DPete27 wrote:Nearing 24 hours of Ethereum mining and.....color me frustrated.
1) I spent a few hours getting everything set up last night. It was no easy task. It just amazes me how someone good enough at coding/programming to make such a complex computing system such as Ethereum can somehow not manage to create a singular graphical UI for users...... Furthermore, to not even include a comprehensive setup guide with your program download.
Welcome to the world of open source software; volunteer contributors tend to worship the command line. Even those projects that do offer a GUI tend to just have it tacked onto a CLI-based core (see Linux, git, etc.). It's the FOSS tradeoff, power and freedom at the expense of general usability and noob-friendliness.
2) Tutorials were barely helpful, many of which are over a year old. If you have problems, good luck.
See #1, also bear in mind that many of the cryptocurrency subject matter experts are in it for themselves so helping others runs counter to their stated purpose. This is triply true of altcoins, which tend to lack BTC's political undercurrent in favor of pure greed and speculation. They do exist, they just tend to be drowned out in all the noise.
3) When I got home from work today I googled how to check my Ethereum balance.....which said my balance is zero. So either I set the miner up wrong, made some error in the vague account creation process, or I made an error in checking my balance.
This is gonna depend on how you have your miner configured, whether it's directly hooked to the network or part of a mining pool, how the pool payout is calculated, etc. I haven't followed Ethereum all that closely so I'm not sure what the prevailing winds are here. It's going to be hard to remotely debug what's going on here, so probably more reading in your future.
4) With all these problems already, I dread having to figure out how to actually get US Dollars out of this whole ordeal.
I have a rather dim view of the exchanges, so I certainly won't argue that cashing out in favor of fiat is an easy proposition. The difficulty is going from store credit to actual cash money, and the last time there was a cryptobubble a bunch of exchanges got conveniently 'hacked' right about the time users were trying to cash out. As noted, BTC can be used to buy things on many websites but AFAIK nobody's touched the others. Maybe go from ETH to BTC to cool stuff from Newegg?
Maybe all this complexity is on purpose to deter new users. I dunno.
Well...yeah. Cryptocurrency is the domain of cipherpunks, anarchists, and hackers. Tread lightly.
Again, there's basically two factions in play here. One will do anything to make a quick buck, and the other liked the Helios ending in Deus Ex so much that they're trying to make it a real thing. Don't get me wrong, I'm supportive of the basic idea of cryptocurrency and think it's good that you're learning it without sinking a whole lot of money on new hardware, but my reasons for being so have very little to do with income potential and a whole lot to do with R&P and my tendency to prefer the company of machines.