I am only 1.5 weeks old in the Bitcoin phenomenon so pretty green still but I have read and researched a lot of information and I personally like how Slush's Pool is setup compared to others. With that here is a little history about how I came to being here and saying hello.
The topic of bitcoins came up at work with colleges about 2 weeks ago after seeing the huge increase in price of bitcoins and after some long discussions and a lot of un-for-sure knowledge about any of the details and just bad press release information knocking bitcoin I took an interest to see what the hype was about. After first night of light reading around, mostly news articles I was becoming convinced this whole thing was some pyramid scam stuff. But that was mostly bad press and horrible personal opinion information from people in blogs. I decided to dig deeper to understand how it all worked and found out the more detailed story and how it works and became really interested, especially with how the coins are mined and minted into existence.
To fully experience it I got myself a wallet and set the mining flag, after not more then hour after I did that I learned how impossible it was to mine solo via more reading and started looking at pools and setting myself up with them. I spent the next two nights randomly researching how distribution was done and how people did pool hopping to maximize returns etc. which lead me to liking how Slush's Pool worked out a way to be a dedicated miner, less confusing and seems very fair with it's distribution.
I downloaded GUIMiner and started doing GPU mining with that connected to Slush's pool, I started to see my micro value of coins go up and felt happy, it was slow however. So back to more research I went, learned about how CPU mining lead to ASIC usb to dedicated large blade servers etc. And how inefficient CPU and GPU mining actually was, I figured out my kWh usage and how much my computer used and yup cost more at current difficulty then I made even with the high price of bitcoins.
Leading into more research into hardware and decided at present if I got a few of ASIC usb erupters I could start making more then spending in electricity, also I live alone in smaller condo and my computer usually keeps my computer room toasty I positioned my computer to vent to living area and guess what I can use it for some heat by doing GPU mining as well as ASIC mining now, and for a little added heat in winter now I do all core cpu mining also
This has lead into actually being fun watching and playing with the data as it comes in. I currently have a 5x333M/hash erupter setup, use my GPU's and CPU's when not actively using my computer (helps with producing heat in winter so should be less baseboard electric heat). I changed from GUIMiner to cgminer and minerd for cpu mining, yes I know why but hey I have reasons as stated. I monitor my entire system with plug in wattage meters and currently am able to pull small profit mining and maybe pay for my investment in year if luck is on my side, I am sure with difficulty keeping going up I'll be slowly investing more as time goes on to stay ahead but this has been a fun en-devour.
I now understand more of what bitcoins are and how the system works then I did 1.5 weeks ago and am actively participating in the system and just once again wanted to say hi and give a little bit about my back story and hope to discuss more things on the forums and learn more from people that are aged veterans of topic.
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Shaggy