Bitcoin – Top questions low tech folks might want to know.

Bitcoin mining is plagued with criticism and skepticism since its inception.  But it is still alive and kicking, or rather should I say that Bitcoin is still hanging on with whatever lifespan it still has.  I am sure everyone out there who are looking at Bitcoin from a distance, as they are wondering if they should take a dive, but worried about a few questions.

 

Here are some top questions that low tech folks might want to know.

 

Q1: Is Bitcoin safe?  

Q2: How do I know if I am mining Bitcoin for real or just being cheated.

Q3: What about malware?  I do not want to be hacked.

 

I will address these questions here.  Let me first state that the opinions and answers that are written here are entirely based on my own thoughts and are not official answers from any representative of cryptocurrency.

 

Q1: Is Bitcoin safe?

 

Bitcoin is safe as it is encrypted and it comes with 2-factor authentication so that it is very unlikely your money or Bitcoins will be emptied suddenly by a hacker.  The only possibility for something to happen is that when you transfer money, you do not transfer using account numbers or IDs, you transfer using a hash number, which is a long string of gibberish that is impossible to remember.  If there is a typo somewhere, there goes your money.

 

Q2: How do I know if I am mining Bitcoin for real or just being cheated.

 

Like anything out there, there are unscrupulous people who will do anything to get a penny.  So if you end up trusting an advertisement or downloading some shady software that claims that it can earn you a few grand a month by using your laptop to mine, most likely it is a scam.  The point to note here is that it does not cost you a single cent to mine bitcoin as most bitcoin mining software is free. It is only the machine also known as “rig”, is the investment that you have to spend money on.

 

Q3: What about malware?  I do not want to be hacked.

 

This is one of the most sensitive topics of all time.  While it is true that most Bitcoin mining software will be picked up by Anti-Virus as a malware and will be removed.  But it does not mean that it is a malware, the reason why it is seen as a malware is that all Bitcoin mining software will do a direct access to the CPU itself, which is usually not a norm for most applications.  Thus in order to do any form of Bitcoin mining if you intend to have Anti-Virus installed, is to know how to set exclusions or you will not be able to mine.

 

Alternatively, you can opt for a multi-boot setup which is to have the Bitcoin mining installation installed on another partition and isolate it from the operating system that is used for work.  However, this will also be a hot topic where people who are from the security industry will talk about the fact that the files are still accessible should the machine be compromised.

 

My stand will be that unless you can afford to get another computer to be dedicated to mining, otherwise, coming from a budget point of view, it is safe as long as you religiously stick to just the mining software on that partition and do not use it to install anything else or to do surfing of websites as there might be a danger of downloading some malware due to hackers who use the “drive-by ” concept to infect computers.

 

The last question that is on everyone’s mind will be that what happens if Bitcoin’s value gets zeroized one day.  Yes, anything is possible, the same goes for stocks in the stock market. You just have to make the correct judgment calls to sell the Bitcoins that you have mined from time to time when it is at the highest value such that even if Bitcoin goes bust, you have earned whatever you have earned from the day you started mining to the day it goes bust.

 

Oh, and before I get bashed by all the sharp crypto-vigilantes out there are quick enough to spot the fact that I mentioned selling “all the mined Bitcoins”, which is total bullshit to even talk about 1 coin now that the mining difficulty is so insane till you will be lucky to get half a Bitcoin after years of mining.  There’s pool mining now so that you can end up earning whatever you mined for as low as 0.0003 Bitcoin, that you can cash out at any point in time.

 

I hope that this article will provide some insights into cryptocurrency mining and I will be writing another article soon to discuss about how to do mining if you are someone who is not able to invest in a mining rig that costs about 10 grand with 12 video cards chugging power bills faster than the fastest beer drinker you know in your life.

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