Crypto Currency

 Over the last couple of days I have entered into Crypto mining. No I have not bought a $12,000 Bitcoin miner, I am not that crazy. No, I joined a Monero mining pool, which allows me to put low powered machines to work mining the Monero crypto coin and still some small amount based on how much work these otherwise idle machines do, everyone who contributes CPU cycles gets a cut. I put 2 Raspberry Pi 4's to work along with 2 Optiplex 3050 mini's to work on this project. The 2 Pi's are averaging about 90 hash's per second, the two Optiplex's are averaging around 600 hash's per second. Over the last couple of days as I put my mini farm to work I have acquired 0.0003 Monero or about $0.05. Yeah, I know, its not much, but hey, if I eventually get 1 complete Monero, at its current price of $190, That will pay for every penny of what I have sunk into this equipment over the last 2 or 3 years, then of course I can start paying off the power this sucks down.

I am not a big believer in the whole crypto currency thing. Frankly to me it is like gold in World of Warcraft or maybe even Monopoly Money. It have no real value except what people attribute to it and eventually all those big mining operations and hedge fund managers who are hoarding all this crap are going to cash out and it is all going to come crashing down. There is no way I would ever spend $190 of actual cash on buying a Monero or god forbid $47,000 for a Bitcoin.

So why then am I putting effort into mining it? Well for one thing it is an interesting technical challenge setting up the hardware, compiling the code, getting everything working. Second, though eventually this is all going to come crashing down, until then there are some uses for crypto currency, especially Monero, which has some extra security features on it that make tracking it much more difficult. While I have no intention of doing anything illegal, you just never know when you will need a stash of untraceable money at your disposal.

Anyone interested in getting started should watch this video, it is a great starting place.

Cyberpunk 2020

Back in the day, meaning the mid to late 80's, we played a few games of Cyberpunk 2020, I still have a copy sitting on my bookshelf. It is interesting to look at and think about what we thought the future might be at the time and how far away 2020 seemed to be to us. Now of course the idea of virtual reality being streamed directly into our consciousness is kind of far fetched, considering how much processing power we now know we need to render reasonably good graphics. But back then, it seemed like a real possibility. Never mind the ludicrous idea that people would willingly have limbs amputated and replaced with bionic ones. Thankfully the dystopian part of it never really materialized either, but it was easy back then to see how it would come about. I think most people have an idealized vision of what the 80's were really like, all they remember is what a wonderful president Reagan was and how the economy was booming. The reality was, we lived nearly the whole decade on the brink of nuclear war and if you were not a Yuppie, the new economy probably did not benefit you very much. There was a lot of anxiety about the future, I think pretty much everyone I knew had given up on any sort of golden future for humanity. Somehow we managed to live decent lives, in spite of the darkness that surrounded us.

Review: Feed

Feed by M.T. Anderson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Feed was a really tough read for me. It starts out depressing and steadily gets more depressing. I get that it is supposed to be an extension of smartphones and the "People as products" business model of Facebook and Google, but that is really what is depressing about it. I am also not the type of person who needs a happy ending to a book, but when people die, I like there to be a reason for it, I like there to be meaningful in some way. Violets death did not change anything, it did not even change the main character in any way, he ultimately made the same bad choices at the end of the book that he was making at the beginning. While I found the slang language used by the teenagers to be kind of distracting, I do have to say though the descent into the pit of despair was subtle and well written.


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Reddit made me laugh today

I am not a huge Reddit person, but I do make a couple of stops there a week to look at the Cyberpunk subreddit and such. It always kills me when someone does something embarrassing. Here is a tip for posting pictures on the internet. If your picture includes portions of the place you live, please make a visual check of the area to make sure your sex toys are out of sight.