I would like to hear about your personal hands-on experience with trading or mining crypto currencies.
For general thoughts about why you think crypto currency is good/bad I would suggest you continue this thread, to keep all related information in one place:
I was contemplating whether I should just necro and derail that one, but I don’t really care all that much about the ideology behind it, I’m mainly interested in the feasibilty to use crypto currency to earn fiat currency like USD or EUR. Does anyone here have first-hand experience to share?
@Arowx : a while ago I remember you talking about mining Etherium. Did you follow through with that?
Back then I suggested to just buy and trade it instead, for a slightly lower upfront investment risk. I have since watched a few videos on the topic and thought I should give it a try. So I made an account on kraken, went through their verification process, and because that took friggin forever and was a huge hassle, I’ve already missed out on some good trading opportunities.
I’ve registered my account when BTC was just below 3000 EUR, and I had no opportunity to buy any till past the 3800 EUR peak. Currently I own tiny amounts of Etherium and BTC, and I can’t log into kraken because their website seems to be having problems. So far I find the whole thing to be a rather underwhelming experience.
I was thinking that on paper day-trading sounds like a really fun thing to do, because I have an affinity for dealing with numbers and graph patterns and I really like “numerically quantifiable success”. One of the traders I’ve watched videos from calls it his “24/7 money making video game”. He seems to be a fulltime trader who also trades penny stocks etc. and genuinely enjoys that kind of work.
I can see some appeal, but considering the stress and risks involved and comparing it to my freelance work… I don’t think trading is that good of a deal for me. It might be different if this all was a more secure and stable system like you know… an actual bank.
How have your dealings with crypto currencies worked out? How do you deal with “fear of missing out” ?
Never mined, but I have day traded and I see no similarities AT ALL.
Doesn’t take a rocket scientist or someone with experience to tell you what you can make mining. There is a ton of info on it out there. If I was going to get into that, I would be selling systems or something to the suckers who think they can just buy some piece of hardware, let it sit, and make $$$ for them.
Day trading is not about numbers. It’s about knowing markets and people.
I got into it out of curiosity. I opened an account with a few thousand and traded for about 6 months. What I found is you need a lot more invested and you have to spend a lot of time with it. There are a lot of people in the financial services industry day trading, like how can I compete with them? They have a built in advantage really.
Kind of like all the people that come to these forums with no game dev experience but this great game idea. That’s what we look like day trading to the professionals I think:)
It was fun while it lasted though. I lost my ass, close to half of what I started with.
Yeah, probably. From a pure time/money risk factor I’m still leaning towards gamedev being riskier. But at least after making a commercially failed game you’ve got skills that you learned along the way and can be applied to other projects. I can’t think of much uses for daytrading experiences outside of doing more daytrading.
I’ve seriously underestimated the time investment factor. At this rate I’m losing more money from opportunity cost than from bad investment.
Yikes. Sorry to hear that. We’ll at least you haven’t invested and lost as much as this guy:
This topic is quite interesting, as long as you can convince hippo and gorilla not to lock it up.
Based on my experiences, mining bitcoin and etherium (on my hardware) is largely a waste of time. Both bitcoin and etherium require ridiculous amount of time to sync the chain. For example Ehterium blockchain data is 20 or 25 gigabytes (I think it takes 2 or 3 days for intiial sync, and it can glitch out). Bitcoin has similar size if not bigger. The thing is that both of those will apparently continue growing with every new transaction, and in the end the size of the blockchain will be infinite… which makes me doubt usefullness of such system.
Regarding actual mining… bitcoin mining is dead. Basicallhy, it processed through CPU minign, GPU minign, ASIC minign, and right now apparently it requires a cluster because difficulty goes up. Also bitcoin guys experienced internal conflict and are planning to fork the blockchain in novemeber.
Etherium on nvidia hardware is unprofitable, based on my calculations I’d get something around $15 or $20 per month if I could keep my computer mining 24 hours per day.
Basically… all currencies seem to follow the pattern where they experience initial gold rush, where mining can be done on CPU, then someone creates GPU/OpenCL/CUDA miner that is significantly more profitable, and after that it’ll be all about specialized FPGA hardware. Then difficulty of mining goes up and it is no longer profitable for anyone who doesn’t have a cluster.
You can earn something if you spot a promising new currency and ride the trend while it gains popularity, but as a long term perspective it is not viable. Reddit had a thread where somebody said “don’t mine for profit, mine for fun”. Or something.
So, my experience of briefly looking into cryptocurrencies left me skeptical about the whole idea.
I had dabbled with day trading on a stock market, and it is nerve wracking, to the point where it wouldn’t be surprising if your hair went fully gray one year later. I wouldn’t touch crypto trading, due to their uncertain legal status. Stocks are at least legally recognized, in case of currencies someone can screw your over and there’s very little you can do about it. Also, survival rate in day trading (stocks) is below 5%. Not a good idea.
I’ve day traded on a few simulators. Some of the local markets have them, you can basically trade fake money on a mirror of the actual market. I lost money more often then I gained it, and it was enough to convince me to leave it to the professionals.
I would strongly suggest trying a similar simulator first to see how you actually perform before investing real money.
I actually used real cash but a small sum, and in my opinion the one who profits from stock transactiosn the most is the broker. They get a cut from all transactions. So, while trading over small price fluctuations you need to keep the cut in mind. The stock exchange may also has its own subscription fees you’ll need to pay for accessing it.
About the only time I have been tempted to buy stock would be after AMD showed benchmarks for Ryzen. AMD’s stock value just shot way up (AMD last year was sub $2 and now it’s hovering around $12). Past that though I feel like it I would end up losing money rather than making any so I’ve never bothered to learn how.
