tutorial

How to install MetaMask – Tutorial for beginners

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MetaMask is the pretty much the standard if it comes to storing crypto currencies. As per their webpage, over 30 millions of users are using. This tutorial is for beginners.

What is MetaMask

If you are new in the crypto currencies world, you are probably overwhelmed by the number of options and wallets available and you might not be sure where to start? Right? No worries, I got you covered. Here you will find an easy step-by-step guide on how to install the MetaMask wallet to store (many of) the coins and tokens secure.

MetaMask can store all of the ERC-20 tokens. ERC-20 tokens you said? ERC-20 is a expression from the Ethereum vocabulary and defines a standard for all fungible tokens. You might have heared about ETH, BNB, Drip. There are many, many more. All tokens from the Etherum blockchain, from the BNB blockchain and all blockchains based on Etherum can be stored in MetaMask. It is a lot. Hence, MetaMask is a good starting point. But enough of the technical stuff, lets gets back to the basics and start with the installation.

Download MetaMask

Make sure you download the extension only from the official side. Navigate to www.metamask.io and click on the button “Download for <your browser>”. I am using Firefox, hence that icon is showed. This will guide you to the extension repository of your browser. Click “Add to Firefox” or “Add to Chrome, if you are using Chrome. And then endorse again, if your browser ask to confirm the installation. Your browser will confirm, that the new extension is added. Click “Okay”.

If your MetaMask extension got installed successfully, you should see a little Fox icon at the top right corner in your browser. Together with all your other extensions installed.

Great, now you got MetaMask installed, now we have to create your personal wallet. The installation might look a bit lengthy, but that is only because I added a screenshot for every step to guide you safely through the whole installation process.

Create your wallet

Click on the MetaMask item and a page like the below will load. Click on “Get started”.

As the next step, the MetaMask developer ask you if you like to provide data to improve the product going forward. Up to you, if you like to send your data or not. I would argue it is safe, but at the end it is your decision. Click either on “No thanks” or “I agree”.

As the next step, you click on “Create a wallet”.

Next you have to define your password. Make sure you use a complex password, a mixture of upper and lower cases, numbers and special characters. Lengthwise go for at least 12 characters. Yes, harder to remember. But for sure more secure. And you like to store your digital money here and you like to sleep well during the night. Convinced? And to make thing even more secure, do not store the password on your computer. Don’t take a digital picture of it. Write it down on a piece of paper and store it somewhere safe.

Click on “Create”.

Then a learning video about the Secret Recovery Phase follows. I highly recommend to watch it.

After you watch that video, you will get your personal Secret Recovery Phase. Click on “Click here to reveal secret words”. As the text says already, never disclose this phrase to anyone. Never. No matter who asks.

Treat the the Secret Recovery Phrase the same as your password: Do not store this phrase anywhere digitally. Only on a piece of paper. Keep it as safe as possible.

After you wrote that phrase down on your piece of paper (and again, not digitally) MetaMask asks you to confirm your Secret Recovery Phase. Just click all of your words in the correct order to ensure you got it written down correctly. Once you clicked on all the 12 words in the correct order, click “Confirm”.

If everything went fine, you are the proud owner of your personal MetaMask wallet and are ready to store your coins in it. Congratulations. Click on “All done”.

You will find your wallet address below “Account 1”. Many numbers. No need to remember it. My test wallet for this article is “0xdA194DD3815C41DC8deB96FbEDd13778C7417B9d”. Whenever you need it, like to send some coins to your wallet, you can copy it by simply clicking on it.

Adding BNB Chain

So you got now your wallet ready and it is connected to the Ethereum Mainnet. We will now add the Binance BNB Chain, as one of the most popular Blockchains. I am following the guide from the official Binance website:

Click on your MetaMask item in the top right corner of your browser, click on “Ethereum Mainnet” and then on “Add Network”.

The below screen pops up. Fill in the information as per the screenshot I took for you. You can copy/paste the information from below. Or copy it from the Binance page I linked.

Once you filled in all the information, click on “Save”. And done. You are now connected to the BNB Chain. You can choose your network by simply clicking on MetaMask icon and then on the current network and select the one you need in the menu popping up.

Whats next?

The next step is then to transfer some tokens to your MetaMask wallet and trade for the first time. We will cover this topic in one of our next articles soon.

Comments about such beginner articles are highly welcome and appreciated. Too challenging? Too complex? Too lengthy? Let me know. Thanks for reading.

HNW Refinery – Is this the new Drip?

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As mentioned in one of my other posts a while ago, I will start to explore some high risk DeFi projects going forward. Here is another journey I started only today.

Have you ever heard about Drip? Pretty sure you did: Invest into Drip, buy some tokens, deposit them and you will be rewarded with 1% on a daily basis. You either re-invest this amount or you take profits and claim it. Drip also used a referral system, where you can profit from your ‘team’ which led to quite a lot of Drip articles on Medium and everywhere.

I have to admit, I never used Drip myself. Looking at the current price chart of it, I decided to not choose Drip for my experiment (or better experience), but use one of the new similar and hopefully improved systems instead: HNW refinery. Let me take you on my journey. Keep in mind, I am just learning about this system together with you. Should we get started?

