Technology - IKnowRusty.com

Apple’s Upcoming Streaming Service Theory (Pre March 25th 2019 Announcement)

Posted on March 14, 2019 by RustyG

AppleStream_Invite

So the invites have gone out for the March 25th, 2019, Apple event. As all of the rumors have pointed towards and now the almost cofirmed, “It’s Show Time” showing up on the invites, it can all but be confirmed that we will be seeing the new streaming service come from Apple. With the fact that Apple has stopped sharing the iPhone sales numbers last year, due to the fact that all smartphone sales have basically maxed out, and the market is basically saturated with smartphones everywhere. People are a little stressed out with the now common $1,000 entry point for some major flagship smartphone manufacturers and are now holding on to their phones for longer due to many reasons, but one being the lack of innovation in the newest phones being released. We are not seeing a lot of major changes in the year-to-year and some are waiting anywhere from 2 years or more until they upgrade now.

(I wish we could go back to contracts and subsidies, rant ahead)

I will admit to a sidebar here, as I find this funny, but with folks holding on to their phones for 2+ years now, why can’t we have the option of going back to a 2 year contract price and getting the cell phone carriers subsidizing some of the cost? I remember when T-Mobile basically set the precedent for this and killed off of the contract. This at the time sounded amazing, but basically, they didn’t “kill” the contract, they just re-labeled it and made you pay full price for your phone and they no longer subsidized the cost of the phone. I saw that as a very manipulative way of marketing, but a ton of people liked the idea of no “contract”, even though they were still in a “contract” of a different kind. Those terms aside, T-Mobile started this new way that mobile carriers do business and all the other major carriers followed suit and now, we the people have to pay FULL price for our phones now, which is vary frustrating. I personally WOULD sign a 2 year contract with my carrier of choice, to get this price back down to something more manageable if we are going to continue to this foray in to the $1,000USD+ entry point on smartphones. I was with At&t from the time I was 18 (then Cingular Wireless) until I swapped back in 2014 or 15, I believe it was. I have been with my same carrier now since that swap and have no plans to swap anytime soon, unless there are some major changes.

Now back to the regularly scheduled post.

So with the fact that people are getting phones much later and the market has been saturated, Apple has been planning for the future as people are moving to the streaming platforms in droves and the physical format may soon be dying. Even Samsung has stopped making Blu-Ray players, but this had more to do with the fact that they haven’t kept up with the trends and not updated their hardware, but that is besides the point. Apple knows that people are subscribing more to online services and want to cash in on it. They are already making it work with Apple Music and they want to expand their services into the video industry.

Netflix is the #1 video streaming service as it stands, in my opinion. Obviously, there are multiples out there, including Hulu, SlingTV, DirecTV NOW, Amazon Prime TV and many many others. I don’t want to delve into the individual services from the individual content providers like ESPN, HBO, CBS, NBC or any other direct providers, but just the overall platform providers that are “content agnostic”. I put content agnostic in quotes, because now I am going to lean towards the upcoming and rumored, but almost confirmed Apple video streaming service.

It seems that Apple will be announcing their streaming service to compete with the likes of Amazon and Netflix. I think this will be the same $10 per month entry point like most of the others out there, along with other tiers. Apple has been very good at making contracts with certain companies in the past and making services more “mainstream”. I use iTunes and the P2P sharing from back in the days of the early 00’s as my point of reference. Apple was able to make it so convenient and fast to purchase music for the first time when it launched iTunes Music store in 2003. They were able to bring most of the major labels to the table and basically take over and create the online music market.

Now fast forward to 2019 and we are about to see the announcement of Apple’s streaming service and I want to give some thoughts to what they may be working on. Beginning in January, I started getting notices from a few of my services that I subscribe to for my online digital library that I don’t normally use. Let me show you what I received:

AppleStream_Ultraviolet

This is the first email that I received from Ultraviolet and then I got another email from Sony:

AppleStream_Sony

I am just speculating here, but I am thinking that these are major movie services that are shutting down because they have been bought out by Apple. I have no hard facts or points of reference to confirm this, but I think these are good indicators that Apple may be buying up the licenses for these movie providers, and adding to their already expanding library.