For me it all is directly related to making games, because I don’t think “making games to make money” is gonna work well for me, for a number of reasons. But I still really want to make games, so I need to “make money to make games”. I’ve worked freelance for over 10 years, I know how to make money, and theoretically I would have enough time on the side to make games, but I don’t have the energy to do it. Doing creative work for a living means for me that I expend all creative drive I have on other people’s projects, and after a week of freelance work the last thing I want to do is make art assets, UI designs, new prefabs etc. etc. for my own game. It might be different if I could focus creatively on making games and earn my living with something less creative.
I talked with a friend about crypto mining many years ago, we did the math and it roughly came out at converting money via electricity into bitcoin without any profit. The thing is though, if I had bought or farmed bitcoin back then, they’d be worth a fortune right now. Though knowing myself I’m not so sure I would have had the faith in Bitcoin to hold for the looong periods of time where the price constantly went down.
The lack of protection for crypto funds is a major downside. Basically the only place where I’d feel the money to be sort of safe would be if put into a paperwallet and stored in a bank vault (I’m actually renting space in a bank vault to store backup drives already - it’s not that expensive).
I did the simulator thing with forex trading and was losing virtual money so quickly that I gave up on that. I was contemplating it for crypto daytrade too, but a) I didn’t find a simulator/demo account on an exchange, and b) had some serious FOMO, which hindsight justifies, given that I’ve missed out on the 3000 to 3800 EUR price increase due to delays in the verification and funding process on kraken.
I’ve made my first test trade on EOS (green dot is buy, red dot is sell):
With ETH I tried to buy in the dip, but after it did’t bounce back as far as I had expected, I just wanted to sell it without a loss. I think I had already placed a limit sell order right after buying it, but the price dropped again very shortly before the limit that I had set, so it didn’t execute. I think I still have two small limit buy orders for when the price drops below 200 EUR and 150 EUR, but I can’t check because kraken is down again (I think it might be literally the least reliable website I’ve ever seen at this moment, I can’t imagine that to be normal for them because I did at least a bit of research when choosing an exchange):
And with BTC I have slightly more faith that it will recover, so I only bought, bought, bought. But after being so fed up with how crappy kraken is and having had many many problems logging in or getting orders placed today, I’ve set two sell limits when I had the chance (red circles on right axis) that would sell most of the BTC that I bought:
If I just cash out and ragequit now, I’ve lost less than 1% of the money I’ve put onto the exchange initially. Stubbornness compels me to want to wait and get out with at least a tiny plus.
By the way, someone has made a website that posts alerts for price drops on some exchanges (not kraken though): http://cryptomarketscanner.com/
The idea is to only buy the dips and then quickly sell again when there is a bounce back to the usual price. The thing isn’t able to spot pump&dump scams though, so it’ll go off after those too.
I can see how this could be useful for someone trading altcoins, but I know so little about those and I don’t want to get into that.
Isn’t it still way higher than indie dev though? x]
A friend of mine does some stock trading and says he’s getting fairly good percentages out on the bottom line, but I’ve also once heard him be rather frustrated from losing around 10k EUR in stock value…
Be honest with yourself. This post is about as related to game dev as if I made a post about improving the tatk time of a factory and asked for advice and experience on debottlenecking filling machines.
Many of us have day jobs which we use to fund game development. That doesn’t mean any of those day jobs are directly related to game dev.
If I paid attention to the financial markets all day every day, I did end up making money. But the simulator was enough to show me I wasn’t interested in doing that, without loosing me any real world cash.
It doesn’t take many 1% losses to erode away your capital. You are welcome to do this of course, but I’m convinced you will find it just as much a full time job as anything else you could do to make money.
Indie developer will have hard time making all their money go poof over course of one day. It can be done with stocks. Also indie developer can usually get employed in an area that is related to their skills.
Stock traders usually recommend to figure out strategy that works for you and stick with that no matter what happens. For example, you could buy, and then place two stop orders - one that will sell the stock/currency if it goes below acceptable losss thresold and another one if it goes above desired profit. There are also tools like stock options, which allow you to earn more and burn through your money faster.
Technically it never will I’m reminded of the joke about the engineer.
An engineer walks into a bar. He says, “I want a full glass of beer. My buddy wants half of that. My next buddy wants half of that. My next buddy wants half of that…” The bartender rolls his eyes and pours two glasses.
As far as stocks are concerned, are programs illegal? My knowledge of them is pretty much limited to World End Economica…
I remember once I saw this stock, I feel like it was bentley or something, and it was $0.03. I thought to myself, “Oh, I should buy this!” A few months later it was $3.00. I’m sure I’d lose money if I tried doing it for real though.
We just need to insert a tangent into the thread that makes it relevant enough. Building economies in video games, the effect cryptocurrency mining has on target system requirements due to GPU shortages, etc. That last one is particularly annoying because it’s resulted in brief periods of absurd prices for even mainstream cards.
I was thinking the same thing until I looked deeper into it. Basically, you need a trading expert, or spend 5…10 years looking deeper into it. There are TONs of different indicators, some of which are very well known, but the thing is that popular indicators will not work. As soon as some technique becomes widely known, it stops functioning, because market compensates for it.
I haven’t looked deeply into blockchain, but I think it is not really suitable for in-game currency. The issue here is that it grows with each transaction, and appears to grow indefinitely. I already talked about Etherium taking several days for initial sync (not to mention it can glitch out during this phase).
I’m reminded of the joke about the engineer.