If Only It Were That Simple

So awhile back I decided to try to get into cryptocurrency. I had heard about Bitcoin but I wasn't quite sold. I knew it was a good idea and eventually the world economy would have to shift to purely electronic currency, it was(is) inevitable but I didn't think Bitcoin would be the one to do it (I'm beginning to think I was wrong). Then I heard of this coin, Darkcoin. 'Ooooo...' I thought, 'a coin that boasted anonymity, that's the one!' I finally felt I had a reason to begin really researching the market and tech behind cryptocurrency. Not because I wanted to make shady black market purchases on the internet but because I truly value my privacy (no Facebook, steemit is my first social media site since MySpace over a decade ago). That's when I learned about how easy mining could be.

It sounded awesome. Leave this program running on your computer while you're asleep or at work and it makes money for you! Come on that sound fantastic! So I set up a wallet and got some program to mine Darkcoin. Which by the way is now called Dash, apparently. Anyway, I start mining on my laptop which has dual graphics, not crossfire(AMD) but dual, and was using the GPU to run the algorithms. I think I mined about .6 of a Darkcoin before I checked my wallet. Nothing, no deposits. I must have researched nearly everything i could that was out at the time but I found no answers. 'Maybe there's just a delay and I have to wait a day or so..' So I waited and waited. Two days go by still no deposit, so I shut the program down.

A few days later I looked at my wallet and there it was, 0.6* Darkcoin. I WIN! So a few days after that I figured I'd start mining again, maybe do some trading if I could figure it out. When I went to access my wallet I couldn't get in. I shut down the mining program and tried for days to get into my wallet. It was gone.

Lesson Learned. Try Again?

After losing the coin I had done so... little for (?)... I kind of gave up on it for a while. Then came steemit! Now I'm back in it, the technology and support for it all is far better than it was, even two years ago. I'm earning some money (how ever little it might be) for taking pictures and writing about things I find interesting, and I couldn't be happier about it.

Before I go on I just want to thank @derekareith for get me into this!

Now I'm hungry for more though! I want to start mining again. I have a new Bitcoin wallet and I signed up for bittrexNiceHash. Simple, easy, decent community around it. Well, it turns out that due to many updates and age my graphics cards are no longer seen by my laptop as gpu's, so that sucks! But I figured I'd try some CPU mining, I mean why not? Again, free money basically right?. Did some trading to get more STEEM so I could in turn get more STEEM Power. YAY! That was cool, and not really a whole lot of effort (poor @derekareith had to walk me through bittrex over text but whatever it's in the past now.). Then @derekareith told me about

^{Don't believe their lies! unless you have a better computer than me, then it might be worth a shot.}

After two days of letting NiceHash run and collecting roughly .05 USD in bitcoin I looked at the wallet I had linked to it and once again NOTHING. I know I set it up correctly and everything I'm not worried my wallet will be hacked again because of this. When I looked at the back end of NiceHash, you know the 'check my stats!' page, it said that the next estimated deposit date was "NEVER!! MUAHAHA!"..

No really, it laughed at me... |(*sigh*

So I stopped NiceHash and decided to wait until I can get my server built, I know it will have 3 processors in it very likely to be Xenon processors, and to Nvidia cards, not sure which graphics cards yet but obviously better than my laptop. And I do plan on mining STEEM as well as other altcoins. So my question is, what other mining software is reliable and trustworthy and does anyone know why NiceDash screwed me?!

Ok they didn't screw me but can someone please explain to me what happened and why I will never see the bitcoin that my dated computer slaved away for two days to get?

Honestly my plan is to invest most of what I earn from mining back into steemit, STEEM, STEEM Power, STEEM Dollars... whatever! You know what I mean. I'm so sick of up-voting these great posts and seeing '$0.00' after. It just sucks! But even then, I like this site a lot and plan to do what I can to promote it and keep this ecosystem healthy. Even if it means never truly turning any sort of profit from it.

Until later, take it easy.
Justin

Sources

images:
The first image in this post was a composite I made using the first two images listed below.
https://s21.postimg.io/m90tcmtmf/bitcoin.png
https://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/minecraft.gamepedia.com/4/41/2012-01-28_18.35.00.png
http://i0.wp.com/www.reviewoutlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Darkcoin.png
http://bitcoincasino.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/nicehash.jpg
other:
https://www.nicehash.com
https://cointelegraph.com/news/darkcoin-is-now-dash-and-not-a-moment-too-soon
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/