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..

Alien Worlds - Earthling Invasion Aftermath

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).

The Aftermath

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If you've been following along, it looks like my initial discovery of Alien Worlds and the WAX blockchain came at a particularly lucky time. A week or two into the game, factors in the world outside of the player interface resulted in my apparent creation of around $200 from nothing, other than my time, electricity and internet access charges. I was stunned to be honest, although the main thing missing from this system (like others) is a button to 'withdraw'. Sure there's always a button you can click where you can easily buy more (be it tokens, shares, coins or any other asset) but the lack of an equally prominent and effortless way to return value to the end user is what typically turns me away from ever transferring money into these systems. I am working on my crypto-knowledge but so far this piece of the puzzle evades me.

I can see why this difficulty exists as who wants to end up behind bars for money laundering when that obviously is not the reason they built their games and systems. My response was to re-invest my gains into art NFT's to support the independent artists being drawn into the WAX eco-system. I am now however somewhat perplexed by what seems to be some sort of hidden penalty on my account. Since my other half has also been playing, we have both acquired the same set of tools for trillium mining (and despite the game not telling you this, my increased CPU usage while playing this minimal animation game suggests it really is crypto mining in the background). 

We have both been using a standard shovel, standard capacitor and standard drill on the exact same plot of land, but while my other half has been receiving around 0.1-0.2 TLM per mine, my own rewards have dropped to 0.0001 to 0.0002 TLM or I get a 'nothing to mine' message. I've also noticed its been a very long time since I had an NFT drop. Is there something hidden going on behind the scenes and a lack of transparency for the players I wonder? There is no visible sign of my account being blacklisted for any reason, nor have I received any email to suggest I have somehow broken any terms of service. I can only presume that either there is some sort of bug affecting my account or some sort of hidden account age limit after which players are expected to become payers to further benefit from their interaction with the game.

Sadly this is where my timing is not so lucky as those mining tools are still very expensive on the marketplace. I am also reluctant to invest while mining yields seem so much lower. I would guess this is because people un-staked the TLM they had in planetary pots to sell off during the gold rush. 

My other half was not far behind me in signing up so it will be interesting to see how her mining yields are affected in the next couple of weeks. In fact at one point I had most of the family playing along which I suspect is what caused the reCaptcha issues. Since there appears to be no rule against having multiple accounts, I might set up a new one  to see if it eventually suffers the same fate. This YouTube video by Cryptostache suggests setting up another account to get a custom username is acceptable and I cannot find anything in the T's & C's to suggest having multiple accounts is disallowed. 

I'm also curious if a new account might benefit from better NFT drops. As I mentioned earlier, I had not got any for a few days and so far the best any of the family have had is the common level (the rareness of NFT's can be 1 of 6 levels: Abundant, Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary or Mythical). Good luck with your own planetary exploration if you are currently playing or have been inspired to have a go.

Usual Disclaimers

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This article is purely for entertainment. My opinions are my own and do not constitute any sort of financial, medical or legal advice. I post about things that affect me while I'm learning. As mentioned in this article there can be external factors which means your experience could be very different to mine.

Alien Worlds - The Invasion

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 other crypto or actual cash.

The Invasion

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Wow; what happened? I can only describe it as the Earthling invasion! As a result of the intercrypto link between the Alien Worlds game and Binance, there was a bit of a gold rush (or should that be dollar or wax rush?). People were even posting videos on YouTube about how they were making $200 per day playing Alien Worlds. The result was a lot of down-time as the system appeared to struggle to cope with the increased number of players and a few changes such as the addition of Google's reCaptcha which has now pretty much killed the game for me.

The Binance investors will have their free trillium and NFT drops for 30 days but they may not get the big pot of alien gold they thought. The gold rush saw the price of tools used for mining 'go to the moon' to use the current most fashionable expression in crypto. So, those receiving any of these NFT's may not understand that prices have become inflated and are likely to start a massive downward trend. Why is this? Well with all the new miners, the planetary pots of mineable resource (TLM) have been well and truly plundered. It's unlikley that anyone who had huge quantities of TLM staked to the 6 planets resisted the urge to unstake and sell it. The result is those resource pots  are now looking very depleted. Roughly about half as full as pre-gold rush levels. They may still replenish on a daily basis but I'm convinced they are not refilling to the same  levels as before, or maybe they are just becoming depleted so much quicker.

