Category: Speculative Mining

Hitting the Road

Michael Wade

We’re gearing up for CryptoCoinCon this weekend in Valley Forge, PA, and since we’re overdue for an update I wanted to get a post out before we head out.

As they say, everyone is a genius in a bull market, and this bear market has given us ample opportunity to focus on the tech. We’ve (temporarily) ceased active trading, setup passive income growth with a masternode, and been actively building community with a small coin fork to hone our development chops.

Trading

We’ve refrained from all trading the last two months. After failing to hold to our 2% risk management rule with our holdings on IDEX (AURA and SEN), we decided that it wouldn’t be appropriate to continue until these open positions returned to profitability. We did have a nice gain on ZRX that closed in early July, but were offset by a stopped-out position in BNB.

Masternodes

We setup our first masternode (MN) in early July, finally picking XDNA after several weeks of research. We gave a presentation on MN at the July Blockheads meetup, and we’ll expand the discussion on the experience at a later date. 

SpecMining

Measured in USD, our mining portfolio for July and August so far hasn’t quite made up for June, but the last 90 days have been profitable, BTC-wise. 

PennyKoin (PK) is going to get a full write up here at some point, a lot of our attention has been on this one over the last month or so. For now we’ll say that it’s a CryptoNote fork run by a solo developer, and we’ve now functioning as one of the core devs/community leaders. We’ve setup a mining pool and block explorer, and have even contributed to the project’s Github. It’s also inspired a related software development project that has income potential, and we’ve learned so much about blockchains while debugging the code. 

We also spent a couple weeks mining TUBE, the token for BitTube, a decentralized YouTube clone that looks really interesting, but we’ve since switched back over to our profit-switching pool of choice, MiningPoolHub. 

Not rekt yet

Michael Wade

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!

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SpecMining update for April

Michael Wade

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.

Haven

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.

Raven

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.

Bitcoin crosses critical trend intersection

Michael Wade

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.

First mining rig

Michael Wade

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.