You have to understand that Apple is already working pretty heavily and almost directly with Disney/Pixar/Marvel/LucasFilm and will already have the rights to those media libraries and you already see this in your current online library if you have any of these movies streaming to your AppleTV. Apple still needs to bring in some of the other major studios to round out their available movies if they want to play more than just Disney owned content. I believe that these notices I received above are the pre-cursor to seeing Apple bringing in the other names like Sony and whatever deals that Ultraviolet has with the others.

I will say that I think that MoviesAnywhere may be either their direct opponent or we may see a re-branding of it to the Apple streaming service, because they have also been slowly getting all the online digital services under one house. I say re-branding because Disney itself, shut down it’s Disney service recently as well as it moved over to the MoviesAnywhere service.

In another story that I thought I would never see, Apple also has announced partnerships with Samsung to get the iTunes media libraries on their Smart TVs starting in 2019! I think this has to do with more of the fact that Apple doesn’t have a dedicated, 1st party television set that they sell and that they need to get to the market that does not buy Smart TV dongles like the AppleTV, Amazon Fire Sticks or Google Chromecasts. If you are a TV consumer who never buys the extra STBs, but may have purchased a Samsung Smart TV, then this is another way to get you into the Apple Ecosystem.

I could be totally wrong here, but as a long time tech person, I feel like this is how it will go down on March 25th. Only a few more days away and we shall see!

Technology

UBI and the Future of Automation

Posted on January 31, 2019January 31, 2019 by RustyG

The future of jobs is soon coming to head and the end of manual labor for the mass society of Americans as we know is coming to an end sooner than you expect.

I have had this conversation with a friend of mine and acquaintances who simply do not believe it and just want to put their heads in the sand and want to wish it all away. They think that technological advances in automation of so many different industries is “so far” away that it will never be seen in our lifetimes and they just don’t want to even face facts and numbers. It may not be the ‘Terminator’ style ending that we saw in the 80’s and 90’s from the Arnold Schwarzenegger hit movies, but robots will basically take over everything that we do.

I will point you to the screenshot above from the 2008 Disney movie, ‘Wall-E‘. As you see the movie progress, you will see that humans have evolved (or devolved, however you want to see it) to a point that robots do everything they need and there is no real need for the manual labor of people anymore. Obviously, this also shows the progression of humans getting more obese, but that is not the point of this post and I will not delve into that side of things. I want to point out, that the future portrayed in this fictional movie is really not far from us, as technology stands today.

I have shown the video of the Tesla automated semi-truck to my mother’s boyfriend, who is a truck driver and has been for multiple years. He just laughs and says “good luck”. I have shown him that his job is going to be questioned in the near future. As companies get larger and larger, they will want to automate and efficiently get rid of human workers in the process. Humans are the most expensive and least cost efficient part of any process and they can cause errors on a much higher level than robots will ever do. One of the worst economic examples of this, was bust before the millennium in 1999, when a NASA, Mars observer was burned up in the martian atmosphere, due to the translation between imperial and metric measurements. As this was obviously due to American’s stubbornness not to change to the metric system, this mistake would not have been made if a trained robot was doing the work, but I digress.

We have seen the idea of automated cars driving around and now taxiing people around cities like Las Vegas as the likes of Waymo, Lyft (aka Level5) and Uber are all working to eliminate their drivers. You can see some automated systems in cars now like lane assist and automated breaking systems that are already being sold to the public in cars from companies like Ford, Toyota and Chevrolet, just to name a few. The human driver is the worst accident causing part of the driving equation and the faster we can remove that from behind the wheel, the better off we are.

