The Fontas Effect

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If you’re starting to mess around with various Crypto-Currencies no doubt you’ve stumbled across the various exchanges and the absolute lengths people will go to motivate you to sell low, or buy high – it’s the Wild West out there. There is no oversight, no government control (not that there is in the actual financial worlds, is there?)Traders will go to Hell and back to pump up whatever currency they are in in order to dump it on you.

If you’ve spent any time at all watching the world famous Troll Box at BTE-C, you’ve no doubt heard of Fontas and his legendary pumps. Revered by many, hated by most, the guy is an absolute legend around there. I haven’t been around long enough to know why, or understand how he’s accumulated such a following (2200+ followers on Twitter and growing daily), but whether you like it or not, the guy’s words move the Crypto markets.

I don’t know anything about him. For all I know Fontas is a group of traders attempting to move the markets. There is a lot of that going on. And while the Fontas Pumps are generally big fails at the times he says, the Fontas Effect is very, very real. An example – late last night Fontas advertised via his Twitter account that he’d be pumping NameCoin at 9PM EDT, some 19 hours later.

As you can see from the picture, the pump never materialized and instead was a massive dump. I suspect Fontas had actually accumulated NameCoin the previous evening while everyone was distracted by another pump and dump and then dumped every single bit of it at the time he said it would be pumped.

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So the vaulted Fontas pump failed miserably – if you waited until 9PM to get in, expecting it to go higher at that point, at the session highs. I’m sure he, or the group of people he may or may not represent, laughed all the way to the bank.

The Fontas Pump failed but the Fontas Effect worked great. Exactly what is the Fontas Effect? It’s actually his very loyal followers doing the work for him, whether they know it or not. He announces a coin he’s invested will be pumped sometime in the future and then, rides the wave up of people accumulating those coins to join the pump, and then dumps the whole lot sometime around the appointed time. It’s genius, really. In no actual governed market could you get away with this but in the Crypto world it’s old hat and, to be honest, sort of fun to watch. Had you gotten in when he announced and then out before the 9PM time you could have made 30%.

I’m not really sure what to think about these events other than that they are fun to watch. It will be interesting to see what happens with his new NVC pump.

 

LiteCoin: A Beginner’s Guide #litecoins #bitcoins

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The last few weeks, since I’ve been posting about LiteCoins and my rigs, has been interesting to say the least. This little website has had more traffic than any time in it’s history. And the incoming search terms are interesting to me as well.

litecoinrig

7850 litecoin mining

bitcoin mining rig guide

best litecoin rig

You get the picture. There’s a huge interest in LiteCoins out there and, being the writerly/entrepreneurial type I like to think I am, I’ve put together a very basic guide on how to get started with them.

This guide is absolutely NOT for you if you’re already well versed in Crypto-Currencies. It’s not even for you if you have an inkling of what to google for. This guide is an absolute basic crash course into LiteCoins, and by extension, other Crypto-Currencies.

It covers:

What LiteCoins are. Magical money making pixie dust produced by AMD elves.

Wallets - Personal and Online – Someplace to keep the dinero!

Easily purchasing LiteCoins – And by easy, I mean a trip to Wal-Mart

Mining LiteCoins via CPUs or GPUs in completely easy, non-geeky, step by step ways.

Alternative Mining – your same rigs can mine anything!

And a note on exchange day trading (boiling down to it’s great fun! Don’t do it!)

Buy it from me here or buy it from one of the online retailers. And just like the online retailers, and with all my books, if you’re not happy I’ll refund you’re money.

LiteCoin Rig 2.0 – The Redneck Rig/Guide Update

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The RedNeck Rig has been up and running a week or so and is doing quite nicely.

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The two computers are churning along at around 1400 kHsh/s, which isn’t awesome compared to a lot of big miners, but for a couple of used PC/craigslist rigs, isn’t bad. It ran without issue the entire time we were on vacation and only shut down with the crazy ass weather and power fluctuations we had last night.

The rig’s cards consist of:

2X HD 6770 (from Best Buy)

1X HD 6950 (a nice card I scored off Craigslist with funds generated by the rig and a little bit of trading)

1X HD5850 (another good Craigslist score)

1X HD7850 (my first card – from Best Buy)

Bang for the buck the 6950 is the best card, at this point, but out of the retail cards the 7850 has been the best. The retail cards score above the Craigslist ones though because of AMD’s awesome warranty (which reminds me – I need to register them).

