on their staking value as these can and do change. We are seeing this in R-Planet as they have dropped the rewards on common Alien Worlds NFTs and the community seem to expect Koloboks rewards to be nerfed next. Despite this, the Stachio's NFTs can be staked on R-Planet for various reward levels and while he might not consider the stake value to be an important decision many others in the community will take this into consideration. If you're going to spend 200 wax on an NFT and one can be staked for 50 Aether/hour while the other has no staking value, financial common sense says get the one which can be staked and use the returns to eventually buy the other. This is the reason why the secondary market value of a lot of  NFTs on AtomicHub have risen. There's even a tool where you can check how much an NFT can be staked for before you buy it.

I'm sure Stache knows his basic economics as he announced his latest drop near the start of his most recent show knowing full well he had almost twice as many people (about 900) on his white-list as he had NFTs available. There were still people in his theta.tv audience who had no idea there was a white-list. This raises the question of whether he is keeping mint numbers low to fuel demand and maintain staking rewards rather than satisfying the demands of his tribe and over-saturating the supply; a move which could see his NFT stake rewards reduced (which he said should not be a part of your purchasing decision, so he should be dropping about 900 NFTs each drop to satisfy everyone on his white-list). Personally, I think it would be good for him to do this and to arrange with R-Planet for all his NFTs to reduce their staking value. His basic 'Stache-signal' NFT was available on the AtomicHub market place for around 40 wax about a month ago but is now listed for 89 wax. 

An alternative approach may be to look at the AtomicHub market and remove those who are selling his latest NFTs less than 24 hours after launch from his white-list. These are people or bots who took a 57 wax NFT in high demand and are now selling them for 135-200 wax. The only thing worse than tuning in to these shows and instantly being sold to is then being unable to buy except from the secondary market at over double the price.

Anyway I appear to have gone off topic a little so back to R-Planet. Despite the fact there will be a lot more R-Planet rigs in circulation by Sunday, the prices of individual cards remain high. Yet the Aether supply is likely going to the moon next week which means lower rewards for everyone as the value falls. I'm also half-expecting an announcement that all non-RPlanet cards will earn lower rewards. The people behind the project are giving us another chance to buy-in so it seems likely they will plug more of the leaks which see Aether being traded rather than used in-game. This is good news for fans. When I got my first R-Planet rig it was from the secondary market and prices were already starting to pump higher. I had no idea what the staking rewards were but by the time I figured it out, the possibility of obtaining enough Aether to get one of the element NFTs seemed to be out of range.

The question now is will all the packs be taken by bots. It's a risk I'm prepared to take in the hope of owning a few more R-Planet cards. If I fail, there are other NFTs I like which also currently have a staking reward but many are currently trading above true value because of these rewards (in my opinion). Despite the news of the new rigs, it didn't prevent my low-reward rig from selling at around four times what I paid for it. It went quickly too; because the other rigs are still selling for five times that amount. If all goes to plan at the weekend, I will end up with twelve new cards with a reward rate of 2,000 Aether/hour but most importantly of all - 12 new random NFTs of the same artistic calibre. There is no guarantee and I suspect we are just as likely to see bot-owners reselling their new rigs at huge mark-ups.

Well that's all for today. Fingers crossed for the weekend and I might not post again before next week. I have un-staked some CPU to have funds ready for the R-Planet rigs so will be mostly offline until then to keep my CPU usage very low. If the bots get all the packs, well it may go even lower afterwards.

WAX CPU - What really happened?

A lot of players will have noticed an increase in 'out of CPU' type error messages recently when trying to do anything using the wax blockchain. Everything is transaction based; every time you claim a mine in Alien Worlds or buy something from the AtomicHub market or claim a free drop (if you can still find one). While wax is often touted as not having transaction fees, this is not entirely true. For example if you use the Anchor wallet and you don't have enough staked, it will actually tell you this and kindly (sic) offer to let you pay an additional sum of wax to complete the transaction. Let's dig deeper.

What actually happens is you receive a few wax when you set up your cloud wallet which is automatically staked for you so that you can interact with the blockchain. There is a finite amount of CPU and net resources which are shared among all the active users in the ratio of how much wax you have staked to how much of these resources are available. This is explained here using a really bad analogy to airports. So why did this system work fine a few weeks back but not so well today?

The answer can be found here. From the narrative of this statement using an equally poor hotel metaphor,  a lot more players are visiting resulting in the available resources being shared among more people so everyone gets a smaller slice of free pizza.This is only one part of the explanation. The article continues '...previously influential customers in the space reserved a large amount of “rooms” that they did not use every day, so new accounts got extra resources for free. However, now these extra resources are taken up by a larger user base, so customers are only allocated the resources that automatically came with the account.'

So to use a better metaphor, the whales had superfast wi-fi but weren't using all of it so we got some free wi-fi off them but the whole neighbourhood started using it and now not even their unused wi-fi is enough to cope with everyone wanting to Netflix & chill; so everyone needs to fork-out for their own land-line (i.e. stake wax to CPU). The problem here is that everyone is competing for the same CPU resources. The result is that when the system is busy, only those with a large CPU stake are going to be able to transact. While this is ok for some on YouTube who will be able to continue scamming people, the rest of us will need to fund our transactions by buying and staking more wax or choosing times when the system is least busy - which is harder due to the influx of more players. If we all continually increase our CPU stakes, the system will not improve as we are just competing with each other for the same resources so gradually more and more of us will get priced out of the system. 

Can you imagine going into Tesla and being told 'Yes we have a vehicle for you and we understand you have the money for it but unfortunately our cash-registers require you to hold a minimum of fifty million dogecoin now that our vehicles are more popular and our big dogecoin-holding board members no longer want to foot the bill for us to use our registers?'. The question we should be asking is 'if you're now making more money from more customers, why aren't you investing some of it into more resources?'. There is also the question of who benefits and who gets hurt by this change. If users need to invest more and more into staking, they have less to actually spend on digital products so artists releasing their NFT's now have a bigger market but this is combined with downward pressure on prices. There's also the knock-on effect of users now thinking they were conned as all the free-to-play games suddenly require increasingly bigger deposits to actually use.

The original article explains the benefits of staking as getting to vote on things which many of us I'm sure have very little interest in. I've also previously explored how you can earn interest on your staked wax, but this is a tiny, trivial amount compared to what you could earn from just 5 wax if you were lucky enough to get the first mint in a new series of NFT; if only you didn't need to stake ten times that amount just to transact. 

What then is the solution? Well we can continue to compete with each other for limited resources by continually staking more wax rather than spending it on things we would otherwise buy, or we can resign ourselves to a decreasing allocation of transactions and progressively higher staking levels. I'm not sure if anything less than collective action is likely to see a reversal of this change. If enough people were to unstake all their wax before the next big launch event, bad publicity might force a reversal when stories emerge of lots of people having enough tokens to buy the products but the blockchain resources being insufficient to support the sales. 

As for me? Well I'd rather be able to continue playing than not. I decided to sell off my standard drills, stake the wax and continue being able to mine, but back to using shovels. Hopefully I can drop a valuable NFT before the next round of stakeflation kicks in. If not then I will be writing about the best times to avoid heavy CPU usage (which at the moment seems to be weekends; short post!).

Usual disclaimers at the top of the page.

Alien Worlds - Multiple tools and Land Prices

So far in this series of articles, I have covered getting paid in crypto while you browse the web using Brave browser and getting started with Alien Worlds; a free-to-play digital card-game which occasionally pays out random NFT prizes. I've also covered the process of trading in your mined TLM virtual ore for WAX tokens (and potentially other crypto or actual cash).

CPU Problems

=============

At the moment a lot of people are reporting issues with CPU usage on Alien Worlds. It looks like the WAX network may be having issues with scaling thanks to all the new players. A month or two ago, all you needed was 5-10 wax staked to CPU usage to play for several hours. The amount of CPU resource available is shared between all the staking users and you might have had to stake the odd couple of wax when the network was busy. It's not clear what's causing the issue at the moment but my guess is the influx of new players. 

Multiple Tools

=============

Anyway back to tools. If you've found a second shovel you might have noticed that the game interface doesn't let you equip it. Some of the video's I've mentioned recently suggested this must be possible and it is. Rather than repeat content, I'll just link to it here. If you can't fathom it from the written article, I recommend this video version on YouTube. 

Some Thoughts on Land Prices

==========================

It's interesting to see that with a standard drill and a couple of shovels, players were getting around 5 TLM in a single mine back in January. By contrast, with a standard drill, standard shovel and a standard capacitor my highest mine today was 0.0936 TLM. It's hard to say if this is going to be the new normal or just a temporary situation. There must be a knock-on effect for those who invested in land. It's now much harder to justify those crazy secondary market prices if earnings have been slashed to around 1-2% of what they were five months ago. At the time of writing, the cheapest land on AtomicHub is listed for 54,000 wax (around 12,000 dollars). Thanks to AWStats, we can see that this land has only yielded 0.1 TLM in the last 24 hours from a commission of 15%. The commission earned is therefore 15% of 0.1 TLM; not exactly a great earner.

Is this the Binance effect? Is it the result of the influx of new players. The current CPU issues are certainly having a negative effect for land owners as well as players. If  miners can't mine for very long and don't earn much when they do, land owner commissions are probably likewise going through the floor. This would mean land values are currently way over-priced. In the last month they have risen ten-fold on the secondary market while passive income from them appears to have decreased by up to 98%. I imagine there are a lot of angry land owners at this point holding and hoping for fixes and a recovery. If this doesn't happen, it begins to look like a rug-pull. Land went 10x while income from it simultaneously went 0.02x. This suggests anyone who bought to invest is likely to take profits or cut losses as they could now earn more from staking the wax than they might earn from future commission. The question is will we see the bubble burst or are there enough new buyers from the influx to support higher costs with lower yields?

Usual disclaimers apply here (see above). I'm not a financial advisor; I'm just a person who suspects 54k in wax has a better return from staking than 15% of 0.1 TLM. Virtual assets can go down as well as up (and if they go down to realistic levels I probably will buy a plot of land in A/W, but after my research I have my own opinion of what they should be selling for and it's way lower than current prices).

Alien Worlds - Mega-Strategy Update

A very short update today. I'm still contemplating the impact of this. It had to be out there somewhere, just like the TokenHead wallet.

A YouTube user by the name of CryptoPunk has uploaded a tutorial about AWStats.io - a sort of visual data-mining tool which you can use to explore who is getting good drops from Alien Worlds, what sort of a deal landowners are getting and what tools are successfully landing legendary NFT's.

Here's the video and here's the website which he mentions.

The video implies that you don't need mega-expensive tools to get good drops. I'm still figuring out how to use the tool and I'll update on this next week.

Crypto Round-up or What I (L)earned during April

The world of crypto is very different to how I remember it from way back in 2009/10. It's been good to see how things have progressed. Now instead of a single blockchain they seem to be in double-digits (possibly even triple or more). Things which have stayed the same include wallets with 12-word security phrases to secure them and the odd opportunity here and there to earn a small amount of crypto-currency. Things which have changed include the number of exchanges to swap coins and tokens, games using blockchains and collectible NFT's with built-in provenance.

I think I can safely say that those with wealth have a lot more opportunities to invest in digital assets but only time will tell if the current plethora of chains and systems will continue; maybe some will contract or consolidate. It's hard to imagine what will happen at that point. A lot of their data appears to be provided by decentralised storage-providers while the blockchains appear to just hold account and transaction details. Will we eventually see entire blockchains being archived and if so, what happens to the items being traded on those chains if there's no way to update them? Maybe they will be moved onto other chains as 'wrapped' assets. Is the current situation a bubble and if so, when the first blockchain gets archived will we see a nervous shift back to physical collectibles and assets?

One thing I have learned recently is there are things called 'faucets' which are like dripping taps in that they reward you with tiny amounts of crypto for fulfilling certain tasks. I hadn't realised that these are very much a part of most modern blockchain systems, usually intended to whet the appetite and incentivise investment. I had no idea there were so many different versions of these until I saw this article about them from coinmarketcap.com. 

I suppose this will continue to be the case with blockchain games. While Alien Worlds has the potential for you to drop a valuable NFT, this does not seem to occur frequently so the trickle of trillium which can be converted into wax could now be considered a faucet in my opinion. Mining yields from basic tools have not recovered since the whole Binance project took off a few weeks ago. I would have liked to have been able to own land in the game however the current cheapest listing on AtomicHub is at 55,000 wax (about $14,000) which makes virtual land ownership very much a rich persons game (as in real life). At the moment it really feels like developers are selling off the treasure before they've built their game(s).

For those coming into crypto without capital (like myself), this world is full of barriers to entry. There appear to be those who get early access to crypto games who continually jump to whatever the latest game is only to cast it aside the following day for the next new best crypto game ever. As someone who put in many hours of gameplay into Guild Wars 2, developing a character and building up an inventory of relatively rare items I would urge developers to consider equalising opportunity for those likely to stick around. If you are always poor in-game, then you eventually stop playing. Those you sold your treasures to early on are not the people likely to be your long-term customers. They will sell their magic staves and swords the moment they show a nice profit. Unfortunately so will many newcomers to a game who suddenly find themselves torn between keeping a lucky drop or taking value from it to help with real-life problems.

Still I have digressed again and that was not the purpose of today's post. I said I would review how far I've got from an initial investment of absolute zero (when I said I had no capital, I really meant it). I am therefore very grateful of the people and developers out there who have enabled me to have greatly increased the value of my initial investment (of absolutely nothing). Rest assured once life gets back to normal, I shall remember where my crypto-victories came from. For now, let's have a look at those who've been a praise-worthy part of my recent crypto-exploration.

Theta.tv (article): (TFUEL)

==============================

I've been running their edge node software on this PC and more recently on my older laptop. So far it has netted me 4.0427 tFuel. I love this project even though it's far from profitable. I have yet to see if they will transfer these earnings into my wallet. At a current price of $0.39, this equates to $1.58 which is more than I earned from watching content on YouTube during the same period. Last night I was watching the CryptoStache channel and the show ended with a raid. Essentially all the viewers jumped onto another streamers channel. This guy (Stumpie) then proceeded to dish out a bunch of freebies to the new audience. He had some interesting things to say about the crypto-verse and I wish I could have stuck around for longer but it was after 2am. I will be checking out his channel again soon (if only to find out what he uses on his rig to mine Etherium).

Update (9thMay21): Today my 4 and a bit tFuel have moved from the pending section in the node software to my Theta wallet. I will now have to work out what use it has from my perspective. I'm unlikely to ever stream myself so it may be a good way to support those who are building communities on theta.tv. It's great that I got this reward just for supporting something I believe has great potential. 

CryptoTab: Bitcoin (BTC)

======================

I still can't decide if it's a scam or not but it definitely pays out. This is faucet territory though. My main system varies from 2k to 4k hashes per second with my old laptop running at about a quarter of that rate. So far I've only hit the payment threshold once but after that I tried out NiceHash and have now decided CryptoTab is the lesser of two evils. It is definitely more of a mini-me than an Austin Powers but did pay out the 0.00001 BTC within 24 hours. I'm currently running it on my main PC, old laptop and now also on an antiquated system which I use as a crypto-heater in my office and I'm half-way towards the next pay-out. I gave CryptoTab a green-light after the first payment came through but have since revised this to an amber-light (use with caution). Their twitter account lacks any attempt to create an online profile and was also suspended. I also think it may be problematic to uninstall for many people should this ever be needed and they also show no interest in responding to their critics on TrustPilot.

WAX: Blockchain (WAXP, TLM, AETHER +more)

===========================================

Wax was great for me, partly due to timing and partly due to some inspired decision making on my part. I was lucky to get some above base-level mining tools in Alien Worlds which I sold when prices started rocketing. I was then lucky to discover selling TLM on Alcor. I was lucky to have found channels like CryptoStache on YouTube and I was lucky that I opted to buy a couple of R-Planet NFT's from the AtomicHub market because I liked the art. These rose in value just like the mining tools of Alien Worlds. I haven't sold them yet as I have them staked in the game and they are currently earning a small amount of passive income. I just have to log in now and then to claim the Aether (the reward token which can also be traded for wax via the Alcor exchange). So far I have not taken a penny out of the wax system as I believe it has the potential to grow huge. I also reinvested some into KOG's (Keys to Other Games) as I think their project looks interesting.

I staked some wax and reinvested my remaining wax into NFT's from the AtomicHub marketplace. When I sold my Alien Worlds tools I actually earned over $200 worth of wax due to an influx of new players. I started to buy NFT's from new artists - just art I liked and intend to hold. This included my R-Planet rigs NFT's which I bought not knowing they could earn staking rewards. Since the process of going from wax to other mainstream crypto still confuses me, I just keep reinvesting everything back into wax projects and I continue to play Alien Worlds. It's kind of hard to say how much I've earned from wax as it's all reinvested. Just like CryptoStache, I want to stash it rather than cash-out. The TokenHead wallet suggests my accounts are worth around $250 at present but this includes some dubious valuations of NFT's (it's not clear if these are based on listings or actual sales). Even so, this propels wax to the top of my earnings list for the month. It wouldn't be enough to live on but as a side hustle with long-term possibilities, I'd say it's the next bitcoin.

Brave Browser (BAT)

===================

Almost bang on-cue to ensure I don't forget about it comes Brave browser. Not only has it just announced the months earnings are ready to claim, but I think I also got a bonus 5 BAT for dragging the logo symbol onto an empty template space. My balance currently stands at 7.250 BAT (currently just over $10). I'm still a good way off the 25 BAT required to set-up the uphold wallet but it does appear to be growing slowly and it's more than I earned from using Google Chrome last month (which was nothing). 

Pi-Coin (PI)

========

It was the discovery of this on 3/14 that got me looking into the crypto-world again. It's still under development which means you can't use it for anything yet but you can still get involved by downloading the app to your phone and pressing a button every day. As yet I can't see a need it fulfils but hopefully that will come around before or soon after the launch.

So that's the good guys, now for the ones I'm dropping this month.

NiceHash

=============

It was inevitable after my experience with trying to withdraw my earned bitcoin from their custodial wallet to my own. I now refer to them as Not-So-NiceHash and they will not be getting any more of my mining resources. It appeared more efficient than CryptoTab but it's quite boring to watch. Using CryptoTab instead allows you to turn any browser-game into a crypto-game so the slower earning rate can be offset by using it to play Alien Worlds or any other faucet you might want to try out. 

XMRig

=========

This is the miner I previously ran on my crypto-heater. It was great for producing heat, but I only earned 0.00001247 after 8 hours. With a minimum of 0.1 XMR for the payment threshold (about $42 at the time of writing), I've estimated it will take 334 days of running 24/7 to reach that threshold. Even if I was assured the $42 return and that would cover running the rig for all that time, I still wouldn't need to run it for 334 days per year. Here in the UK we usually get at least a brief summer when my heater is not needed. So XMRig has been relegated and the heater now adds a small extra boost to my CryptoTab earnings when it's running.

Still lots more things on my radar to try out so I will keep the articles coming for as long as I can. This week I've discovered chain(o) games and been hearing about music NFT's on Phantasma and a secret society experimenting with a human blockchain?. I also saw an advert for an interesting looking project called Kanaria however as the image below shows its already beyond my means.

There always seems to be so much going on in crypto.

Not-So NiceHash :((

Well I was trying to compare NiceHash O/S with CryptoTab and I thought the signs were good. Over the past couple of days I have mined for approximately 32/48 hours to reach the payout level of 0.00001 BTC. That would have put NiceHash in the lead by about 24 hours however they have shot themselves in the foot metaphorically speaking.

Yes they made it difficult to start with by insisting I use 2-factor authentication to add my bitcoin wallet address. This meant installing a Google authenticator app on my phone (which I never wanted) and turning on 2FA on a Google account which I had to link (which I also didn't want to do as I don't use my gmail address for mining). It also states on the set-up pages for this that there may be a 24 hour delay if you don't already have this authentication system set-up. Not only that but my 0.00001002 balance from the mining screen appears to have shrunk to 0.00000983 by the time it has appeared in my NiceHash wallet.

