Progression

The current situation, is that we have two Antminer S1 machines running, both of which are powered from a single Corsair 750W power supply, as this particular model has 4x outputs that are normally used to power graphics cards.  Each of the S1 machines has two ‘blades’, each requires a power supply input, so this all works well.

The machines have been placed into different ‘pools’ to do their mining, simply due to our naivety in terms of how to approach things, with the intention of moving one back into the other, if it turns out to be more successful and, ultimately, more profitable for the work.

• mining.bitcoin.cz, aka “Slush’s Pool”
• BTCGuild.com

These work slightly differently to each other, as Slush’s pool is a straightforward example of a group of machines working together to solve a problem and sharing the reward for it. Whereas BTCGuild is a pool that the rewards appear to be based on the last ten work items that have happened, more than the work currently being undertaken.  This almost implies a sense of working to earn loyalty in the pool, and the rewards increase as a consequence of it.

Each website offer the ability to log in and see the current work item, past rewards, current rewards as well as the ability to set up the bitcoin wallet to send the cleared/confirmed rewards to, once they’ve been earned.  In addition, there are mobile apps available on each platforms, as well as JSON-based data available for real-time analysis, if desired.

Bitcoin Mining: The start!

Over lunch at work, we started talking about the possibilities of purchasing a Bitcoin mining machine and using it to not only generate a little bit of money between ourselves, but to learn more about bitcoins, as well as to have a little tech-fun.

We settled on buying a pair of pre-owned AntMiner S1 mining machines from ebay, and as they need an external power supply, we chose a single Corsair 750W unit to drive them both. (More info here: http://antminers.co.uk/shop/antminer-s1-bitcoin-miner/)

Couple of days later, the goodies arrived and that evening, they were configured to get to work, right away.

In terms of 'how' the bitcoin miners work, their processing resources are used as part of a 'pool' of other similar machines to all crunch a load of numbers. Once the set of numbers has been crunched to perfection, the 'reward' for the effort is then shard amongst the machines in that pool. This reward, is the goal, and is paid as a very small percentage of a single bitcoin.

As time goes on, the complexity of the numbers being used in the computation process will gradually become more difficult, and quite possibly to the point that the S1 machines that we've purchased may be useless. But for the time being, they're looking like they're ok.

The overall aim is that, after considerations for electricity have been taken into account, each of the bitcoin mining machines will generate enough bitcoins to make it worthwhile. At present, the value of bitcoins is low in comparison to what it has been, so there's a chance that we'd be mining something that currently isn't worth it, due to the cost of the electricity required to power these hungry machines, but conversely, the value of bitcoins is hoped to rise to the $1000+ value again, in which case, the rewards outweigh the costs.

We shall see..!

At present, we are just over a full day into the process, so things are still very new to all five of us in the team, but we're learning more about bitcoins each day. My hope is to blog about what we're doing, how we're doing it, and the things that we've learned due to the mistakes that we've made!

Spam emails are getting better

My wife has received a couple of emails in the past days or so, claiming to be from Ikea, informing her that the delivery has been shipped.

And the email looks genuine too. Except… we haven’t ordered anything (ever) from Ikea, so this has to be spam.

I wanted to post this on here so that in case you get such an email, you’ll know it’s rubbish, and is probably a phishing email - here’s screen-shot:

Obviously, using the official logos isn’t a new trick, but getting the English words spelt properly, however, is. Although, on inspection, they have misspelled my wife’s first name, which is odd, as one would assume that somehow these would have been harvested from somewhere.

Either way, if you get one and you know that it’s not real, please just delete it and do not click any of the links within. Don’t reply either, as that’s just as bad.

Publish to Microsoft Azure… faster!

If you have, like me, an internet connection with a slow download speed and an upload speed that’s hardly worth being there at all, then publishing a large website or Cloud Service to Microsoft Azure can take ages.

I’ve found that I can achieve the same goal, but in about 16 seconds, thanks to using a Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine!

What I mean, is that on my home development PC, to upload my current project to Azure takes about 25 minutes, due to my appalling speeds, due mainly to where I live and not being able to have fibre broadband as yet.

But… if I fire up an Azure Virtual Machine that can build and publish my code, this all takes about 16 seconds to upload, mainly due to the lightning fast internet speeds that the Microsoft have, and possibly due to using the A8 VM, with it’s very fast networking facilities.

The Virtual Machine I am using is one that I have picked from the Gallery in the wizard when first creating the virtual machine. It has Visual Studio 2013 Premium and SQL Server 2012 pre-installed.  When picking the type of VM to use, I chose the A8, as this comes with 8 cores and 58 GBs of RAM, which is very fast.

This should cost me about £1.52 per hour, but this is all using the free credit to MSDN subscribers. Admittedly, when I’m not using this VM, I shut it down immediately through the Azure Portal as to not waste the credit.

Once fired up, the A8 VM is very quick at opening Visual Studio 2013, and soon downloads my code from Team Foundation Service.  A quick check to make sure all is well before publishing to Azure, and the upload takes about 16 seconds to upload.

For me, this is fantastic. My slow internet connection speeds are not a limiting factor at all in using the Azure virtual machine, and I get the best of both worlds!