My #GRCOriginStory:
I've always been interested in computers and science, even though I ended up in the engineering field... Sometimes I like to think of it as "applied science." :^)
I started crunching for distributed.net in 2001, as i recall. SETI@Home was next - I still remember when they updated the screensaver to show more detailed workunit status. When SETI shifted to BOINC, I immediately realized how this could enable many more projects to harness the power of volunteer computing. Little did I know how true that would become!
After 14+ years of crunching, I was thinking about cryptocurrencies, specifically that I still need to work to get money after missing the boat on Bitcoin, Etherium, and Ripple. At the time (2012 and 2014 for BTC, 2016 for ETH and XRP) I either "didn't have time" to set up crypto, or felt nervous about sending bank account routing info to a sketchy exchange in a sketchy country. OOPS. I'll have to wait a little longer to buy a private island, I guess.
Much like other users have experienced, a random search led me to Gridcoin. This time would be different! I set up a wallet in October 2017, but not without some difficulty. Thankfully, the developers and community are fantastic, and helped walk me through troubleshooting and eventually advertising the beacon. I think that I even "found" a bug in version 3.6.2! Not fun, but it showed me how great the developer community is.
The original intent was to start from scratch, solo mining without joining a pool. Unfortunately those days are long gone, so I bought a little BTC (big mistake) to trade for GRC, which was probably my best decision of 2017!
Today I'm proud to be a part of this growing community, and have recruited two more friends to the cause. I help them set up everything, join BOINC, and loan some coins to get them staking. I hope to give back a little of the positive spirit and camaraderie that make this probably the best crypto project around.
Now to get more cores :^)
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First up - a belated welcome aboard for October 2017 and thank you for sharing your story :)
Nice to see another old-school cruncher joining the community - I remember running that SETI screensaver back when it came out in the late 90s and have fond memories of watching it (very slowly) process the WUs! What kind of setup do you run these days? I'm always on the hunt for more cores - though it seems like the devices I use are ever-changing as old ones finally give up on me or I manage to fix broken devices and bring them back online :)
I think the dev community for Gridcoin really shines when it comes to troubleshooting. I love that if you get stuck or find a bug there's always someone available who can help you out - it's usually the person that wrote the code in the first place too, so they know what they're talking about! Have you got your wallet updated to the latest version? There's some fantastic work gone into speeding it up and stabilising it since the last major release :)
Thanks again for sharing!
Wallet is updated to 3.7.1, soon to be 3.7.2... thanks to @ravonn, @caraka, @ifoggz, @jringo, @barton26, @tomasbrod, and all the others that I might not know about working hard to improve the community :^)
I have a few old laptops crunching WCG, but now also a NUC, Raspberry Pi, an old Dell tower (space heater) to warm up my bedroom in the winter, and my work laptop (sshh!)
Just got my buddy signed up and he staked last week - I must admit some envy of his 32 core home server, but glad to bring him back to BOINC!
Holy-.. a 32 core home server? Yeah, I'm jealous! I'd be tempted to get a more serious setup at home, but.. I think the girlfriend might not be overly thrilled 😂. Perhaps I can spin it as a low-cost alternative to heating the house with gas? That works, right?
I'm using a free old i5-650 with hd7570 (dell rebrand) gpu to warm my bedroom a little bit - it just takes the chill off, but with a magnitude of about 10 more than pays for itself. it keeps the aquarium heater from turning on so often. The next step is to rig an arduino temperature sensor and watercooling setup to directly warm the aquarium with waste heat, if I ever get around to it. Put your space heater computer under the bed, it captures the heat in the most important place and helps block the fan sounds!
Ah wow, that'd be an inventive way of heating the aquarium! You'll have to share some photos of the setup if you get it working, sounds like a fun project!
Now that's a good idea - the real LPT is always in the comments :)
It turns out that with the desktop running in my room 24/7, the temperature is about 22C (72 degrees F in Freedom Units) . So far I haven't seen the 100W aquarium heater turn on. The outside temperature at night is about 10-12C normally here in "winter," and about 15C indoors, so I'm going to call this a win :)
Impressive! You're tempting me to give this a go - it's been expensive to heat the house this winter with it being so cold, this might be a way more efficient way to do things :)