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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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

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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

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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.

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..