30th January

Portfolio: £239,412.31

More sideways and down action after the slight rises of the past few days, but nothing catastrophic. I bought up some TNC and DBC in the hopes that the upcoming NEO conference will give me a little boost in these dour times. Also got a stack if ICX in the hope that the Icon conference has the same effect. I have a feeling though that these will have to be neatly timed exits, which means I’ll screw it up! May have to set some unexciting sell orders. Profit is profit, which is everything at the moment.

What’s also dragging the market down slightly is the Tether rumours. In short, no one is sure if the $3bn they say they have is actually there or if it’s been created to boost the price of Bitcoin when it was dipping. If the latter is the case, then this could result in a quite a sizeable downturn in the market as the fear spreads when it goes belly up. A Tether collapse in itself wouldn’t be huge, but the after effects would be – panic would ensue and millions of people would be running for the exits. There seems to be a 50/50 mentality on this one, which makes action hard – you don’t want to pull out 25% of your portfolio and miss out on a potential February bull run, but then you don’t want to leave it in and have it drop by over half and miss out on an incredible opportunity for buying back at ridiculously low prices after the crash. It really is toss of a coin stuff, but I’m leaning towards taking out 20-25%. This would present a chance to actually make use of some of the profits I’ve made in the real world (my cashing out method couldn’t have been better timed!) and have a decent amount standing by. It really does seem something is up with Tether as they have repeatedly failed to offer assurances at every opportunity they’ve been given – including firing their auditors for doing their job. I will probably wait and see if I get a bounce from my conference coins then take out my percentage. The wife will be happy as that means that a) all this talk of thousands of pounds will actually become real and I wasn’t talking out of my arse, and b) she can then spend it all on a dining room table, blinds, a vacuum and all the other things my paltry regular salary can’t afford! Obviously I hope the Tether situation is resolved in a positive way, but the worry cloud is certainly getting bigger and bigger around crypto and Tether themselves are not going to right way about controlling it.

MINING UPDATE

My mining rig had started to freeze now and again so I set up a task within Windows where it reboots every 12 hours and automatically runs the CLI upon boot. This might have prevented some freezes from happening, but I then discovered that most of the time the entire computer freezes, meaning that reboots wouldn’t kick in. So what I’ve done is plug the PSU into a wifi smart plug, meaning that if I notice that it’s down I can turn it off and on from my phone. But…what if I’m asleep or busy when it goes down and I can’t reboot for hours or days? That’s where a network monitor comes in – I register my rig with a free network monitoring service which pings the miner every five minutes and emails me if it detects an error, which it would do if it has frozen. Once I’ve got that set up I’m hoping to set up something where it reboots the system automatically. Sounds quite long winded, but once it’s done it should prevent lost hours where the miner is running but not generating anything.