About candy wrappers, okroshka and investments

The first time I heard about bitcoins I read this article on a cold winter evening . How did I then bite my elbows, then I thought something like - "incomprehensible crap", pressed ctrl-w and then buried myself in the hub

After 2 months, a friend came to visit me at the beginning of May 2011 and said that he needed to go and buy video cards ... To my reasonable question “nauv?” He replied that he would generate bitcoins on vidyuhi.

In then I thought ... In the study of this incomprehensible substance from cryptography, economics, algorithms and finance, I disappeared for almost four days. One thing did not fit in my head - how can this be? Is there a catch somewhere? Well, this is just another pyramid ...

Of particular suspicion was the fact that no one had ever seen the creator - no one Satoshi Nakamoto, and this person was rather mythical ...

For this, my friends and I called them candy wrappers.

Alas, not one of the suspicions was confirmed. This cryptocurrency has all the necessary mechanisms for it to self-regulate.
Surely everyone is already in the know, but here are the main consumer properties of the currency:

• complete anonymity when used on i2p or tor networks.
• cryptographic stability - trying to pick a hash is simply not economically feasible - it is better to use these emission capacities.
• Free transactions are ensured by the fact that the issue and transaction support are inseparable.
• candy wrappers can be exchanged for any currency either directly or through exchanges;
• candy wrappers can be stored as a file on your flash drive or in the cloud (like in a bank)
• The transaction database is completely distributed to ALL (!) who use the network.
• emission is carried out by anyone. This requires computing power.

Vobschem this thing is impossible to stop by the way even having chopped off all root dns servers with free transactions (conditional) and anonymity.

A clear analogy with gold climbed into my head.

After consulting with 4 friends, it was decided to get involved in this incredible allure together. Fantik grew rapidly, all calculations and simulations showed that the matter would burn out)))

After 4 days, after a sleepless night, Kolya and I screwed motherboards in each of which 3 graphics cards to the Ikea wooden shelves directly on the self-tapping screws.


Money scraped on 29 vidyuh Radeon 6870. These were the most ROI effective cards on sale. 5970 was already sold out at that time.

You can write a separate post about the launch of this design - the cards were constantly overheating and cut down. All engineering problems were resolved on the fly - we went to buy coolers, screwed them in - monitored ... And so on ...


After another couple of days we reached the design capacity - 10 Ghash / s. These are two such racks plus 5 more vidyuh spread around the available computers. The room of a friend who was not temporarily in Moscow time then turned into a server room, which constantly warmed up with 10 kilowatts. We opened the windows, turned on the condo to the full (here morons), but nothing helped. From overheating, the automatics on the mothers constantly triggered and they were cut off. Uptime was not more than 80% and this depressed us greatly, because complexity grew very quickly and it was necessary to beat off the iron.

We moved the racks to the balcony, covered the windows with reflective film, arranged something like fresh air ventilation with ordinary fans. After a couple of days, we reached uptime in the region of 97%.

There was another problem. Wiring could not stand it. First, each rack was laid out at different points. But it did not help. The automatic machine constantly worked. I had to change it. But this did not help much and a day later we had two brand new voltage rectifiers. We switched to okroshka - because the kettle could not be turned on already ... However, like any other electrical appliance.

A month later, we were tired of okroshka and found a way to smash two racks into different apartments.

After 2 months, the course began to fall sharply and generation became unprofitable. We sold the glands for 70% of the initial cost. And the generated candy wrappers remained to lie ... The

guys told me that we need to fix half at least $ 15. Now I understand that it is fixed correctly.

The rate fell to almost $ 2. Selling them was pointless. Therefore, they decided to let them lie - all the more so since everyone remained with their opinion that candy wrappers have a great future.

3 weeks ago we recorded half of what we generated then at $ 25.5 - i.e. even if the entire bitcoin economy, the money supply of which is already more than 500 million dollars, will collapse right now, we will get about 25% per annum.

If you evaluate the value of the portfolio at the current rate - you get something about 450% per year.

I am telling all this in order to convey several important things that I learned from this story (despite the fact that they are obvious):
- invest if you know the subject area very well, consider the risks!
- invest only when there is a clear exit strategy. After investing, dancing is bad. The success of our event is due to the fact that we did not succumb to the temptations to play on the course;
- understand the psychology of the market. If we understood the news background of that time and believed that the candy wrapper would fall so sharply, we would have increased the portfolio not by 8, but by 30 (!) Times in a year and a half;
- Invest in technology and growing markets as early as possible.

By the way, Bitcoin has stably fixed at a level close to $ 50!

But we both know that ASIC is approaching . And one should not console oneself with hopes that this will play a good deed in the stability of their course.
Arithmetic is very simple: for example, such a thing . Generates 1.5 THash / s for $ 30k with a consumption of 1.5 kW / h (which is hard to believe). With these indicators, the cost of mining will fall 30-40 times. Gold will become more affordable. We draw conclusions ourselves ;-)

Well, for dessert, I want to know the change in 2 years in public opinion regarding the perception of candy wrappers: