Have the Patience to Gain Some Wisdom

My still brief trip down the crypto mining rabbit hole has taught me far more about crypto than simply buying at the dips and doing a little trading. The lessons all seem to point back to one particular root--use patience to gain wisdom. I believe this hold true for any area in life. Even though I don't always have patience or make wise decisions, it's still true...

The coins I have decided to mine are SmartCash and ZenCash (because they are just really cool), the Blakecoin suite (merged mining, look it up) of... well coins that might go in the toilet soon but maybe won't, and Ethereum as the solid-and-steady backup (until they switch to proof of stake). I didn't just look at the most profitable coins. I looked at coins that have the biggest upside if they moon (I picked up 600,000 PHO for about $3.50, it's gone as high as $115 and not below $60 since then) and are easy to mine large quantities of; coins that have the best features and the best communities around them (SmartCash and ZenCash); coins that have the biggest market cap but are extremely resistant to LAMPs... It takes patience to do your due dilligence. The wisdom gained is that it's good to give yourself options, and it's good to know when to exercise those options when the world changes and your old choices don't look so good any longer.

It takes patience to find the right mining pool. Some pools are larger and offer you a more steady stream of income but smaller amounts per block mined. Some pools are small and offer less frequent payments but larger shares of the pie. Mining in smaller pools helps to decentralize the network of a coin which is healthy for the coin's ecosystem. Your own profits will be heavily affected by luck as finding a block is more of a crapshoot when you have a very small portion of a network's hashpower. Some days/weeks/months you will do great! Some not so much. Mining in larger pools helps to ensure a consistent rate of payback. Some coins with the best features and a lot of up-side (SmartCash) will get targeted heavily by LAMPs and therefore their difficulty will fluctuate wildly. When this happens, and you've selected the smaller pool, patience will tell you to just stick it out. Wisdom will tell you that if difficulty goes too high and stays there permanently, it's time to move to a larger pool to have any hope of finding a block.

And once these coins and mining pools have been selected, it takes patience to leave your mining rig sitting there mining them and not constantly tweaking something or trying something new or constantly checking stats. I'm almost done actually building the thing, and so soon it will be time to just let it do its thing and only make a move if it's wise...

Before I got into the dedicated mining rig, I went with most easy, most profit. Yes, Nicehash owes me like 0.001 BTC from a week of "this is easy" mining with my first "real" video card. Even if they had not been hacked and lost over 4,000 BTC from their wallet... I wouldn't have seen any benefit from the time spent mining there without TONS of patience. They had their minimum payout set to about 6 weeks of mining time for the one video card I had at the time. I was like "whatever, this is easy, I have patience, I'll just set it and forget it." But what this taught me was that for small miners, payout thresholds that you cannot meet for several weeks is not what you want. I will never see the aforementioned 0.001 BTC because the patience I used to earn it gave me the wisdom to realize no time or energy spent using a LAMP is well spent. If I would have directly mined the coins Nicehash was pointed at, I could have earned far more than the BTC I would have been rewarded for them. But that's why I don't use Nicehash anymore and neither should you.

Of course it also takes patience to study the charts and the news and the coins and set limit orders and buy at the right time. Once you've decided what price you want to buy at, just... leave it there. Let it happen. If you are playing with money you can afford to play with there's nothing to worry about. Worst case the price crashes and you more or less lost the money you could afford to gamble. Middle of the road, it goes back up before it hits your limit, you keep the fiat and buy again when the time is right. Best case the price gets to your "buy at the dip" point and then starts going back up.

It also takes patience to hodl. Not selling a coin when you are up 3,000% requires patience (and faith, but definitely patience). If you believe we are early adopters in Money 2.0, you simply have to hodl. Unless you can pay off your mortgage or you are trying to pay all your bills with crypto right now, just hodl... The patience of HODL is its own wisdom.