Obviously, this is not something that we can do overnight or even quickly, but will take a serious amount of time for acclimation for the society at large to accept this, but it will happen. Let me repeat that for affect here, IT WILL HAPPEN. I have already seen so many skeptics and worker’s unions fighting this, but there is no real need to fight it. Technology, no matter how big or small, has always and will continue to enrich our lives. the problem is that humans are infallible and will always find a way to make any process longer, take their time or just flat out quit. Humans are not really built for repetitive tasks and we need to understand this moving forward. There is a reason, as I write this, I begin to think of the writer’s worst nightmare, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

I am using driving cars as the example above, but it can be repeated for many, many industries across our human work force. The most menial jobs will be the jobs taken over by robots and automation, which include service jobs like fast food, hotels and even security jobs. I could take almost any industry and show you how there are, or will be automated robots take over some aspect of the job. When it comes to even more dangerous and even more skilled jobs, these are not left out either. Since most of the ‘blue-collar’ jobs will be taken first, I can see how the ‘mob mentality’ will fight this the heaviest, but do not dismay, as the ‘white-collar’ jobs are also on the way out as well.

You have to understand that automation knows no bounds and does not care at what level anything is. If a process can be eliminated or automated, robots will take of this in the future for us. This can be software robots or even hardware robots. Many robots are already out there in today’s workforce that you may not even be aware of. I currently work at a car plant that ’employs’ loads of robots to do a lot of tasks that help alleviate worker strain or even repetitive tasks that a robot that only needs light maintenance and doesn’t require a paycheck to do so. This can be seen across almost every car manufacturer today.

You may have heard of or already know about the IoT, a la the ‘Internet of Things’. This is the area of the gadgets that we have, that will be a part of this network. This can include but not limited to, things like our Amazon Echos, our Internet connected weather vanes, or just some internet connected toaster that allows us to control it via the internet in some fashion. Basically, anything that we attach an internet connection to, that previously did not have internet access, just for the simple means of having access to it remotely, is a part of, or will be the IoT. We as a society are connecting more and more things to help enrich our lives, so that we can basically control our lives from the smartphone, that the automated robot future is just an extension of the current reality that we live in today.

I could go deeper into this rabbit hole, but I just want to say this. Many of our jobs, in the next 2 decades may be all but eliminated and we need to be prepared for that. Many tech pundits of our time today are talking about the Universal Base Income (UBI) because the distribution of wealth will most likely stretch even further than it is today and the super rich will become the super super rich as they own and build the robots that will be the future we are looking at. The idea that everyone, everywhere will get the same basic income because robots and automation will most likely wipe out the middle class is not that far from the truth, if you expound upon the ideas of what I am speaking of above.

I am not here to say that your job is in direct fear of losing it to robots right now, but it is over the next few decades and I include myself. I am stating however, we need to plan now for this automated future and not try to tear it down or block it before it comes. As history has taught us, those who oppose future, always fail. We are about to embark upon the next revolution with automation, the same way we did with all the technologies of the past, being that of the printing press, the cotton gin or the airplane. The next ‘Industrial’ revolution is upon us and we must understand it now and try to begin to educate ourselves for the future instead of trying to either idly stand by or try to tear it down like uneducated cavemen of the past.

My recommendation is taking the next hour or so and reading this article from the Guardian and watching these videos below. If the videos below interest you, I recommend heading over to ColdFusionTV on YouTube and subscribing to his videos as well. Be prepared!

Rants, Technology

Why Does At&t keep Lying?

Posted on January 17, 2019 by RustyG

5G is up and running and ready for 2019. Kind of. It isn’t really ready for mass market yet, but we will start seeing it come to our mobile handsets, maybe as early as March 2019 with the announcement of the Samsung Galaxy S10, 5G edition(via CNet). What is 5G you ask? Just to K.I.S.S., it is the next evolution in mobile internet access via mobile devices like the smartphones and tablets that we carry with us today; though tablets may be on the way out (via Forbes). 5G will mostly likely, double, triple or even quadruple the speeds that we have with our mobile devices on 4G LTE (via PCMag). It is the next evolution in our mobile internet broadband access for the world to use. The fun part about it, is the race to be the first to have it. Well, as of recently, if you have an At&t device, you may be seeing it pop up on your phone, like this:

att-5ge

Are you able to see the difference? It’s very subtle, but you may be used to seeing it this way. Let’s zoom in a whole lot.

