Early August in 2011, I started seeing the occasional Reddit post about some new currency called Bitcoin. I did my homework and once I started to process how it worked I was immediately in love with the idea that my computer could help create a currency by crunching some algorithm via the GPU. I've contributed to the distributed programs Folding@Home and SETI since High School, but this one would actually make me money! I spec'd out a decent mining rig for around $1000 using other people's hardware as a baseline to hit my goal of 1500 Mhash/s. I let the rig sit in my cart for a week and finally decided against it. Posts kept appearing claiming I missed Bitcoins big boom and mining was no longer economically feasible. Bitcoin was almost a dollar or something ridiculous and the difficulty factor was rising quickly.
The idea was still interesting and fun so I decided to throw together a mining rig with some parts that I already had. I mined from August until January 2012 and made about .6 BTC. During this span BTC doubled from $1 to $2. That would be great for an investor but, for a miner, $1.20 in BTC was hardly worth the 6 months in electricity I was using. I considered the experiment a complete and powered down the miner.
Through the year Bitcoin continued to slowly climb in value. I continually spec'd out new systems but never had the spare cash to actually buy one. It broke $10 around November 2012, which was a big deal. The idea that a digital cryptocurrency with no tangible value and no governments backing it could be worth $10 each was mind blowing. That was enough for me to fire up the mining rig again and see what the current yield was. I didn't stop with the one rig this time though. On and off, every computer in my possession was mining when it was not in use. When the month was over I tallied up the total and discovered I mined .4 BTC. Even with the rise in BTC value, it still was not economical to mine with my current hardware. I shut everything off once that .4 BTC was added to my .6 BTC. Having 1 Bitcoin in my wallet was enough to give me closure on this whole ridiculous thing. Or so I thought.
Bitcoin started exploding in early 2013. By March it was obvious it could actually hit $100 per BTC. I could not handle sitting idle any more! I did not have much but I was able to budget $100 for some new hardware. I snagged a deal for two Radeon HD 6750s for $100 and put them to work immediately. The payout was awesome, at first. I was making about .05 BTC a day! After about a week, .05 BTC every other day. Then once every three days. As the value went absolutely crazy, more and more miners were joining. This causes the difficulty to rise. And it did not take long for my cheap cards to become as obsolete as my original miner. And then the final blow, the ASIC Block Erupter, an FPGA programmed to mine Bitcoins. These were so efficient that one of them could mine as well at both of my cards at a fraction of the Watts. All GPU miners were now becoming obsolete. I shut down the miner July 2013 once I was down to mining .005 BTC a day. To celebrate the end, I ordered Dominos Pizza using Bitcoin which ended up costing me .4 BTC.
My total earnings during this experience was around 2.2 BTC but the fun had and knowledge gained was priceless. I also learned to trust my instincts more. If it weren't for being otherwise dissuaded, I would have built that rig in 2011. Almost everybody who knew about Bitcoin in the beginning has a story about how they were so close to being millionaires. Some were much closer to others and some were actually millionaires that lost their fortunes in different ways. I was somewhere in the middle, I did not come out of it badly but there will always be some regret.
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