I’ve always loved and been fascinated by computing. My first experience with it came in 1980 when my dad brought home a ZX80 one evening. This was later followed by a ZX81 and a variety of Spectrums. By the mid 1980s, I’d moved onto BASIC programming on BBC Micros which featured heavily in the UK’s school curriculum at that time. I studied computing at GCSE level and ended up writing large chunks of other people’s coursework projects as well as my own.
After high school, I suffered teenage indecision on my career path and made what was probably a mistake, choosing to study telecommunications engineering at college. Inevitably, boredom set in and the lure of earning resulted in my quitting college and moving into audio and electrical engineering for a number of years. With the benefit of hindsight, I probably should have opted to follow the path to a computing degree – which probably would have resulted in my being in a better financial position than I find myself now.
In the early 90s, computing grabbed my interest again and I bought my first PC – a 486 with a whopping 80mb hard drive. After building and modifying a succession of machines, I bought my first 14.4k modem, signed up for AOL and discovered the internet. As an early adopter, I quickly became convinced of the inevitability that the internet would become ubiquitous, so set about learning HTML, PHP and SQL. I subseqently introduced my employer to the internet and set about establishing an ecommerce presence for their company. Over time, this became my full time role as the business scaled and the ecommerce business became a larger, stand-alone business.
Managing an ecommerce business, I inevitably became aware of Bitcoin and, in 2012, when the Raspberry Pi became available, I set about mining it at home. For a couple of years, I ran a Raspberry Pi hooked up to a number of USB ASICs but eventually, the mining rate slowed to the point where I struggled to even produce enough to pass the pool withdrawal threshold. With a fractional total, I turned off the mining rig and forgot about the whole thing.
Fast forward to 2020 and Bitcoin value started to sky-rocket. Frantically scrabbling around to find login details on old machines, I managed to recover my funds and, whilst I’m a long way from rich, this proved to be a nice windfall. This piqued my interest and triggered me to start looking at mining again. I’ve created this blog to document my progress and share tips and experiences with others looking to mine in 2021 and beyond.