att-5ge-change

Can you see it now? You may be used to seeing that 4G LTE logo on most At&t phones, or some fashion of it. It may just be the text AT&T LTE in the top left hand corner of your phone, depending on the software. As of this writing, I would say that 99.9% of At&t customers are used to seeing the LTE logo on their phones now, but as of 2019, it looks like At&t is starting to swap some customer’s icons to the ‘new’ 5G as they are touting 12 cities with 5GE capabilities available (via FierceWireless). The overall problem that I have with that is, that the handsets are not yet available that have the 5G modems that can receive the signal and most likely, won’t be available until later this year, if not until 2020.

Now this is a similar tactic that was previously used by At&t back in 2012, when they basically did the same thing and started labeling HSPA+ (a 3G .5, or 3.5G technology) as ‘4G’. I actually wrote about this when it happened back in 2012. T-Mobile actually started the whole snowball by labeling their HSPA+ 3.5G as ‘4G (aka FauxG) with their whole Carly Foulkes marketing campaign and At&t followed suit (via DigitalTrends) after finding out that no one really cared.

So now, here we are again, where companies are allowed to put labels on things that are not truly what they are. The fun part about it is, that companies are now trolling each other for the shenanigans. Check out T-Mobile’s response on Twitter:

didn’t realize it was this easy, brb updating pic.twitter.com/dCmnd6lspH

— T-Mobile (@TMobile) January 7, 2019

As stated above, and linked in the Digitial Trends article, it was At&t who condemned T-Mobile for the sudden change in marketing tactics, even though the technology didn’t match up with the labels. So now, in 2019, the shoe has swapped and T-Mobile is trolling At&t for the same exact behavior. While I don’t like the marketing tactics of either, it can start to be confusing for the consumer, as salesmen at the store can start using this as a selling point, even though the phones have not reached the capabilities for 5G yet. As the Verge points out, the ‘5GE’ that is currently being changed, is really only LTE Advanced or LTE Advanced Pro in the current markets.

All of my issues aside, as this has happened in the past, even dragging Apple (via the Verge) into the mix, I am just tired of companies making things more confusing for the customers at the bottom and just getting more $$$ in their pockets with marketing jargon. I just find it very funny that all of the wireless companies are repeating past mistakes and no one is really on a national level calling them out and most general consumers will never care to be educated about the things they are being sold on past the cover of the book.

Apple, Rants, Technology

My Problem with Apple Fanboys and the Company as a Whole

Posted on January 3, 2019January 3, 2019 by RustyG

I want to be very transparent right up front. I used to be an Apple iPhone guy, an Apple iPod guy and even now so, an Apple iPad guy. I can say without hesitation, Apple STILL makes the best tablet, as of January 2019. I have had a Samsung tablet and even read some of the most recent debacle issues that the current Google Slate is having. I still use my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 as my “daily driver”, though, not in tablet form, but in full on laptop mode, if you will, because I have FULL Windows on there, and tablet mode just seems to ‘maim’ it and I don’t like that version of it. All of that aside, let me get you to where I am with Apple and Apple products.

Way back in 2006, I was carrying the Motorola RAZR V3i. This was the variant of the wildly popular Motorola V3 RAZR phone that had iTunes on it. Apple had recently partnered with Motorola to release the Motorola ROKR(a poorly received, yet rehashed phone from 2003 called the E390) which was the first phone with iTunes that was announced a few months before the V3i, but was a HIDEOUS phone. It was the “dream” phone, because you could carry your iTunes library (albeit only 100 songs max) from your iPod and also have your phone on you at the same time! You have understand, back then, you had to have your iPod as a separate device and carry it separately (and the reason for the modern AUX jack in your radio) from your phone. Smartphones were not yet ubiquitous. Blackberry was the dominant player of the day in the smartphone market, which held the nomenclature of ‘crackberry’.

So back in January 2007, when Steve Jobs got up to announce the iPhone and that we could get this ‘magical’ device in 6 months, the world was EXCITED! (The Motorola ROKR was silently killed off.) I have to admit that the iPhone was the first of it’s kind and definitely changed the smartphone market from then on. I even video’d the event on my RAZR V3i (very poor quality) as I waited for my first iPhone to get shipped to me through Cingular Wireless.

I did several short videos on this, as back then, you could not ‘live-stream’ the way we do now. I had to do this via short clips, as the V3i didn’t have a lot of storage to store videos and I couldn’t use the live-streaming app Qik that I would eventually start using with the iPhone. As you can see, that this phone drew a lot of new people to the smartphone market, including myself.

So I had the original iPhone 2G (named because it only had Edge network capabilities on the Cingular, soon to be At&t network) and was able to sell the phone unlocked and jailbroken a year later to some guy in Italy for more that I originally paid for it! You also have to remember, this was back when the wireless companies subsidized the full cost of the phone because you were agreeing to a 2 year or more contract, so I had only paid $299 for it! You can see the video I used on eBay to sell the phone still online:

So I purchased the iPhone 3G, as it was obvious that many other phones that weren’t smartphones had 3G capabilities and was limiting the first iPhone from ‘high speed’ internet. Apple’s biggest argument was that 3G was a battery hog and could kill the performance that they wanted from their first foray into the smartphone market. As the first iPhone was such a smash hit, they pushed forward with the second iteration, known as the iPhone 3G. Then, in their 2009, 3rd generation iPhone, they released their now known update as the ‘S’ year, the 3GS. This was basically a simple update to all things on the previous version, which usually doubled all the performance over the previous version. Since this was an ‘S’ year, I skipped and held on to my 3G for the full 2 years and waited for the iPhone 4.

The iPhone 4 was an AMAZING upgrade and introduced us to the ‘Retina‘ display and showed to us that Apple still could hold the consumer market in ‘awe’ as they continued to innovate on the original design and capabilities of the iPhone. They had added a front facing camera for the then unknown Facetime chats, but would soon just become the ‘selfie’ camera. Even though it had been leaked ahead of it’s launch, the iPhone 4 was wildly anticipated and hyped before we were ever able to purchase it! Apple is a company known for it’s secrecy and even hunted down the people who were implicated in the ‘loss’ of it’s prototype device. All of that aside, it was an awesome phone for 2010, so I made my purchase and sold my iPhone 3G, though this time, for a little less and didn’t make a profit.

Though, I did have this weird vibrating issue with the phone when I first got it, but that ended up being a REALLY small fluke issue that only affected a small number of people and you can see that video here:

I mentioned it in passing in this video, but it affected quite a lot more people than the vibrating issue that I ran into and that was one of the first MAJOR ‘gate’ issues, known as ‘Antenna Gate’. There have been plenty over the years, but this was the first one that I became majorly aware of. It was such a pivotal moment for Apple to take a hold of the issue, but the way they illustrated it to us, was that it was our faults. Even though they did provide ‘bumpers’ or discounts on cases, with the idea that we were supposed to buy MORE items from them to fix their issue, it was painfully obvious that Apple was blaming the users. I even had a rant about it, when it all went down. You can see the full event here (sans the Q&A afterwards, which you can find in pieces on Youtube):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IorfYuF4gMM

The funny thing was, that after the press event, it didn’t take long for someone to show that their answer was a bit flawed.

Even though, this was one of the first ‘cracks’ in the armor that I saw in the ever growing popularity of the iPhone and Apple as a whole, it was a little disheartening to see they were blaming the users. Obviously, this was a real attenuation issue with how the antenna received signals and the human hand could kill it, but to say that it was the user’s fault and not really admit that his was a design flaw was a little disingenuous in my opinion, but I held on and continued with the iPhone 4 throughout it’s life cycle.