However the real kick in the teeth is the new minimum required to withdraw from the NiceHash wallet to my own atomic wallet. Yes below you can see the minimum is not 0.00001 but 0.001 or to put in another way, 100 times the amount I just spent 2 days mining. So at the prospect of having to mine for another 3,200 hours to get a pay-out, I'm opting to say so long Not-So-NiceHash; thanks for stealing my fish (electric eels?).

Well if that's how NiceHash want to support miners I'm done! After going through all that additional hassle just to be confronted with this:

Statistically it may have been the faster miner but this is just so shady. So if I might make a suggestion to the 'Nice' people - maybe you could update your earnings estimate page. Here's my suggestion for how it could look.

So I'm calling it - NiceHash are dishonest. They failed to state that mined bitcoin would remain in a custodial wallet until reaching 100 times what appeared to be their minimum payout level. If I had known that in advance, I probably would not have even tried their service. I will put this one down as a learning experience.

Tomorrow is my planned review of the past month of crypto-learning and I realise I have barely scratched the surface. There is just so much stuff out there.

Usual disclaimers apply.

Cryptotab Update: I'm no longer green-lighting it at present!!!

 

As readers may know, I have recently been using CryptoTab. It's been one of those 'is it genuine or a scam?' type situations from the start and I still can't be certain but I now have a new reason to say if you are a cautious/mildly paranoid type then this is not something you should install at the moment.

The reason I've decided to update my opinion to 'only install if you're fairly tech-savvy' is because yesterday I started up my laptop and didn't actually want to use CryptoTab and I always like to disable the automatic start-up of applications so they don't start running until I DECIDE WHEN they should be running. The usual way to do this is to press CTRL+ALT+DELETE, go into task manager then click the 'start-up' tab. If you've never done this before, it's highly recommended to take a look at what starts-up every time you turn on your machine. Here's what mine currently looks like.

As you can see, there's not a great deal that's really essential. I tend to leave Windows security, my graphics driver utilities and my anti-virus enabled. Everything else is fine to disable, especially if they happen to be called 'program' which is about as uninformative as it gets. Disabling things usually just results in a quicker start-up time. Enabling things here results in your PC having a longer boot time every time you power on. Most things can be disabled - the graphics link is usually for the controller app on the taskbar and not the actual graphics drivers but I tend to leave it alone. Even Microsoft 'Cortana' - their creepy AI spy-doll can be turned off at boot time using this. So I have to wonder why CryptoTab installs itself in such a way that the ability to disable it's auto-run is greyed-out meaning that a good percentage of windows users will be unable to prevent it from running until clicked. This is unlikely to be accidental. I suspect this is by design and that's why CryptoTab encourages you to restart your PC right after installation.

There is a quick workaround to (hopefully) prevent CryptoTab from running at start-up. Right-click on it and choose 'open file location'. In the window that pops up, look for the browser.exe file, right-click it and rename it to 'browzer.exe'. It will ask for your admin password to do this. Next time you reboot, the program will be unable to auto-restart so you might want to right-click on Browzer.exe and create a new shortcut for it on the desktop if you intend to keep using it. This is the quick and dirty method to take back control, but it's also worth noting that CryptoTab sets up a bunch of services too which will auto-run and if there is anything nefarious going on then it's likely to be these services doing it.

While I'm currently ok with running CryptoTab, it's this cavalier attitude towards end-users that makes me wary of it. On the plus side, they've proved they pay out and their cryptomining browser is easy to set-up and get running unlike some other mining applications. The program also actually installs into the program files folder rather than some weird hidden location (of which, windows has many suitable for hiding things). On the negative side, they don't want you to ever disable CryptoTab and they run a multi-level marketing scheme to incentivise you to get everyone you know to install it and we can't be certain of their intentions. So let's see what else we can find out.

The website registration appears to be Russian in origin and registered to one Eduard Zaharov. Here's their current Whois details. 

A quick look at their twitter account reveals this:

No profile pictures and the account has been suspended for violating twitters rules. Now since twitter allegedly has a reputation for being one of the preferred hangouts of internet trolls, you really have to wonder what CryptoTab did to get suspended. If their feed was anything like their Facebook group then

it's highly likely to have been a dumping feed for all manner of get-rich-quick and free-money schemes. Philosophically you can argue that if our governments looked after their people as well as their corporations (or backhand providers) then fewer people would be drawn into these things in the first place. 

So where do we go from here? Well the responsible stance for me to take is to stop recommending CryptoTab until they sort themselves out. They need to change their product so it plays nicely with Windows and doesn't try to prevent itself from being turned off or removed (which is my next test). Until then I am not recommending its installation in the first place. While I can confirm it will pay out once you meet the earnings threshold, I do suspect it will prove to be more hassle than it's worth in the long run. I shall be using it on older PC's, reinstalled and void of any important data from this point onwards. I would prefer to earn my crypto slowly rather than risk my personal data getting dumped onto a dark-web repository. Again I ask, if cloud mining is profitable, why would anyone want to sell it to someone else? So if you haven't already installed it, you might want to watch this space before taking the plunge (or not).

Usual disclaimers: As above, this post is for information only. I do however think it's worth letting others know about my concerns on this one, especially with CryptoTab`s summer promotion likely to convince others to install it over the next few months. I have posted some of my findings to TrustPilot to help the community make a more informed decision, but y'know... free bitcoin. As yet I haven't seen a pro-active approach from anti-virus vendors to label it as malware. It's such a tricky call to make after actually getting the first payout. 

