Cryptocurrencies - Back on the Train in 2017

So here it is, my first ever Steemit blog post, thought I'd give you a very brief history of my foray into the mining community.

Getting into Mining

I started to get into cryptocurrency mining back in June 2014. Primarily mining Bitcoin using Bitmain Techs Antminer S3, of which I had 4 running. These were running at approximately 441GH/s each giving me a total of 1764GH/s. I added an additional pool of Rockminer Rbox miners which took the total up to 2048GH/s just topping over the 2TH/s threshold.

The difficulty on the network was at approximately 13,000,000,000 I was mining approximately 0.1BTC per day.

On the side I had a slight soft spot for Litecoin (LTC) and purchased 5 x Gridseed Blade ASIC miners, each running at 5.2MH/s giving me a total of 31.2MH/s. I started mining LTC around Christmas 2014.

I'm unsure as to how many I was mining per day, though with the current value it was a significant amount!

I continued to mine both coins until June 19th 2015. I ended up with approx. 26 BTC and 110 LTC.

Making Money, Jumping too Early and Getting Back on the Train!

Bitcoin was trading at approximately £300 during the time I was mining and was off the back of the £1000 spike which was towards the end of 2013.

Litecoin had been trading at around £1 and had little to no movement during the time I was mining.

A second spike arrived in May 2016 and I decided that this was the time to sell my BTC. I'd covered my initial investment and made a tidy profit. I was convinced at the time that we wouldn't see the price of BTC rise to such levels (I sold at £700 per coin) again, how wrong could I have been (at the time of writing BTC is trading at £2028 - 20th July 2018).

LTC had made a similar spike in value to £30 in January 2014 and saw a second spike in May 2017 to approx £25, again I was convinced we wouldn't see this happen again and yet again, I sold. Another nice tidy profit. However the price has continued on a upward trend and at the time of writing is trading at £35.

Lesson Learned

Being an IT engineer I had equipped myself with all of the necessary skills to obtain cryptocurrencies however I had not taken the time to learn anything about economics and certainly did not profess to have any business sense.

The main mistake I made was to sell all of my stock of each coin, in hindsight (20:20) I should have taken out my initial investment from each stake and if so required maybe a slight return on my investment.

My total stake in BTC (26) would be worth today - £52,728
My total stake in LTC (110) would be worth today - £3,850

Back on the Train in 2017

So it's 2017, cryptocurrency market is in turmoil, Bitcoin may or may not be having a hard or soft fork (though it's looking ever likely that Segregated Witness will be switched on) and it's a second coming for those like me to get back into cryptocurrency. I've decided to reinvest 25% of my profits from my original mining escapades.

I've built myself a nice 6xGPU mining rig for Ethereum which has been ticking along in the background (you can't take the IT Engineer out of me) and I'm trading coins online, though mostly accumulating various.

My portfolio is currently contains:

Antshares
Ripple
Ethereum
Stratis
Steem
Basic Attention Token
Reddcoin
Digibyte
Siacoin
Bitquence

Ok, so there are a couple of questionable coins on the list, however I'm in this for the long game now. I feel like I've learned from my trading mistakes from the past and hopefully can make some nice gains in the coming years.

Who knows may get lucky and be able to retire early!

Hopefully my experience brings some nostalgia to others who may have gone through similar in recent times!

Please comment and let me know how you all got into mining and if you have been one of the lucky millionaires out there!

We can all dream!