The same continued for the ‘S’ year cycle again for the 4S and I again, skipped; now seeing that Apple would continue this format of new design, update old phone with new specs and then redesign again. So I figured that by the time the iPhone 5 would come around for the 2012 release, I would be more than happy to upgrade and be WOW’d again. Unfortunately, this did not happen. The iPhone 5, was a rehashed version of the iPhone 4, but this time and for the first time, had the screen size increased to an almost 16×9 ratio with still carrying the ‘Retina’ display moniker. Yes the phone was thinner and faster than the 4S and even had LTE for first time, but this wasn’t as enticing as the change was from the 3GS to the 4.

Also at this time, the Android market had begun flourishing and many companies had already had their freshman and sophomore tries at smartphones and were releasing phones with better specs and features than what the iPhone 5 was carrying. So I began looking around and found a nice alternative with Samsung and the Galaxy S3. This phone had a 1280×720 display, whereas the iPhone 5 only had 1136×640. The overall screen size was larger at 4.8″ over the iPhone 4″ screen, which was one of the major reasons why I left. Apple was getting stuck in their idea that 4″ was the magic number and that no one wanted anything bigger. This wasn’t the only reason, but was a major factor in my decision to switch from iOS to Android.

Which also brings me to the idea that iOS was getting stale. No matter what Apple did to the iPhone, no matter how many times I jailbroke the iPhone, I could see more options on the fledgling Android side of things. I was getting tired of the software on iOS and at this point, the iPhone was starting to be owned by anyone and everyone. I didn’t want to be a part of the crowd and I wanted to stand out. I had researched phones like the Motorola Atrix or the HTC EVO 4G for quite some time, but due to network availability, I had to end up choosing the Samsung in the end and I was happy that I did. The funny thing was, that the S3 ended up being a very popular phone for Samsung as well and I was loving their bigger screens and ended up the next year, upgrading to my first ‘phablet’ phone the Galaxy Note 3. This began my obsession with larger screens.

I stuck with Samsung as they kept making things more awesome every time I upgraded and I felt like they were the company that was making me have that WOW affect every time. I followed my 2 year cycle, as I was still on At&t contract scheme and skipped the Note 4 and went to the Note 5. Even though, the Note 4 Edge was a REALLY cool design, and I seen the prototype at CES a few years prior, they only put the curved edges of the glass on the back of the Note 5. It was really cool to see the curved edges finally make it to the front of the phones with the S6 Edge, earlier that year, but I still wanted the larger screen phones. They eventually made the S6 Edge+, which was basically the size of the Note 5, but had less features than the Note series.

I won’t go much further in my history with Samsung and why I continued to stick with them, but you get the basic idea that it Apple continued to be ‘stale’ to me, even with the change to the design of the iPhone 6, which wasn’t really, all that much different. Then they continued on with that design through all versions of the ‘S’ years through to the iPhone 8 and still some of that design is in the iPhone X and XS. All the while, Apple kept cultivating a ‘fanboy’ status among their fans and was becoming of a cult status.

Over the years as issues went on and on, it was all in how Apple handled their ‘faults’. I think this is one of the biggest reasons why I continue to obstain from Apple and have disdain for their products, even though, some of their products are great. I can attest that iMessage is an awesome idea that Android still really hasn’t mirrored. AppleTV and iPad are in my opinion, one of the best products in their particular markets. I will even admit that MacOS from time to time can be quite helpful, but it isn’t enough to sell me over into the ‘walled garden’ aspect of their entire ecosystem. Especially when there are great alternatives out there, that are cross platform and don’t really care what system you are on. Web services, platform agnostic, to be honest are the best and should have always been the way, as Steve Jobs really wanted from the beginning. (Remember web apps, before we had the iTunes App Store???)

