Blockchain

Yes, I am a crypto miner.

In the picture above you will see my first Ethereum mining rig, manually built, all parts bought online, and run for about a year and half. At first I was planning to build a 3-GPU rig just for fun, after a proof of concept and a quick earning of a tenth of an Ether, I decided to buy three more GPUs. It was in mid 2017 and of course the original seller had no more new GPUs in stock, so I bough the used ones on Ebay, and set up this loud baby in my tiny studio apartment.

I won’t forget the summer of 2017, hot and humid, at night I was tossing and turning every day, with loud buzzing sound 7 feet away made by the cooling fans of the rig. Today I may just choose to pay for a quality sleep, but at that time, with the price of Bitcoin and Ether soaring up like rocket-ships to the moon, I was having too much fun to shut it down.

As you may already know, price of crypto currencies peaked at December of 2017 and suffered a 90% decline over the next year. Miners started to sell their machines cheap, inventors quit the market and turned to stocks. All the hypes and discussions about Bitcoin and Ethereum just vanished quickly without a trace. What a roller-coaster ride.

However, nothing has slowed down the development of blockchain technology. Organizations are seeking solutions from blockchain to protect clients’ data privacy, track merchandise, and to record transactions. There is so much people can do with a decentralized, tamper-proof data network; but no application has ever simplified the traditional workflow, or make any portion of out lives easier. We rely on database, but also suffer from data breaches that are caused by the careless party whom stores and manages all our important information that we didn’t even realize we give them to.

There is still a long way to go, but I believe in one day, people will ultimately benefit from a scalable blockchain application for their daily activities, and without any more fraudulent ICO, non-fungible tokens, STO, IEO, or any form of greed disguised as libertarianism.