I had no idea what I had in store for me as I took this first step down the rabbit hole. I believe I ended up spending $1,400 on a maching with 2x GPUs in it. I thought it was awesome and within a year I had GPUs hanging from wires throughout my home office that were liquid cooled with a giant central radiator. I miss the daily struggle of having the latest software and settings to maximize return. It all felt so hands on back then. What a ride it's been...
Back in 2013 I remember starting on a tiny Radeon HD 7850 video card, then in just a week, revenue plunged from $1/day to just $0.50/day. Difficulty doubled in just 2 weeks. Then I learned about Butterfly Labs and the other ASIC companies. From there, my mining journey was full of making it big, losing it all, recovering losses and ending up at the same point I started, except with a lot more knowledge.I believe my first GPU purchases for mining were of HD6870s. They weren't the best miners out, but their 5850 counterparts were impossible to find anywhere. That was the first thing that struck me about Bitcoin when I first learned of it... I found it amazing that it created such demand for GPUs, even before anyone had heard of it, that you couldn't find a single 5800 series GPU anywhere. I eventually fell into the Butterfly Labs trap myself, losing close to 500 BTC in the process, but as with you I had gained a great deal of knowledge. Fast forward another couple of years and this whole Bitcoin fad became the thing I spent most of my time working on (working for is probably a better description).
We need to get rid of the addresses for normal simple transfers - not in the protocol, but I should not have to copy/paste that. I like the link.