Update on the update

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Curiously while checking to see if I can remove CryptoTab, I renamed the browser back to it's original name (from browzer.exe) and rebooted. I can now disable it in task manager. Could this get any weirder?

Cryptotab update: AMBER light

I have updated my guidance on using Cryptotab. Before installing it, check out my update here.

Original Article:

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So far in this series of articles, I have covered getting paid in crypto while you browse the web using Brave browser or Cryptotab (affiliate link / Non-affiliate link), getting started with Alien Worlds (a free-to-play digital card-game which occasionally pays out random NFT prizes) and also how you can earn tFuel by watching video or setting up a Theta node.  I've also covered the process of trading in TLM virtual ore from Alien Worlds for other crypto.

Today we have an update on my bitcoin mining article from last week and I must admit a bit of a change of heart. If you saw my previous article, you may recall I was a little bit suspicious of Cryptotab due to it's multi-level-marketing tactics and their claim that you could probably earn enough within the first 24 hours to reach the threshold for a payout and the way the hashing speed seemed to dip without their being a correlating dip in processor usage.

You may recall, I left my PC running for a couple of days to see how long it would take to reach that magic 0.00001 BTC to trigger the payment. The result was about three days (although after two nights I decided I didn't want to leave my PC running 24/7). Well due to the suspicions I've voiced before, I decided to take another look at NiceHash (non-affiliate link). 

Although this PC is getting on a bit, it is my main machine and has a nice sized monitor. That means I have most of my data on it and I'm wary of installing random downloaded programs from the internet for obvious reasons. That's why I was quite interested in testing out NiceHash O/S - essentially a linux installation which you install on a flash-drive. Using this meant I could disable my drives in EUFI/Bios when booting and just use the flash-drive to boot into their linux install. This is a good solution as it keeps my data safe while utilising the hardware to earn bitcoin. Nicehash also has a profitability calculator on their website so when it appeared to have higher earnings potential than Cryptotab, I felt I needed to give it a go to see if Cryptotab was as bad as I thought.

So this is where it gets interesting. Last Saturday I got to the earnings threshold for Cryptotab and applied for the payout. I then set-up my NiceHash O/S flash drive and ran it for the rest of the day. Unfortunately I didn't note down the exact details of when I started and stopped mining and there might have been a small amount of balance left in the account from a previous mining session. I will therefor have another go at this later to confirm the details tomorrow. Here's the thing though. My dashboard currently looks like this:

I reckon that balance is mostly derived from the session on Saturday and I'm pretty confident I had it running from 11:30 until 8:30 (so a total of 9 hours). I'm going to be a bit generous and say lets call it 8 hours. If so, 24 hours of running NiceHash would net me three times 0.00000371 or 0.00001113 BTC in 24 hours. This is good as just like Cryptotab, NiceHash has a threshold you have to reach before you can apply for a pay-out. It also happens to be the exact same amount... 0.00001 BTC.

I've just suggested that NiceHash has the potential ability to earn three times faster than Cryptotab, so why does this article suggest I'd prefer to endorse Cryptotab which is so much slower and possibly quite dubious? That requires a bit more insight into how I spent my time on Saturday.

So while I spent a few hours in the garden, it was fine to leave my PC running NiceHash O/S. I could even log into the web-site from my laptop and watch what it was doing. I could see that my BTC was going up by what appeared to be one pence per hour. Now if you've been following these articles, you'll know that I understand my systems here are not making as much money as the electricity costs. However I'm using the fuel payment system which I would be paying anyway, so I don't have to put card-details into any financial sites and make a minimum investment. I have no interest in becoming a crypto-trader only interested in using crypto to make money. Instead, I've been using mining to generate heat in my small office. This means I don't need to pay to heat the whole house using gas central heating, especially if I'm the only one home. My heating is a by-product of earning rather than just trading money for fossil fuel usage so by earning crypto I'm actually getting discounted fuel - as long as the crypto really does end up in my own wallet.

While I was watching that NiceHash earning counter slowly rise, I was very aware of how not having access to my main PC was affecting me. I could have used my time to post here, to play with Blender, surf the web, check my email, use social media etc. I know I can do a lot of that on other devices, but it feels more comfortable on my main desktop PC. Not having this meant I was not playing Alien Worlds, earning NFT's and trillium while simultaneously earning bitcoin with Cryptotab (at a 33% slower rate). Remember that earnings prediction from NiceHash (0.76 GBP)? How does that compare to my actual 8 hour session... well if I've earned 0.15 GBP that suggests my daily rate will be 0.45 GBP. So while I'm not denying that on the whole NiceHash appears to be the more profitable, you also have to take into account the loss of PC usage for other things. 