All of that aside, I think this guy kind of puts all of my feelings toward Apple in a nice 22 minute video. Thanks for reading my ramblings and rants. Feel free to comment below. I’ll leave you with the video below:

Cryptocurrency, Technology

Mining Cryptocurrency in January 2018

Posted on January 31, 2018December 30, 2018 by RustyG

My last post was the beginning of mining at home with Ethereum and also with my cloud mining efforts with Genesis Mining. I wanted to do an update since then, just so I could see for myself what my efforts have brought me and just to report to the world, how it is going in the world of mining. So the first thing I want to cover, is the fact that the mining at home, in it’s current state, has gotten quite expensive, if you have not already gotten into it and bought the hardware needed to mine. Typically, people want to buy a GPU with a certain number of Gigabytes for mining, and right now, the cost per GB has gone up severely. When I made my first post, about the card that I purchased, it was running $299.99. I even was able to go back, a few weeks later, when they dropped the price to $269.99 and get my $30 back on the price difference.

Well, things have changed. If you look at the XFX Radeon RX 580 8GB card that I got, it is now over $500 to purchase now. Miners have caused the cost of graphics cards to go up significantly. I actually shared a news article about this whole phenomenon from Tech Radar a few weeks ago. With this push back, it looks like makers like Nvidia have asked retailers to make sure that no one is walking out with more than 2 graphics cards at a time. If you look at the current cost of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition 8GB, it can vary in range from about $380 (IF YOU CAN FIND IT)all the way up into the thousands!

This has changed some people’s mind about purchasing cards right now, due to the fluctuation in the cost of entry for getting just one card. Such is the law of supply and demand, though. I highly recommend against it at this current writing of this article, but it could change in the near future, with all that Nvidia is working on for their machine learning and computer vision projects they are working on for their autonomous car driving aspirations they are trying to reach. Only time will tell though.

At Home Mining

So, let’s get back to my at home rig that I have been running for a few weeks now. Remember, I just got started in November, so there is a little bit of difference in these. Previously, with the cost of Ethereum, I was getting anywhere between $1.25 and a $1.50 a day. Since I last wrote, Ethereum has now broken the $1,000 level and has stayed above that for the most part and now I am getting over $2 a day. Which is GREAT! So let’s start off with what I got from November. The mining pool that I started with, required that you be at a certain minimum before you were able to cash out, which was 0.05 ETH. I say was, because they tweeted out, that starting on December 1st, 2017, they would start cashing out anything above 0.02 and from then on, they would cash you out if you have not cashed out in the last days.

As you can read from my last post, I was able to start cashing out on December 2nd, 2017 and every week after that, since then. I would say it has been pretty much on schedule, every Monday since, except for when I recently changed my request to put my mining efforts into my Exodus wallet instead of my Coinbase wallet. Now it looks like I will get my efforts on Sundays instead. Either way, let’s take a look at what I have been getting. Keep mind, that the USD comparison, is for the exact worth at the point of deposit. Since Ethereum is traded daily, that worth is volatile and changes the instant it was deposited. All of that, aside, here you go:

Date	ETH	USD
12/2/17 (Tuesday)	0.07880366	35.8
12/11/17 (Monday)	0.03345818	16.12
12/18/17 (Monday)	0.01984642	15.31
12/25/17 (Monday)	0.02131229	15.85
1/1/18 (Monday)	0.01870194	14.02
1/8/18 (Monday)	0.01909514	22.01
1/15/18 (Monday)	0.01844023	24.24
1/22/18 (Monday)	0.01331773	12.98
1/28/18 (Sunday)	0.01436816279	16.98

This means that since I have started, I have mine’d 0.2373437528 of ETH with a cost of $173.31 (calculated, not actual current trade rate). That means that there is a difference of $96.68 in the 9+ weeks that I have had it. Meaning, I should be well on my way of having the card paid off, in less than 7 weeks from this writing, if I use a low average of $15 a week. You can see the price change over, week by week. For instance, you can see that the week of 12/11, I deposited 0.033* and only got $16.12 for it. Where as of this last Sunday, because the cost per ETH has shot up over $1,100, that same $16 is only 0.014* ETH.

