How To Setup Gekko BTC Trading Bot on VPS (Ubuntu 16.04) with GUI (Vultr.com)

20 February, 2018 | Servers | 57 seen

Gekko is a free and open source Bitcoin TA trading and backtesting platform that connects to popular Bitcoin exchanges. It is written in javascript and runs on nodejs

For the past couple of days I've been playing around with Gekko trading bot installed on my laptop (Windows 10), I have made a few trades and experimented with a couple of strategies. First impressions are promising. See: Simple BTC Trading Bot Gekko - First Impressions

Running a trading bot on a laptop is fun, but if you are looking for a bot 24/7monitoring market and executing trades, either you should keep your PC turned on 24/7 or you could set up a cheap VPS and setup bot on it. 

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links to cloud hosting companies like Linode and Vultr, by clicking on links on this page and by making a purchase on cloud hosting sites, I will earn an affiliate income at no cost to you.

As I have a couple of VPS from Linode, my first idea was to test this setup on Linode VPS, but fortunately, I found a cool tutorial How to setup VPS on Vultr.com and run Gekko by…

How to send international fax to USA using Faxapp

18 February, 2018 | Servers | 4 seen

Think fax is outdated? Think twice, fax is still popular in certain business areas, and fax is kind of popular in the United States. I believe the last time I have seen an actual fax machine in work was back in 1994. Now 24 years later at one stage I thought, it would be good if I would have a fax machine in 2018.

I had to send a fax confirming my identity to the Microsoft Corp. Keep reading to learn how to send an international fax without having a fax machine.

Turns out, there are several online apps allowing to send a fax from the web, after a quick research I decided to give it a try for Faxapp.

Send faxes without a landline to a "classic" fax machine. You’ll get your own local fax number. 
No software required, but available.

All received faxes are swiftly delivered to your email inbox.

Ten-day trial

• Send and receive faxes for free
• Cancelled automatically
• No credit card required

It took me some 5 minutes to open an account at faxapp, and the next thing was just to send international fax to the United States

Faxapp dashboard…

Simple BTC Trading Bot Gekko - First Impressions

17 February, 2018 | Servers | 35 seen

The idea of using a bitcoin trading bot comes up just shortly I decided to trade up from 0.03 to 0.05 BTC. In the past, I've been using Coinlend bot to lend free coins on exchanges and earn some little interest.

Doing a quick google search I found a few bitcoin bot traders, most come with a price, but as I wanted to test how these bots actually work I continued my searches and found free bitcoin bot trader - Gekko.  Setting up this bot will be simple for a tech-savvy person, but might be a daunting task for a novice, as bot asks to install nodejs and in fact, it took me some 4 hours to set up this bot, as there were some issues (more on that at the end of this article)

Gekko is a free and open source Bitcoin TA trading and backtesting platform that connects to popular Bitcoin exchanges. It is written in javascript and runs on nodejs.

You can either create your own trading strategy or start with the built-in example strategies. Once you have a strategy you can use Gekko to automatically run it in a few different ways:

• Backtest: You can start a simulation of the strategy over a historical data period and…

Ethereum (and other altcoin) mining review after 2 months in 2018

16 February, 2018 | Servers | 53 seen

February 16 marks a small 2-month anniversary since I've started to mine Ethereum and others altcoins. In today's article let's take a quick review and try to understand is GPU mining still profitable in 2018?

It all started with a FOMO back in December 2017, after successful second part of the year of investments in crypto, I decided to build a 12-GPU mining rig.

Currently, I've invested $1,661 in this mining rig and after 2 months of operations, the current ROI is 12.53% (not counting in cost for electricity). Meaning that in past two months I've mined coins worth of $208.05.

I have experimented both with different GPU cards and different coins. Here are coins I've mined so far: ETH, SC, ETC, and EXP

Mined coins

Currently, the rig consists of 4 GPU's:

• Mining with SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon™ RX 560 4GD5 Review
• Mining Ethereum With EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 (Single Fan), 6GB GDDR5 Review
• Mining Ethereum With ZOTAC GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti OC Edition Review
• Mining Ethereum With Asus Geforce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB ROG Strix OC Edition…

How To Mine EXP (Expanse) with SMOS

15 February, 2018 | Servers | 15 seen

A couple of days ago I shared a quick tutorial on how to mine ETC (Ethereum Classic) with SMOS (Simple Mining OS), as there is an upcoming ETC Callisto airdrop happening, the idea to pre-mine couple of ETC's sounded tempting to me. 

Now, as I've been using a mixed AMD + NVIDIA mining rig, to get most of it, I'm left using Claymore's dual miner, which just recently released version 11.0 , and I decided to test it with some new coin, after a quick google search I found a quite a few Ethash based coins (good for Claymore's miner) and this time my attention got the EXP (expanse) coin. Reason is quite simple, EXP is listed on Poloniex.com exchange, which means following - I don't need to look for a wallet (I should but for the purpose of this experiment I don't), and since the coin is already listed on a well-known exchange - there shouldn't be problems to exchange EXP to BTC.