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The guide is coming along nicely and should be available at Amazon, this website, and various other outlets this weekend. It will boil down the very basics of getting into LiteCoins, from setting up wallets, exchange accounts, and basic construction of a rig. Hopefully I’ll have compiled what I’ve learned through this little experiment in a way that is useful for people who don’t have a lot of experience doing this.

 

Litecoin Rig 2.0 plus upcoming guide

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This is about as Redneck as you get.

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This is actually a combination of rigs #1 and #2. And it’s evolved a bit from here since I scored the sweet HD 6950 from Craig’s List.

I see from the traffic to the site and the search terms that there’s a lot of interest in putting together a LTC mining rig. Being the writerly type that I am I hope to have a guide available via Amazon and here, to start, by the end of the week.

 

What a Wild Ride -BitCoins LiteCoins

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Wow – what a wild ride over the last week or so. Up, up, up, and down, down, down. Since I’ve been watching Bitcoins they’ve gone from 43 dollars to 250 and back to 59, as of this morning. Don’t be scared to get back into USD at the drop of a hat in this. I think my new personal policy is to be back in USD before I head to bead each night – can’t sleep if I’m worried about who’s crashing the price of BTC/LTC next.

Obviously the price of BTC was, with all the media hype, in a bubble. I’m sure lots of new money came in and have promptly had their money taken from them. We’ll see where the price goes from here.

And my second litecoin rig…

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This is the funny one. Or I think it’s funny every time I look at it. This is mostly stuff I bought off Craigslist.

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The mother board, CPU, memory, and power supply came from a lot of old computer parts I got on Criagslist. It took a bit of effort to get it going – the bios is old and needed flashing, it’s finicky about what memory goes in it, stuff like that. But once it was going, it was smoking. The mobo has 3 PCI16 slots, two PCIe, and three PCI. I ought to be able to expand on that old board for awhile before I need another. That same lot yielded a couple of Nvidia GTX 280s which are pretty good cards, but Nvidia sucks at mining. I had them running and was getting about 50 khs from each.

I added two AMD 6770s from Best Buy for a hundred dollars each. They each do about 200 khs, which brought the total farm up to around 700. I then found an HD 5850 on CL and, with it, my total khs is about a 1000. It’s nothing extraordinary, but with the prices of Litecoin on a steady march upwards, I’m pretty happy with the setup.

And yes, one of the 6770s is sitting on top of the other. I initially had all three plugged into PCIe16 slots on the motherboard, but they got too hot. The top card is connected to a PCIe slot via a riser cabe.

I need to break down and build a shelving system to put all these on and separate the cards more.

My first Mining Rig – Bitcoins Litecoins

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The entire Bitcoin thing fascinates me. I’ve spent a lot of the last week or two reading and researching it. I finally decided I wanted to build at least a little rig to see how the whole mining thing worked.

This computer has been a bit of everything in life. I first bought it five or six years ago for one of the kid’s rooms. It was an off the shelf HP Pavilion from Best Buy. I’m pretty sure the kid’s played Guild Wars on it and not much more. They all ended up moving on to laptops and I’ve found different things to do with it.

It’s been a media center for my old apartment when I commuted back and forth to Oklahoma city. Plug in a TV card and, with Windows Media Center, you have an instant and cheap DVR with program guide and the works. It was my first Hackintosh. After a couple of months of trial and error I finally had that project going well. It’s sat out in Hookerisland for those times when I’ve gotten the urge to write out there after the morning work out.

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But now I’ve turned it into a mining rig. The interesting thing about bitcoin mining (or in my case, litecoins) is that it isn’t CPU intensive. It relies wholly on high end video cards. I bought a HD Radeon 7850 and with a bit of tinkering, got it online and mining.

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It’s clicking along mining around 3-4 litecoins a day which translates to 1.50 to 2.00 at current exchange rates. And yes, there is an exchange for these digital currencies. A couple of bucks a day isn’t anything to brag about, but for me it’s more of a proof of concept sort of deal. I’m going to build a bigger rig in the near future and see where it goes.

So yeah, I have the bug. I wish I’d have gotten into this years ago. I’ve built computers for a lot less interesting stuff.