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

Free Crypto - Part 2

 Yesterday I posted about setting up Brave browser to earn free tokens while you surf the web. Today I have an internet card game for you.

Some info

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This game is well suited for anyone who spends a lot of time browsing the web. You can leave it running in a browser tab. It won't slow your computer down like traditional crypto-mining. You will however need to go back to the browser tab running the game every few minutes.

Get a free wallet

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If you already know what a WAX wallet is and have one, you can skip this step. If not you can get a free wax wallet here. You will need a wallet to store all the free goodies which will soon be coming your way. All you need to set-up the wallet is an email address. Just follow the instructions.

Ready to Play?

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Alien Worlds is the game we will be playing but read this whole article through before you start. This video on YouTube explains how the game mechanics work. Essentially it boils down to a couple of mouse-clicks every few minutes. As you get in-game rewards the time between rounds will get longer until you only need to click once every couple of hours.

Before You Start

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The good stuff I didn't know about when I first started playing this. Each time you click the 'mine' button you will earn a small amount of trillium (TLM) which you can think of as a virtual metal ore. The amount of ore you mine is added to a total amount in the 'Tokens' section of your WAX wallet (see the pic above). There are factors which affect how much you will earn each round of mining but for a beginner with no additional tools  you should expect 0.05 to 0.3 trillium per mine.

As you earn trillium, you can also TRADE IT for real dollars here. I  reached around 100 trillium before finding out it had real world value and only learned this by watching this video which explains the trading process. 

Random NFT drops.

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There's also a chance you will get free NFT's from mining. This game attempts to combine learning about how crypto works with digital card collecting. These are intended to be similar to Pokemon cards or the football stickers many of us collected in our youth (or cigarette cards if your memory goes back further). There is no 'album' yet although I suspect that could appear at some point. The problem with albums is that some of the cards are so limited in supply that it would be impossible to complete.

The digital 'cards' are pushed into your wallet when they are discovered. An important note here is they might not show up in-game until next time you log in. I played for a fortnight before I discovered I even had any. For this reason I suggest keeping your wallet open in another browser tab and reload the tab every couple of hours. The game is still under development so not all cards have use just yet. Character cards are being rewarded ready for the 'Thunderdome' button (left side on the home screen). This is for some sort of battle mechanic which the developers intend to implement in the future.

The Marketplace

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There is clearly a push to create a digital version of collector cards whether we want it or not. This means there has to be a way to trade with other people. If you want to trade with people you know and trust, you can click the transfer arrows at the top of the NFT cards to send them to another persons wax wallet. You can also send trillium to another user by clicking on the send button (right-side panel of the wallet). There is also a marketplace where you can trade with other people online. Just follow the link and click on the alien.worlds filter on the left side to see what others are selling. The sales history button (bottom left) will also let you see what trades have taken place - useful for research.

If you keep playing you will eventually end up improving your tools and finding more NFT's as you mine. You will get duplicates of the same cards. You can offer these for sale using the WAX trading tab in your wallet or you might like to explore 'Shining' if you have four or more of the same card. More about this in a bit.

Land

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It's worth mentioning at this point that you may see NFT's for various plots of land listed at some eye-watering prices. NFT's for land DO NOT drop as random prizes. They were available from the developers website in very limited numbers (3,000). There is nothing ruling out the possibility of further planets being created at some point in the future but as it stands there is currently no way to acquire land (except from another ridiculously generous player or the marketplace). Sadly these are too much of a stretch for me at the moment so if virtual land is appealing, I suggest a search on YouTube.

Where can I find out more?

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Try the Alien Worlds Community Portal

What is staking?

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As far as I can tell, staking is lending your mined trillium to a planets reward pot. As you don't need trillium for any sort of in-game replenishment, I opted to stake mine once I had earned 10. I don't know how much of a factor this was in affecting my NFT drops but it did seem like I wasn't getting them before I started staking. Once your trillium is staked it takes several days to get it back so you risk being unable to remove it from the game and convert to $USD etc. when you stake. This means your in-game currency is tied-up in-game and you might miss out on a really good exchange rate. I haven't yet un-staked any trillium so I don't know if you get back more, the same amount or less. 

Any other tips

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Once you have multiple mining tools, you can equip them in the mining hub. When you do this, a trash-can icon appears in the cards title box after its name. This does not delete the card, it unequips it - useful if you want to unequip an item to trade or gift it to someone else. Hopefully this will be replaced by a more obvious unequip button below the tool in a future version.

Shining

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Nothing to do with Jack Nicholson films. If you obtain 4 identical NFT's and a lot of trillium, you can convert them into a higher-level shiny version. This destroys the four originals but creates a new card which might have minor stats improvements. See this video for more information.

Does free really mean free?

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After a couple of weeks I got a message about 'not enough CPU'. This is not about the Alien Worlds game but a feature of the WAX crypto network it runs on and suggests that all WAX-based games may eventually have this issue. It appears that the blockchain requires investment from time-to-time in the form of WAX tokens. This is explained with a really bad analogy to airlines, airports and tickets. My understanding is that if you run out of NET or CPU, it's possibly because there is a lot of trading of the underlying crypto-currency. RAM on the other hand seems to be about the amount of data on the blockchain you are using at the time. My solution for now is just to stop playing for the day once any of these events occur. It's not helpful to intermix computing terminology and airports into a wacky explanation of blockchain (after all my network is fine, I have enough ram to play this and my cpu temperature is ok according to the read-out on my PC).

You can keep an eye on your CPU, NET and RAM usage using the 'resources'  button on the right side of your WAX wallet.

Final Verdict

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When I first started playing Alien Worlds, I didn't really think of it as playing or collecting. I think there are things which need improving. It would be nice to have some animation on the mining screen and while you wait for your tools to recharge. It would be nice to have an audible prompt when your tools are recharged and you can mine again. It would be great if little animated miners could jump up & down on-screen if you unearth an NFT reward. It would be good to have a digital sticker-book page in the wax wallet which shows all the in-game NFT's and highlights which ones you have. Yet for all these things I am still playing it, just to see what else there is to discover. It can be quite complex with six planets comprising 3,000 plots of land, which are linked to different planetary reward pots, have different luck factors to influence your NFT drop rate and also different charge time multipliers affecting how frequently you can mine there. I imagine some people will try it and just cash-out anything they earn. Others will stick around and collect the NFT's and hope the developers build a bigger game around this NFT lucky-dip system. I'm undecided yet but will likely keep the good finds but use some of the trillium to complete my challenge.

The Bottom Line

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Ok so the final target for me is some coins in a crypto-wallet but maybe you don't want WAX tokens? Well you can always use an exchange like CoinGecko to convert the WAX into something else as explained in the previous video on the subject. At this point I also want to mention Bitrefill which allows you to turn crypto into gift cards for various UK stores. As crazy as it sounds, we are sort of there with that virtual game world where a random number in a game might just pay for your next console. We should probably expect to see more of this to come. Let's just hope it doesn't turn us into a nation of gambling addicts or day traders. If you are currently working from home or able to use this as a timer between tasks then why not have a go. My first challenge is complete at this point after trading in just over 10 TLM. Sure I'm no bitcoin billionaire but after a few clicks today I now have a whopping (sic) 0.8 WAX. It's a start. Yes it might have been cheaper to turn the computer off and save electricity but I have also been entertained, kept warm and avoided parting with any debit/credit card details.

CHALLENGE COMPLETE - YAY !!!!!