Introduction and my first 1.5 months of Gridcoin mining

This is me... I currently am a CEO and I don't know how often I will be able to post. But I will try to make my posts valuable when I do.

I have been a long time contributor to distributed computing.

To give you an idea...

Name : James C. Owens
Cross Project Identifier : bc0621a4ac4610ffa400a0d298c02e23
Percentage of Total : 0.00499886397798%
Team : Gridcoin
Percentage of Team Total : 0.12116907976275%
Average Team Rank across Projects : 61.33333 up 0.55556
Country : United States
Percentage of Country Total : 0.01138090577275%
First Seen : Wed, 28 Jul 99 18:11:47 -0400
Overall Rank : 617 of 4,629,968
Percentile : 99.98667%

I started contributing to seti@home back in July 1999, shortly after the introduction of the original SETI client. Since then I have been crunching away steadily at a mix of what I deem to be worthy projects with ever-increasing CPU and GPU power. Mostly I just let them crunch away on autopilot!

My current contributions are with six hosts...

My big long-time self-built Linux machine... an i7 3960X (6 core) machine with 64 GB of RAM and massive SSD and RAID 6 storage:

Yes, that is a Linux KDE session across triple 4K monitors driven by an EVGA GTX 980 Ti. You have permission to drool! :)

Three i7 6 core Alienware A51's with a 1080, 980 Ti, and 1070 respectively (used by my three children), and two self-built older Core-2 machines running a 1070 and 980 respectively, rounding out the 6.

What is the connection to Gridcoin? I have been investing in Bitcoin for a while, but one of the things that really has begun to frustrate me is the statistics on the shear amount of power required to drive the staking algorithm for bitcoin, which has been in a vicious upward cycle, now culminating in the ASIC era. While poking around on http://www.boinc.netsoft-online.com to check my statistics, I clicked on a Gridcoin ad, and was immediately enthralled with the idea! In the beginning of September, I set about getting myself into Gridcoin investing and mining!

Given that my Linux box is running a sort of hybrid, self-rolled (at this point) distribution based originally on openSuSE 12.3, I immediately realized that I was going to have to compile the Gridcoin source code from github, because there were no pre-compiled versions from my setup. No problem, I am used to doing things like that given my technology background, so I cloned the repository and also compiled the dependency Boost 1.65 and installed a local library folder in my home directory, using environment variable overrides (BOOST_INCLUDE_PATH, BOOST_LIB_PATH, and LD_LIBRARY_PATH) to repoint the gridcoin compilation (and later execution) to my local updated libraries. (This allowed me not to disturb the boost 1.49 libraries that were native to the openSuSE 12.3, of which a number of other installed programs are linked to and need to run.) Perhaps I will write another post on how this is done, because I have seen a number of postings with people having library problems and many times it is a version problem that can be solved this way.

Anyway with that all done, I pulled a blockchain snapshot down, fired up Gridcoin and got it synced and the wallet going.

I then set up an account on Bittrex so that I could move some Bitcoin from Coinbase to Bittrex and then on to my local Gridcoin wallet. This was pretty painless although it involved a number of steps, including some identity verification.

Since the initial operations on 9/13/2017, I have really been just fine tuning my six hosts to improve my magnitude, and moving some Bitcoin to Gridcoin via BITTREX when the exchange rates were favorable.

Obviously the magnitude calculation requires different tuning than going for maximum cobblestones, and via some tuning I am up to a magnitude of 225 with the 6 hosts. (This is not at equilibrium yet. Maybe it will continue to rise to about 250 to 275.)

I am very happy to be continuing to provide valuable contributions to scientific research, and also be able to earn some Gridcoin doing it. At least I will be able to pay for my power bill now! :D