Add bitcoin mining anno 2017

content/posts/2017-03-08-bitcoin-mining-anno-2017.md

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+date = "2017-02-08"
+title = "Bitcoin Mining Anno 2017"
+tags = ["bitcoin"]
+description = "Bitcoin is still going strong since its introduction in 2008. Mining Bitcoin has become increasingly difficult, so how does one mine BTC in 2017?"
+slug = "bitcoin-mining-anno-2017"
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+
+Bitcoin was introduced in 2008 and has gained much popularity since then. At 
+the time of writing the exchange rate for 1 BTC is about €1100 (or $1166), quite
+an increase from when you could get 1 BTC for just a few euro. 
+
+## The problem with mining Bitcoin
+
+Mining bitcoin can be quite lucrative, but it's hugely dependent on the exchange
+rate and the difficulty of mining. The difficulty is something that is only going
+to increase. In the early days a fast CPU was enough to mine new Bitcoin blocks, 
+followed by GPU mining and eventually specialized <abbr title="Application Specific Integrated Circuit">ASIC</abbr>
+chips. 
+
+Besides investing in powerful hardware to mine blocks, there's also the utilities
+bill. Calculationg millions of SHA-256 hashes per seconds is not very power 
+efficient. 
+
+If you're like me, you don't want to have a machine in your study or living room 
+generating noise and heat to mine Bitcoin. There are several options, like renting
+a powerful GPU machine at Amazon AWS, but there's a huge upfront cost. For the 
+past few years did not find mining bitcoin interesting or cost effective enough. 
+Last week that changed.
+
+## Welcome to 2017
+
+Last week I found [Hashflare.io]. 
+The great thing about [Hashflare.io] is that you choose how much you want to invest
+in hardware by purchasing mining capacity in units of 10 GH/s, currently at a 
+price of $1.20 per unit.
+
+Your mining capacity is put towards mining Bitcoin in different pools (you can
+change these), resulting in a daily payout of mined Bitcoin. 
+
+The good part? This is a life-time purchase. You keep the mining capacity - forever.
+
+The only _cost_ is a fee for power and management of your hardware, which is 
+substracted automatically from your daily payout. 
+
+Purchasing capacity is easy and straightforward. Payment options include credit card
+and Bitcoin. It's also possible to _reinvest_ your earned bitcoin into purchasing more
+mining capacity. 
+
+## Return on Investment
+
+Right now I'm seeing about 40% of my Bitcoin yield go to power and management costs. 
+This means I'll earn back my initial investment in ± 5 months. After that it's pure
+profit. 
+
+The current exchange rate is also of importance here, because power and management
+fees are calculated in USD. Any increase (or decrease) in exchange rate will influence
+the amount of BTC that goes towards fees. 
+
+Since the value of Bitcoin has been steadily rising since 2008 (there have been some
+extreme fluctuations), it's very well possible that I'll break even before 5 months. 
+
+## Let's get mining!
+
+There's no reason not to start mining Bitcoin today. [Hashflare.io] makes it 
+rediculously easy to purchase mining capacity and start minting Bitcoin. 
+
+Will you make your money back? Given time, probably. Is it fun to be part of
+this Bitcoin thing? Oh yeah!
+
+Note: Besides SHA-256 hardware, for Bitcoin, you can also purchase capacity
+for mining with Scrypt, ETHASH and X11.
+
+_Disclaimer: The links to Hashflare.io in the article are referral links,
+I will get 10% of any purchases you make on Hashflare.io. I understand
+if you object to using a referral link, here's a [non-referral link](https://hashflare.io) instead._
+
+[Hashflare.io]: https://hashflare.io/r/B91F1C3F

content/posts/draft.md

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+date = "YYYY-MM-DD"
+title = "Title Here"
+tags = ["tags"]
+description = "For the frontpage"
+draft = true
+slug = "title here"
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+
+This is a draft