Suppose I had dropped a standard drill NFT in Alien Worlds on Saturday. At the current time they are for sale on the AtomicHub market for 45 wax (currently around $12 or approximately 8.64 GBP). Of course there is no guarantee of this but it is something to be factored in. As I already have this card, it must have dropped in the last four weeks and therefore have the potential to be awarded once per four weeks. If I drop another, I could sell it at this (admittedly currently-inflated) price. What about other rarer NFT drops which I haven't had yet? Also due to the banter-bag crew currently telling their followers to buy TLM, there is the potential to earn more Wax by trading this too using Alcor. This is something which has to be factored in and that's why I'm currently favouring CryptoTab over NiceHash. To add the icing on the cake, my first payout from CryptoTab has now arrived in my own Atomic wallet. It took about a day, and while it's a trivial amount it does prove that CryptoTab are good on their word and DO pay once you reach the earnings threshold. Here is your proof:

I don't plan to completely ditch NiceHash. I think I still have a use for it yet. As my PS4 is also linked to this monitor, next time I go through a gaming spell it could be something I run on my PC in the background. I would like to test if they're also good on their payout threshold as you never know when Cryptotab might collapse or get called out as a Ponzi scheme due to all that MLM malarkey. At the moment though I have lots of webby stuff to get on with (like this blog) so for me Cryptotab is currently the tortoise that's winning the race while the hare sleeps.

Hope you're enjoying the articles; usual disclaimers apply (now at the top of the articles). This is for entertainment and education and your experience might differ as my results are no doubt influenced by luck, the timing at which I started playing crypto-games and the moves by big financial institutions to allow their investors to syphon earnings potential from anything possible; yes it's easier to gamble on whether or not the price of any crypto will increase by tenfold in six-months time than it is for gamers to swap a few wax tokens for Enjin coins. I will get there eventually

Bitconfusion

Bitconfusion: definition. When something you've read about bitcoin doesn't seem to make sense or your formula for understanding appears to be missing key variables.

Yes I've coined the term unless someone did it before me. When you look at something and you get that feeling of 'that's not right... wait a minute'. So as I pointed out a couple of days ago, I have started using Cryptotab to have a go at bitcoin mining. As I approach the magic minimum amount of earned bitcoin required for a payment I started to think about which wallet I should send it to. I have a plethora to test (Exodus, Metamask, Jaxx/Liberty, the Enjin wallet on my mobile and not forgetting my paper wallet). I started to wonder how much it would cost if I decide to move my bitcoin to another wallet.

To start with, Exodus was very helpful. It told me my 0.00001 bitcoin would be worth £0.41 but to move that amount using the slowest & cheapest possible method would cost me £0.79. Neither Jaxx nor the Enjin wallet would allow me to simulate the transaction to see if that was a reasonable cost. Metamask doesn't appear to support bitcoin at all. I was tempted to download Wasabi wallet until I read it needed 400GB to download the entire blockchain. I then tried Electrum wallet which also doesn't appear to show transaction costs without a balance (or maybe I wasn't sure I wanted to click that 'Pay' button without knowing for sure there would be a cancel option). So the only thing left to do was Google how much it should cost and that's when I tripped over the rabbit-hole.

According to unhashed.com, miners don't process transactions in chronological order. Instead those transacting can set the fee they want to pay to get priority processing. All the transactions sit in something called the 'mempool' while miners cherry-pick the more profitable ones to process first. I can understand this but hearing it as someone who has tried to set-up a few miners over the last few weeks, I can honestly say I never saw a setting which said 'only process the transactions with higher payments'. I would obviously click that to boost my earnings had it been there. Unhashed lead me to another site (privacypro's) which features an image of Wasabi wallet showing a transaction fee of $0.02 on the slowest transaction speed. That is considerably less than £0.79. The Unhashed article states 'Bitcoin transaction fees are usually quite inexpensive; the average transaction fee at time of writing is just $0.30' (March 2019). I realise bitcoin has risen quite a lot in value over the past two years but going from $0.30 for an average speed transaction to $1.09 for a minimum speed suggests upwards of a 400% increase in price (or skimming embedded within Exodus?).

While I can't compare the others without a bitcoin balance, I can see that the Enjin mobile wallet has an advanced mode where a price can be requested in satoshi's per byte (people often point to bitcoin having value because there are only 21 million of them but neglect to point out that each is split into 100 million satoshi's which is why transactions using them are frequently in small decimal fractions; and it's really important to always double check the number of zero's after the point).

I then looked into which wallet is recommended by Cryptotab. They suggest the Blockchain.com wallet. The blurb on Blockchains website makes it sound like it's non-custodial (you have full control of the private keys) however a quick search on Google revealed a great article by Cryptosec about how their wallets could actually be classed as custodial (more in a bit). Non-custodial wallets are where you personally hold your own private keys which are codes needed to move any currency from your account. Custodial wallets are where the holding company have the keys (so you only need to remember a login password, but if they get hacked there's little defence against losing your coins). In effect, Cryptotab are operating as a custodial wallet until they pay out what you've earned (as your balance builds up in their system until you've earned enough for the payment).

Cryptalker mentioned that Coinbase is a custodial wallet which also has insurance. Personally I prefer to have my own keys so I'm not convinced any company is going to spend £0.79 to send me $0.60 which is why I kept looking for another wallet which can estimate the fees despite me not having any balance. It seems like a good idea to price-up transaction fees before you make a deposit right? Cryptosec have a good article suggesting it's ok to use custodial wallets for small amounts (up to $50 or whatever level you're comfortable with) but they recommend hardware wallets for anything over that amount. I'm not convinced spending £100-200 for a hardware wallet is necessary to secure £0.79. While I don't have any knowledge of how robust these devices are, I know I've seen changes to the USB specification over the past decade which currently tend to be backwards compatible but I wouldn't like to predict that being the case in another decade or two.