And the new planet? Well planet Binance has not yet appeared. It will apparently be a gas planet (with no land ownership). It will be interesting to see if the market-place starts to fill up with mid-quality NFT's once it appears. If so the value of those currently 'hodling' is likely to be affected. I'm sure that whenever it appears, it will coincide with something that gives benefits to investors which will be denied to those who maybe just spent possibly hundreds of dollars on over-priced tool NFT's. From my perspective, it was fun and the gold rush was exciting but now it's not really worth my time investment any more. As I started to earn wax, I reinvested this into NFT's from new artists via the  marketplace and there were occasional free drops which mean I'm now a digital art collector. It is however becoming too annoying to have to keep clicking on buses, traffic lights and crosswalks especially when some of those images are so grainy and unclear. I would like to set-up a gallery of the NFT's I've obtained as I think that would be cool but I don't think I'll be investing much into WAX while I'm battling with reCaptcha so much. 

My top tip for anyone creating NFT drops on wax right now not to rush. There are literally hundreds of new drops every day. Also, avoid creating packs full of 'parts' which combine to create the full item (very annoying with the reCaptchas). Ask yourself 'what value does this give to the potential buyer?'. If you're only selling to make money, the chances are buyers are only buying to flip. At the same time consider how your art should be perceived. Is it a Monet or a Van Gogh, a one-off where some day people will possibly pay millions; or is it a girl in a white tennis dress where everyone could own a copy without breaking the bank. I'm sure digital NFT frames and personal galleries are coming - iFrames for all? probably combined with an app so you can show and trade from your mobile all day. 

I personally would like to keep my NFT's for ever as I curated the collection myself. I do however realise this is unfair to the artists if they released them for less than they are worth to other buyers. It's something I will need to consider further. At least with NFT's, the artists will get a cut of any future sales if I ever do sell any of them. I think it will become a normal part of life. When we get double-sided phones and the back displays our personality and we'll be able to switch in & out new NFT's just like changing our ring-tones. We will all become art-dealers and NFT's will replace post-cards. That is the future I suspect.

As for Alien Worlds? I might have another look in the Autumn to see if I can buy back the slightly-above basic tools I sold off to fund my NFT collecting (I hope to pay a lot less than I sold them for). Good luck if you're trying to persist with the gold rush.

Usual Disclaimers

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Don't use this articla as a replacement for qualified advisors. My opinions are my own and do not constitute any sort of financial, medical or legal advice.

Alien Worlds; More Strategy

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 other crypto or actual cash.

If you've been following along, you should now be familiar with WAX and you might have noticed a load of other NFT's on the AtomicHub market-place. Today's tip comes from the CryptoMonkeys collectible cards. Apparently if you stake your trillium (TLM) to planet Neri, you could win free CryptoMonkey NFT's to add to your collection.

I need to check if this is still ongoing, but the monkeys have also published a guide of which of their plots you should mine. You need to mine a minimum of 19 TLM on one of their plots to qualify. This link shows the lands they own and some mining strategies for each plot.

Is it worth trying?

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Well you have to balance the possibility of a free NFT from them with their high TLM mining commission (19%? ouch... there are lands as low as 0.5% - like Naron 12:14 at the time of writing). Then again if there's a good market for their NFT's, you could possibly end up with more WAX this way than from a whole week of mining with newbie-tools. Remember it can take several days to unstake your TLM so maybe check on Alcor first and decide if your trillium is going up in value (when you might want to sell) or down in value (when you could stake some for a rainy day). Of course another option might be to wait it out for a good transfer rate between TLM and WAX and then convert to WAX tokens which you could then stake to the WAX network, possibly earning interest. 

At the moment, the Alcor exchange is down for TLM/WAX conversions but it should be back on Tuesday. The reason it's down is for a new feature called 'Teleport'. It sounds as though TLM miners might very soon have the ability to trade their TLM for other currencies via the Binance exchange. Another item on my list of things to look into then.

Haven't played it yet?

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You might want to check out this article on Publish0x.com from a player who got lucky with NFT drops and cashed out some, but reinvested part into better mining tools. So far I haven't had to pay out anything to play Alien Worlds. It seems to be free to play, has random rewards, a fair amount of strategy and a growing community. And speaking of strategy, I noticed another article on Publish0X about selecting mining tools. I would love to find some info on NFT drop rates but so far master Google is still in another galaxy.

Twitter on the other hand appears to be where the A/W crew are putting out their future plans. I found this tweet quite insightful regarding the fighting & questing aspect which hasn't made it into the game yet.

The last additional topic I want to mention relating to the A/W universe is R-planet. Apparently you can stake A/W NFT's here for additional rewards in Aether. I haven't had chance to look into this yet so I will update as and when. 

Finally... A postcard from Naron 16:2

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My son has been mining here and got a free NFT this week in the form of a postcard from Naron; a nice scenic snow-topped mountain. It's a nice touch and shows how the community are adding more to the base-level content.