How I made (a little bit) of money on Bitcoin mining
This is not a particularly exciting bitcoin story, but it’s mine. I think I’ve written it before, but this is December, it’s been a long decade this month.
About a year ago I decided it was time to up my graphics card game. As my home computer is on nearly all the time for work the decision was made to get one that might be able to make enough in bitcoin to offset the power consumption. This was done when Bitcoin was about $6K, and I specced out a video card that appeared it would offset the price of electric, allow me to play some games I’d been wanting to on my PC, etc.
I looked around a bit and settled on NiceHash miner. I also sat my computer down for some testing to see what its resting power draw was vs the post mining power draw and determined I was going to probably pay myself back about a buck or two a week when power considerations were factored in (testing both GPU, CPU+GPU, CPU only.) My ETA to breaking even on the video card was somewhere around three years, but I didn’t start this to become a bitcoin millionaire.
But then I became a bitcoin millionaire.
That’s a lie, I’m leaving it for SEO spammers.. we’ll talk about the SEO spammers some other day.
So this started with me having roughly $60usd worth of bitcoin and deciding to buy stocks with it. using the Cash app. I’d transfer some amount that was equal to $10 a week when I started over to the cash app, sell the bitcoin for money, and then buy some fraction of a stock. Cash app allows you to buy and sell fractions of a lot of stock for nearly no fees. I think from $10 in bitcoin I was buying $9.92 in stock a week.
I’d started this little quest to be able to play 3-5 year old video games at a reasonable frame rate and pay for electricity for my work projects, and ended up making some decent investments over the past year along with my weekly bitcoin hauls going from $10 to over $20 due to the price of bitcoin shooting up. When I started a bitcoin was $6K USD, it’s $19K today.
I realize the title of this could also have been “how I might have made more money by not entering the stock market” but I decided all my fake money was for working to get my electric bill paid. It seemed perhaps investing in pharma/online companies I knew were going to be making announcements and selling them right after the announcements. I used the power of NPR/marketwatch and Google. Flock behavior, but it worked.
In a little over a year playing the stock market, mining 24/7, and accounting for expected capital gains taxes, I have paid for a high end video card (at the time,) and the electricity the computer has consumed.
So yeah, essentially free video card, electric covered for any uses, and I think I’m at beer money. Whoo hoo. Exciting I know.
If I had left the bitcoin in and just let it grow I would have about twice the beer and pizza money, but yeah, now I own some Google, Apple, Moderna, Amazon, etc… I trust them as income earners a little more than the future value of bitcoin.