As I had some nice ZEC/BTC trade on Poloniex, I exchanged some small amount of BTC to EXP, before going deeper.

Now, before getting into technical stuff on how to mine EXP with SimpleMining.net, let's find out more what do we know about EXP…

Why I'm Investing in Baltic Horizon Fund (NHCBHFFT)

11 February, 2018 | Investments | 14 seen

Baltic Horizon Fund has been on my radar since the August 2017. Actually first spotted in March 2017, while doing a quick research on Top Dividend Paying stocks in the Baltics. 

Despite being listed on Nasdaq Tallinn (aka Nasdaq Baltics) I was not able to purchase fund units from my existing brokerage account. After I sent a short message both to the fund managers and my current broker, informing about the problem I was facing (and I believe a dozen of other customers with a brokerage account in Latvia) the problem was solved and I was able to purchase Baltic Horizon Fund units. Sometimes all it asks is just a brief message.

Disclosure: I'm not a financial advisor and I don't give you any advice, I'm just sharing my own experience. Investments in stocks, funds or bonds are risk investments and you could lose some or all of your money. Do your due diligence before investing in any kind of asset. 

Now, there is one bold reason I like this fund, quarterly dividend payments (at least in 2017, and hopefully in 2018), the yield is around 7-9%,…

How to Prepare for Upcoming Callisto Airdrop (Ethereum Classic)

10 February, 2018 | Servers | 71 seen

Now, this is huge and exciting for ETC holders - Ethereum Classic development team recently announced the Callisto Network Project which will result in a 1:1 CLO airdrop for ETC holders.

As a holder of ETC, and in fact as a miner of ETC (How To Mine ETC (Ethereum Classic) with SimpleMining OS) I find this very exciting and decided to look - how to prepare for this upcoming "fork" to get most out of it. But before digging into technical details on how to profit from this Callistio Airdrop, let's familiarize with this project a little better.

According to the update:

Callisto is a separate blockchain that is based on Ethereum protocol with its own cryptocurrency (CLO). Callisto has a fixed cap monetary policy similar to ETC. Unlike ETH, ETC is posing itself as a value storage. It should be noted that the ETC does not have any incentives for coin holders. The whole emission is completely controlled by miners and their influence grows with the growth of the network. Callisto introduces a Cold staking protocol that rewards coin holders for being a network participants.

Cold staking is a smart-contract based process that…

How To Mine ETC (Ethereum Classic) with SimpleMining OS

9 February, 2018 | Servers | 76 seen

For the past couple of weeks I've been experimenting with crypto mining and started with Claymore's dual miner to learn that I can dual mine both Ethereum and Siacoin out of the box, I put my mining rig as it is and let the machine to mine coins for me. See: I'm Making $0.98 Per Day By Mining Ethereum and Siacoin, and I want MORE!

Meanwhile, in crypto space, a lot has happened, and I decided to explore my options to mine some other coins using SimpleMining OS, which IMHO is awesome.

At the end of January, it started to look that mining Siacoin is not any more profitable with gpu's (Is It Profitable Mining Siacoin (SC) in 2018?) and I went solo mining Ethereum only, also I decided to pause adding new graphics cards to the mining rig before reaching ROI at least 20% - Mining Ethereum @ ~53 MH/s and Siacoin @ ~310 MH/s Earns me $5.53 Daily - And It's Time to take a Pause

Now, I decided to explore my options mining other altcoins, at start I wanted to test mining Monero, but as I have  a mixed AMD + NVIDIA mining rig, seems Simplemining is not yet supporting both cards for Monero, and it looks like just…

Deep in The Forest (Winter Edition)

8 February, 2018 | | 8 seen

It was on some February's (2018) afternoon, we decided to make a simple hiking in very familiar to us Latvian forests, unfortunately, the temperature outside was way too freezing and our hiking ended after some 15 minutes, fortunately, I managed to capture some HDR's here.

Followers of Piece of Life series will recognize this forest from Deep in the Forest or Wandering In The Woods B&W Photography series. 

Winter in Latvia

No mushrooms or will berry this time of the year.

Marvelous golden hour in forest

Rixwell Elefant Hotel Riga Review

7 February, 2018 | Hotel reviews | 19 seen

Rixwell Elefant Hotel is a 4-star superior hotel and it is conveniently located between Riga International Airport, which is a 5-minute drive away, and the city centre. Shopping center Spice is within walking distance from the hotel and 10 km away is the famous water park Livu Aqua Park in Jurmala.

Rixwell Elefant hotel in Riga is among the cheapest 4-star hotels I've stayed so far, both in Riga and elsewhere, in total for a one night stay here we paid EUR 46, which is decent for a 4-star hotel in this part of Europe. Click here for more Riga hotel reviews. 

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links to Booking.com, by clicking on links on this page and by making a reservation on Booking site, I might earn an affiliate income from that at no cost to you.

The rooms are bright and modern. All rooms come with a flat-screen TV with cable channels, a minibar, tea and coffee making facilities,a safety deposit box and ironing facilities, as well as a direct dial telephone. The private bathrooms also come with free toiletries and a hairdryer.