Overview

The team behind HNW is, as per their Whitepaper, a “team of professionals who want to change the crypto space through hard work, ingenuity, and trust.” And this is intended to be achieved by community building the best offers to clients and investors. It is mentioned a several places that the teams mission and number on priority is to keep the investors money safe. That is a good starting point I would say.

HNW is collaborating with many so called alliance partners like Sidekick Finance, Crypto-Logic, Crypto-Hunters, etc. and offers various services in the area of NFT integration, community building, fund raising, anti-bot & other safe launch measures, smart contract consultancy and much more which adds utility to their tokens.

The foundation of the whole platform are 3 tokens:

  • HFUEL: To keep it short, this is actually the only token you need to start earning with the refinery. You deposit HFUEL tokens, which will allow you to earn rewards from your deposit.
  • HNW (xHNW): Mainly used for team leaders, or wingmen, as they are called here. Staking of these tokens is required to increase the maximum payout of your wallet. See picture below.
  • Sidekick (xSK): Staking of xSK can increase your daily reward from 0.8% up to 1.2%. See picture below too.

Tutorial – how to get started

Lets keep this article a bit shorter then intended first, a follow-up is planned, lets have a look at the steps I took to get started. Feel free to use it as tutorial for yourself too.

I bought 100 HFUEL as a starting point and received 95 tokens in my wallet. There is a tax of 5% on any buy, sell, deposit, transfer transactions. I then deposited the 95 tokens in the refinery and ended up with 90 HFUELs. So in other words there is a 10% tax to start with the refinery. Keep that in mind if you like to deposit a certain amount of tokens.

Prerequisite:

  • Metamask using the Binance Smart Chain
  • Some BNB (or BUSD) to buy HFUEL tokens and then also some BNB’s to pay the gas fees obviously

Steps to deposit in the refinery:

  1. Head over to the HNW dashboard.
  2. On the left side click on HFUEL to open the menu and then click on “Buy”. This directs you to PancakeSwap and you can add directly the HFUEL token to the token list to swap. Just accept adding the token to your list.
  3. Swap your BNB or BUSD for HFUEL tokens.
  4. Head back to the HNW site and click on “Refinery” and then on “Pipeline”.
  5. As a first step here you have to select your “wingman”. This is your team leader in the system. Either do your own research for your preferred wingman or feel free to add my address to support my journey in this area: 0xb3C253D80578f569cFd4fe2E916EDbF01B384577. Make sure to confirm the transaction.
  6. Then it is time to deposit the HFUEL tokens. Either hit “Max” or enter the number of HFUEL tokens you like to deposit. Once the number is added, click on “Approve” and then “Deposit”.
  7. As soon as your deposit is done, you will see your number in the dashboard in the section “Available” starts increasing.

Claim or refuel?

Once you deposited your HFUELs in the refinery you start earning rewards. As mentioned, depending on your stake of xSK between 0.8 and 1.2% daily. You can claim (5% tax) these and sell (15% tax) your tokens if you like.

Probably the better option at the beginning, and this is where the power of compound interest will show its strengths, is to refuel your earnings. So you will end up not only earning on your initially deposited tokens, but in addition also on your reward.

Lets assume you deposited 100 tokens and you earn 1% (for simplicity) you will earn 1 token after a day. If you refuel, you will earn 1% on 101 tokens the next day, which is 1.01 tokens. The next day 1% on 102.1 tokens, and so on. If you do your math, this sums up nicely for you.

And now?

So is this the new Drip? Before jumping to conclusions yet, lets explore the system further, lets see how the deposit growths, lets refuel to gain more. And lets have a follow-up to see if this investments was worth it.

Again my wingman address, if you like to use it:
0xb3C253D80578f569cFd4fe2E916EDbF01B384577

Get started with FAIT on PancakeSwap – Tutorial

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What is FAIT?

FAIT stands for Flourishing Artificial Intelligence Tech. A blockchain data based, learning technology built by Flourishing Capital. As per their website their tech monitors more then 6800 markets and collects and analysis almost 3TB of data per week. Based on these data trade decisions are taken aligned on a set strategy (more on that later). So FAIT is using AI, not (only) rules, as a usual trading bot would do.

There is a web dashboard to monitor FAITs activities and a Telegram interface. The community, and probably also Flourishing, always refer to FAIT as “she”. Not sure where that is coming from though…. guess everyone got its own reason. Lets not go further here.

What is PancakeSwap?

PancakeSwap – or PCS in short – is probably the biggest Decentralized Exchange (DEX) on the Binance Smart (Block-) Chain. DEX means in other words you can do your business like placing trades, staking or yield farming on PCS without relying on a company or central exchange, all activities can be done directly by you with your wallet. No man in the middle. PCS is famous for fast and cheap transaction. Many tokens are supported. Less popular ones can be added manually (you need to know what you are doing obviously) and can also be traded easily once added.

Why should I use FAIT?

