The July meetup has been scheduled for Thursday, July 19th, 7:00PM at Gordon Biersch in Virginia Beach. The first hour will be our standard mixer and discussion, followed by a demo on masternodes, which are a way to provide stability to cryptoasset networks while receiving dividends. Please RSVP on Meetup or Facebook.
If May was bad for crypto markets, then June was completely horrible. We’ve seen USD drawdowns of around 35% in both our long term holdings and mining accounts, but have managed to hold some water, in BTC terms, with our active trading account. The real silver lining has been that we’ve been able to focus more on tech, continuing progress on our trade planning and management package, as well as starting a new project that involves our own ERC20 and 721 tokens. While the past few months have been painful, we’ve been working hard and aren’t rekt yet!
The past two months have been a mixed bag for my personal trading portfolio. In USD value, it’s portfolio is exactly where it was on May 20, despite an overall swing of over 40% from top to bottom. Measured in BTC, our bags have gained 12.5 percent over the past two months, despite making very few trades.
It’s been almost two months since our last activity report and we’ve been very productive. Our current mining portfolio is current split among the following projects:
43% Raven (RVN)
40% Haven (XHV)
5% ZCash (ZEC)
5% ZCoin (XZC)
4% Monero (XMR)
3% Other
We are holding to our original plan to hold all mining proceeds for the first 6 months of activity. We continue to monitor our holdings in USD and BTC amounts and are working on tracking various metrics associated with returns on capital investment.
We started mining Haven Protocol (XHV) shortly after our last update. This decision was based on a few tips from prominent crypto-mining personality @notsofast. The project is a Monero fork that has an interesting plan to create a crypto that is resistant to price fluctuations. Instead of trying to create a stable coin, the goal is to use a special smart contract that will allow token holders to preserve their holdings, based on the USD price of the token at the time it is offshored. When token users decide to pull their funds out of this offshore account, they’ll be compensated with whatever amount of XHV is needed to match their original USD amount. Obviously there a lot of details to work out, but we saw this as a good project to throw our hashpower at, seeing as how our general portfolio was heavily weighted in Ravencoin (RVN) and we needed to diversify. XHV’s price range has fluctuated between the $2-6 range since we started accumulating.
We switched our hashing over to RVN for a few weeks while XHV was pumping. We are still holding our entire mining haul and have not sold any of our proceeds. RVN’s price has fluctuated between $0.02 and 0.048 over the past two months.
As I write this, we are seeing a broad pump throughout the crypto markets. The timing seems to indicate a relationship with the US income tax deadline on April 17th, as the markets seemed to bottom out during the first week of April and began climbing the following week, including an insane $1000 pump that happened in under an hour. BTC itself has climbed 34% in the last 12 days.
We’ve also broken through the downtrend line that began in mid-December. The green line is the uptrend that started March 2017. We see this as a very good sign that the bear market may be over, but I’m waiting for several days of price levels above the uptrend before I call the bull run back on. I had noticed that these two trends were coming together on tax day, and had been anticipating what was going to happen for several weeks. This last dip down to the $6500 level was quite trying.
Alts are also having a nice run as well, with most of my personal bags up 40-160% over the past 30 days. I’ve refrained from any trading other than dollar-cost-averaging into BTC over the past 2-3 months, but today opened a few small positions of ZRX and XMR. I did not do any specific technical analysis beforehand, but did make a trade plan and will be keeping tight stops and scaling up as the price rises. We have only allocated a very small percentage of our capital to trading at this time, and our trade plan is limiting losses to under 2% of this subset. Our exit prices targets are at least 30%.
Our spec mining operation has had a good week as well. Haven (XHV), which we’ve been mining almost exclusively for the past month, has had over 200% gains the past two days. We continue to hold all of our mining proceeds as planned, although we have consolidated some smaller amounts of alts acquired through MiningPoolHub profit switching into XMR and ZEC.
In summary, we’re optimistic about the next few days and are watching things very closely in the meantime.
Our next meetup will be at Bahama Breeze, Pembroke Mall on Thursday, April 26th from 7-9.
March is almost out the door, and what an up and down it’s been. We survived a crazy ZClassic fork, started mining RavenCoin and have been looking at ways to set up our first masternode as price action in the markets have been all over the map.
So we’re about a month into our crypto mining experiment, and things have been pretty interesting. We’re using a pretty simple 6-GPU setup, and relying on Awesome Miner and Mining Pool Hub to operate. This post will go over a few of the customizations we’ve had to make with this setup, as well as some of the details of our profit tracking spreadsheet that we’ve developed.
Distributed blockchain technologies such as bitcoin have a consensus mechanism used to synchronize the transaction ledger, but some of the newer chains, such as Ethereum, actually run a turning complete virtual machine on the blockchain, and process synchronization is important to make sure that smart contracts are computed properly. For those of you unfamiliar with Ethereum, the purpose of these smart contracts is to programmatically define the rules of a business contract, whether as a simple exchange of tokens or as more complex operations such as escrow. Last fall, the Ethereum network was brought to its knees by the popularity of a virtual cat breeding application called Cryptokitties, which allowed users to buy, breed, and sell virtual cats. All of the data for the application and all operations were performed and stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Other notable uses for Ethereum include decentralized exchanges, where users can buy and sell Ethereum’s ERC20 tokens with others over order books and transactions that are maintained on-chain.
We’ve just completed the build-out of our first crypto mining rig, code-named LAMBO1. This beast, spouting 6 MSI GeForce 1070Ti graphic processing units (GPU), and two 850 Watt power supplies, is currently cranking out crypto at an amazing clip and is already providing a steady income stream.
GPUs are almost impossible to find right now at quantity and prices are sky-high due to supply problems and high demand from miners. , and crypto prices are down from all-time-highs, but we fully expect both of these issues to be resolved in the coming months as manufacturers drop new supplies and the crypto market rebounds. For now we intend to accumulate holdings while we wait for token prices to come back and provide us with a better return on investment.
If you are interested in building your own rig or partnering with us on a large scale operation, please contact us for more information.