So it's good that paper wallets are similarly secure. Although they have your private key presented as a QR code, the key itself is also printed alongside (which is essential for if QR codes are replaced by something else in the future). The super-paranoid can boot from a live-CD, go to the site, disconnect their network, create and print a paper wallet and then reboot their computer to have a pretty good level of confidence in the security of this.

It took quite a while to compile this article for today as I've continued to play Alien Worlds and also look for a new wallet whilst editing. The good news is I think I've finally found the right wallet. Despite not having any funds as yet, Atomic Wallet allowed me to enter the transfer amount and give me control of the fees with a user-friendly slider. It allowed me to get the fee below £0.02 which makes it far more likely that a sum of £0.41 could actually be transferred; although probably with a really long wait. It does however suggest that the tiny sum we are talking about will not exceed the fees and so that £0.79 minimum suggested by Exodus wallet is their minimum, not the minimum which the network can deal with (so it's bye-bye Exodus at this point).

While Atomic supports Bat and Enj tokens, it does not appear to handle wax or tfuel. To be honest I'm ok with that for now. There are loads of other currencies and tokens for me to research. You can turn on/off specific coins and tokens using the three-sliders icon in the top-right corner of the main wallet window. There's also a mobile version of the wallet so I think I might be happy to use this one for now.

As for Cryptotab? Well I opted to give my PC a break last night. I'm becoming a bit wary of the fact that Cryptotab seems to drop my hash numbers when the browser doesn't have focus, but there isn't a corresponding drop in my CPU performance. While I was leaving it open and active overnight, I can't be sure it was dedicating all it's run-time to mining bitcoins for me. This is typical for mining programs as they tend to be compiled to devote a few percent of run-time to the developers. While I'm ok with that when it's openly stated, I have to wonder if there's an additional percentage of Cryptotab run-time which is being snarfed and given over to their cloud-boost functionality for other users. This would explain why my hashes go down, but not the performance drain on my system as can be seen below. This is just my suspicion as I can't actually prove it one way or another but it does illustrate why anything involving crypto needs to be upfront about how it works.

We can see in point 1 that the hashes per second are less than at point 2 and yet the processor usage (point 3) is higher in this scenario than when the Cryptotab browser was actually active (point 4). In the first image on the left, there are a few additional processes as I had another browser open but I was surfing, not using anything CPU-intensive which should account for the reduced hash amount. The main reason for me to use Cryptotab is because browsers have evolved to a point where things which run in them are sort of sandboxed. They have adapted over the years to be on the defensive against incoming code which might try to take over the computer. Mining inside the browser is slightly less-likely to result in my system being hacked and my personal data being stolen. Unfortunately it is the potential for data-theft which stops me running mining programs on the best equipment I could be using.

I might have just discovered a workaround for this which I will try out over the next few days. While I couldn't get NiceHash to be worth using on my old laptop, it might do better on my main system. I've discovered that it can be configured to run from a USB flash drive so in theory disabling my internal drives and booting from this becomes a possibility. Disabling the drives should isolate my data but obviously I won't have access to all of my software while mining. I think I can work around that for a day or three, just to see how it compares with Cryptotab.

I will update whether or not this is successful after my testing. 

Crypto News 1/5/21

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So if anyone is reading this, I've had my ears in the crypto world recently and here's a few things you may or may not be aware of. Gary Vee has been telling his followers to get hold of some Etherium this week for something he's announcing on May 5th. I wonder if he saw my comment on his YouTube channel about NFT's with geolocation replacing traditional postcards? On Thursday, Shea Newkirk a.k.a. 'CryptoStache' mentioned a big event happening with Theta tomorrow but couldn't say what. Master Google told me this would probably be the launch of World Poker Tour NFT's coming to Theta.tv. Which reminds me, when I checked out the Stache's website I noticed an older video about profiting from BAT tokens without the hassle of going through an exchange. That's one I need to revisit.

Finally Ran and the Banter-bag group mentioned they would be getting the guys behind Alien Worlds on their show on Monday 3rd May. They were also suggesting it's a good time to invest in TLM for which I should thank them as the virtual ore I've mined since that announcement is still bringing in about 1.6 wax per TLM. As a gamer rather than an investor, I think there are reasons why Aether deserves more attention. There are still some NFT's which can be minted in R-Planet where recipes are known and the only block to obtaining them is having the huge amounts of Aether necessary to craft them. There was quite a spike in Aethers value last week as the recipe for Oxygen was discovered and a quick check of the elements list today shows there are still quite a few yet to be discovered. The prize for being the first to find is to have your name on the discovery and the 599 next people to craft the same element get an NFT too.

That's it for now. So much to mention due to the possibility of running NiceHash from a USB flash drive on this PC tomorrow so I might not get to post for a couple of days. As usual everything here is for information/education and... you know the score. The usual disclaimers are now at the top of the article instead of down here..