It all started on Friday, November 19th, the weekend before Thanksgiving. I decided to try to put an old laptop to work but how? Let's try mining some crypto. Who knew where that one thought and action would lead? Honestly, a month ago I didn't know what mining even was - I equated it to randomly finding crypto like gold diggers did back in the day. Go ask someone who doesn't know crypto what mining is and you will get a variety of interesting answers - none of which will be too close to the truth.
In the past month I feel like Neo after he takes the red pill. I followed the white rabbit down a crypto hole and I have no idea just how deep it goes. I'm in the Matrix now, a computerized version of the financial world driven by blockchain codes I never new existed. Like most, I was ignorant to the Crypto Matrix and even now I'm just taking my first jiu-jitsu lesson with Morpheus connecting on kick-after-kick. It is all overwhelming and I have to tell myself to just breathe...
Do you think that's air you're breathing now?
My first rabbit hole was mining. What started out as one old laptop mining Dogecoin quickly turned into two as we had another one laying around. Fighting through antivirus programs killing my mining software downloads and Microsoft Defender constantly uninstalling the program I began to understand the Matrix a little better.
After a little research it became clear that CPU mining was pretty useless, in-other-words very slow. Guess what, we have a gaming desktop in the house and once that baby had the GPU humming I was off and running getting Ravencoin at a clip of just over 50Mh. Now we are talking. We ordered a second gaming desktop on Cyber Monday since we have multiple gamers in the house. That one is now mining Ethereum when not being used to take out opponents in Call of Duty. That little white rabbit is now looking at the clouds, hello cloud mining as a way to really ramp up the mining efforts without the need for housing more hardware.
Did I say I was going down a rabbit hole? Well that is misleading as there are many different rabbit holes. Imagine the girl above having tattoos all over her body instead of the one just on her left shoulder. The second rabbit hole was crypto wallets because you gotta store all that crypto somewhere once you got it. Mining different coins required having multiple wallets. Hello Coinbase, Bitcoin, Exodus, Doge and Ronin wallets. Believe me I have more and again, I'm just four weeks in. I'm trying to HODL, that is a term in the Crypto Matrix for holding coins long term, by putting most of my crypto in one main wallet that I wrote about earlier this week (no spoilers here) in my article called What's in your Wallet? What crypto wallet to choose...
While mining does cost electricity there are ways to get free crypto out there. This is another rabbit hole involving rolling faucets, participating in surveys and performing other tasks to earn more coins. Actually Bitcoin now makes up about 60% of my total crypto holdings thanks to this method. My favorite of these sites is Cointiply which seems to pay out the most and I've made well over $100 in just a few weeks on the site. There are others but I'd be careful because I'm sure there are many whose intentions are much like those pesky agents always trying to destroy Mr. Anderson. Cointiply has been around a long time and I've had no problems withdrawing my coins which I do each Friday now after seeing how much I've made in the week.
Swallowing that red pill has lead to many other rabbit holes. There are browsers which pay you in crypto and publishing sites like Publish0x in which you can tip others for their fine work - thank all of you writers down there as almost every article is the start of a new rabbit hole. You can also get a little crypto if others deem your articles worthy. I'm just starting out on read.cash and looking into a few others to earn a few satoshis.
There are other ways to earn crypto in the Matrix with Airdrops, NFTs, loaning, staking, the rabbit holes are endless. Rabbit holes can be followed on articles here, blogs, website, YouTube, podcasts, phone apps, etc. I could have given up that initial day when trying to get the mining software to work and just taken the blue pill instead after a few hours on that old unused laptop. I'm certainly glad I didn't as crypto has turned out to be so expansive and so full of potential that my motivation to learn is higher than it has been for anything in a long, long time. Once Neo learned to read and embrace the code in the Matrix he was near invincible but I've just now taken the red pill and am being unplugged. It is an exciting time for me personally and the possibilities are endless.
Thanks for reading and I appreciate so many of you for your informative articles and comments on my articles and others. I'm shocked at just how many great writers there are here focused on crypto - the community is truly amazing. I'd love to hear from those of you who also one day awhile back took your first baby step into the crazy world of crypto - what rabbit hole are you going down today?