One thing has changed sine I last wrote as well. Previously, I did not factor in the cost of electricity. This time, I sort of can. Since I started this in November, I was able to see the bill from October to November, jump up from $90 to $120. Luckily, I did not have to pay any of the first month’s electricity. Then I saw the month of December jump up to $180, so I offered to pay half of the bill, since I did not purchase the kW monitor for this PC. Then for January, it went up to $256, so I offered to pay $125 of the bill. So I have paid $215 out in electricity, but I just can’t give you a really good, ACTUAL per unit cost, due to the fact I am just guesstimating and volunteering to pay 1/2 of the electric bill. Remember though, I can tell you, it is still roughly $0.10-$0.11 USD for electricity here. So right now, I am still “in the hole” on the card, but it should start coming through very soon.

The other thing I have been able to see though, is a slight drop in my mining hashrate. I was typically getting about 20 MH/s on average, but that has recently dropped to 19. Which is odd and because I don’t really research it, I don’t know if it is my card getting worse, or if the traffic on the ETH network is getting more and more and thus making it more difficult to mine, I have no clue. I keep a close eye on my mining from anywhere I am though. I can always watch my efforts on the Ethermine website either at the old site or the new Beta site.

I have been using my mining efforts to do more trading on Binance and HitBTC to get other forms of cryptocurrency like Cordana, Ripple and Ark. So my actual total sum, isn’t the total sum anymore. I have moved some of it over, but for the last 2 weeks, I have kept the balance and just added it to my Exodus wallet. You can check out my balances on both of these trading platforms, as of this writing here:

HitBTC		Binance
ETH	0.00063153	ADA (Cardano)	57
XRP (Ripple)	20	ARK	3.51
		IOTA	0.997
Est Value	0.00489153 BTC	Binance	0.03066671
	$22.8075 USD	XRP (Rippl)	0.0148
		TRX (Tron)	0.0125
		ETF	0.00792166
		ETH	0.00007447
		LTC (Litecoin)	0.000025

		Est Value	0.00489153 BTC
			$48.85 USD

Cloud Mining

I continue my cloud mining contract with Genesis Mining (Affiliate code for all Genesis Mining users:K8MO34 ) as well, but it isn’t as lucrative, since I bought in at such a low hash rate. My zCash continues to grow, but I am currently sitting at just under $13 USD since I started it. With my ETH contract, I am currently sitting at just under $10 USD with it. This is a continual thing though, like a slow leaky faucet that I put in $80 USD on, so it is nice to see the outcome each day. The only thing with Genesis is, with ETH, they “claim” there are “fee” issues where the costs are too high to cash out, so you have to actually wait until your ETH meets 0.075. I am currently sitting at 0.0086854. With an average of 0.00016* coming out each day, it will be about 1.5 years before I actually get the payout. Which is completely annoying, because I can send my above mentioned mining efforts of either 0.01 or 0.02 ETH every single week!

The biggest problem, isn’t Genesis Mining. It is me and the fact I got the cheapest mining contract they had, because I just wanted to try it out. If I were so inclined, I could have bought more power, or soon to be, buy more power. They recently announced a pre-order that I can make if I want, but the minimum purchase is just over $1,500 USD! Now, I am currently only at 1 MH/s in the contract I am in with Genesis for my ETH. It was roughly $80 USD. So, to go up to 40 MH/s and not have to pay 40x the cost, I guess is a deal, but I just don’t have that kind of money (extra) to buy in right now.

With zCash, I have been getting, every 3rd day or so, about 0.001 to 0.0011 every time. This is a little bit nicer, since the fees are a lot smaller, I actually get my cash out, every third day. Even though I have been mining at 25 H/s, instead of MH/s, like with ETH, I am able to get “real” payouts without having to wait. The biggest issue I have with Genesis though, is the fact that I can only purchase whatever they have available for contracts. I assume this is because of their own build outs. They physically have to be able to afford to buy more equipment before being able to sell cloud mining contracts. Either way, I just don’t see it being worth the money, unless you don’t have the knowledge or money to get into building your own mining rig.

Off until next time..

– Rusty G