Rixwell …

January 2018 Dividend Income Report - $100.95

2 February, 2018 | Investments | 14 seen

Welcome to the ninth (#9) dividend income report, covering earnings I've made from dividend-paying stocks, peer to peer lending (both fiat and cryptocurrencies) in January 2018. 

Surprisingly, but January 2018 turned out much better I thought before, an unexpected dividend payment from Silvano Fashion Group boosted total earnings in January, and I was able to generate $100.95 income in a very passive way. Silvano Fashion Group have been in my portfolio since the July of 2017, I literally chased to buy this stock for a couple of days back then.

As usual, I was doing nothing much, just investing in great companies, playing a little bit with cryptocurrencies and lending out money via peer to peer marketplace. Most of the January was on autopilot, just at the start of the month I deposited some chunk of money to Mintos.com peer to peer lending marketplace, bought Lietuvos energijos gamyba and ENERGIJOS SKIRSTYMO OPERATORIUS  stocks at Nasdaq Baltics.

See a complete list of things going on behind the scenes and my investment plans for 2018: 2017 in Review…

How To Connect to SimpleMiningOS using Putty SSH Terminal And Few Simple Commands to Get You Started

1 February, 2018 | Servers | 74 seen

Putty is a nice and neat free SSH terminal for Windows OS, I've been using Putty for years, mostly to perform server-side tasks (Ngnix, Drupal and so on). About a month ago when I started gpu mining experiment and decided to build 12 GPU Ethereum mining rig, I didn't know much about many options available for mining and soon found SimpleMiningOS, which is brilliant (IMHO) - plug and play ready to go from an 8 GB USB stick.

I was pleasantly surprised learning that I could manage my rig using Putty SSH terminal, and for this article, I have decided to list some basic information on how to connect via Putty and some simple commands to get you started.

Locate your internal network IP address (You could run this over internet, but that would require port forwarding and so on, it's not recommended to administer your rig over internet)

In case you are not sure what your internal Ip is, just hover over your rig name in SimpleMiningOS

Detecting your rig's internal IP

Next:

• Open Putty
• Enter IP address
• Default username/password: miner:miner

Enter screen…

Bākūži Winter 2018

31 January, 2018 | | 7 seen

Made a couple of HDR's back at Bākūži, the country house where for the last couple of years we have done some home remodeling.

In today's Piece of Life series, simple winter mood from Latvian winter (January 2018)

Fishpond

A decent level of water, not to say more, see: Waiting For The Water Level To Rise In The Pond

Back view of the house

Apple orchard

For those of you interested how it all started, see: Home Remodelling - How It All Starts

Lost Siacoins after Depositing to Poloniex.com Exchange (Probably because of Wallet Maintenance)

30 January, 2018 | Crypto | 13 seen

Hmm, this is not nice, but that what happened to me, Siacoins I had mined using GPU mining rig,got lost somewhere in Poloniex.com

A brief background - since I started to experiment with gpu mining rig, I opted for Claymore's dual mining Ethereum and Siacoin, mining Siacoin didn't seem very profitable (see: Is It Profitable Mining Siacoin (SC) in 2018? ), but I decided to keep mining just in case Siacoin goes to the moon (like many other altcoins) and maybe someday my Siacoins would be worth millions of dollars? He he. For Siacoin Withdrawal address I entered the one I have on Poloniex.com exchange. 

In total, I had mined 131.61 SC. And everything seemed nice. It would take me a couple of months to reach minimum 500SC withdrawal limit, but it all happened suddenly. I had a flight and obviously, I was not checking what's happening with SC or ETH withdrawals - why would I? There are still plenty of time to reach that 500 SC minimum threshold. Before boarding my plane I last time checked my e-mail and read following comment regarding Siacoin mining:

SIAcoin is no longer profitable to…

Mining Ethereum With Asus Geforce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB ROG Strix OC Edition Review

28 January, 2018 | Servers | 53 seen

Asus Geforce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB ROG Strix OC Edition is the latest addition to my Ethereum mining rig, which currently consists of 4 GPU. 

Bought back in Tbilisi, and I believe that I just overpaid about $100 for this card, in total spending $296 for this card. Not very cost effective. A couple of weeks ago I bought Zotac Geforce GTX1050Ti card for about $220. And in fact, this time I visited a store I was looking to purchase another Zotac, but unfortunately some had reserved all cards already and I was left either to purchase SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon™ RX 560 4GD5 or search for another store.

I choose the second option, and that's how I acquired Asus Geforce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB ROG Strix OC Edition for about $300. It seems this card is sold on Amazon for the same ~ $300, see: ASUS Geforce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB ROG STRIX HDMI 2.0 DP 1.4 Gaming Graphics Card (STRIX-GTX1050TI-4G-GAMING) Graphic Cards

Check out this article, if you are building your mining rig in Tbilisi (Georgia) - Buying Graphic Cards (GPU) and Computer Parts in Tbilisi,…