FAIT is not emotional. FAIT knows (almost) all the data. At least the ones she is monitoring. She follows the strategy you set without looking left or right. Talking about strategy: Per exchange you can set your anchor currency. WBNB for PCS is the default. What does that mean? Well, FAIT is conducting all trades with the goal to accumulate more and more WBNB. On Bittrex you can set the anchor currency to BTC, ETH or USDT. Whatever you prefer and like to accumulate.

How well does it perform?

I tested it now for not even a month on PCS and also on Bittrex. I honestly don’t have a big amount of money on PCS, but it still works fine.

FAIT completed 21 trades since I started using it (her) on both PCS and Bittrex around 20 days ago. Calculating my average profit per trade I got currently 4.6% profit per trade across both exchanges. Out of the 21 trades, 20 were profitable, and only 1 trade ended with a loss of 9.6%. Luckily, this was a very small trade and I lost only 0.84 USD. Guess it sounded worse then it actually was at the beginning.

How much does FAIT cost?

Flourishing offers two price plans currently: One for CEX or DeFi, currently only PCS, and a price plan for CEX’s, currently Bittrex and Binance supported.

  • For CEX: You need to held 0.75% of your AUM (Assets under Management) in AI token.
  • For DEX: Besides the 0.75% you pay a monthly subscription fee of 40USD.

Exam-question: Is it worth it?

Guess you are the only person who can answer that. For me, yes, it is. I profited so far way more then I paid. I also joined the IDO on BSCPad last year (yes, I regret not having used the service since back then….), hence I had some AI tokens lying around in my wallet and wanted to do something useful with it, hence I gave it a try. I am impressed by the service and technology the team offers and delivers so far. Also the support provided by the team is great.

I am sold. What do I need to do?

Let me show you step by step how you can get started with FAIT on PancakeSwap. I assume you have MetaMask already hooked up to the Binance Smart Chain.

  1. Sign-up for an account with Flourishing
  2. Buy (or you might have already) some BNB tokens
  3. Log in into the dashboard
  4. In the top right, there is a blue button with all the exchanges. Click on PancakeSwap and on “connect”.
  5. Under “Settings” (navigation bar), there is a section called “PancakeSwap”. There you see your custodial wallet address. This is the address “your” FAIT is trading with. Send the desired number of BNBs (and only BNBs) to that address.
  6. Click on “Portfolio” in the navigation bar and wait until FAIT picks up your BNB’s. It should show up as “Assets Under Management”.
  7. Wait for FAIT to make her first trade for you.
  8. Profit.

These are the very basic steps to you get you started with FAIT. Play around with the settings currently offered to familiarize you with the dashboard.

Where can I ask questions?

Flourishing got a pretty active and helpful community on Telegram. Just go there. Feel also free to add a comment here on that page if you like.

Referral link for signing-up via Telegram: https://t.me/flourishingcryptobot?start=1611699253
Don’t have BNB’s? Easiest way to buy BNB directly is via upLink. Tutorial here.

Easiest way to buy crypto currencies? upLink

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Usually you read about the complexity of buying crypto currencies. How complicated it is, how many steps you need to take, how big the risk involved is, and a lot more of – mostly negative – things are wandering through the (mainstream) news portals.

The arguments are now useless. Flourishing Capital solved it. Full-stop. How? They created upLink.

UpLink is an easy interface to swap your FIAT in one (1) step into crypto. Directly from your credit/debit card. It cannot be easier.

Currently BNB, Matic and their own token AI are available to buy. The team is working hard to implement further coins. You can also choose, if you like to use your own MetaMask wallet or if you like to use Flourishing Capitals own custodial wallet to receive your tokens.

Then you either connect your Metamask wallet, sign-up for a new Flourishing Capital account (or login to your existing) and checkout to get your new tokens to your desired destination.

Seriously, can it be easier to buy crypto?

I plan also to do a review Flourishing’s FAIT soon, but need a bit more time to test it thoroughly and see the results.
Update: Here is a very basic tutorial how to use FAIT with PancakeSwap

Setup your Raspberry Pi as mining device controller

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As I just bought a new miner (Rockbox new R-Box) I was looking into a convenient way to operate and administrate this box. Currently it is running on a Windows 7 machine using cgminer (a tutorial will follow on that one). As I got some Raspberry Pi’s lying around, I was looking into way how to setup one of the Pi’s as controller.

After digging around I bit, I found first Minepeon. But after a bit of research on the project page and the forums, it seems this project is pretty much dead: Latest release is from early 2014, forums not having any recent post except for one thread with the title “Minepeon Project Died?“.

So I found this great project called “Minera“. Minera is a – very important – active project providing a lot of features on how to control your mining device(s). Its features are

  • Web frontend with Dashboard and widgets
  • Currencies rates
  • Detailed tables for pool and device info’s
  • Charts
  • System monitor like temperature, system load
  • Autorestart, autorecover
  • and much more

Sounds like the tool you need? That is exactly what I thought as well.

Minera Dashboard

Minera Dashboard

 

Hardware requirements

  • Raspberry Pi
  • USB Power plug (preferable with a on/off switch
  • HDMI cable in case you like to attach a TV/monitor to the Pi
  • SD card with at least 4gb

 

Software requirements

Browse to the Minera project page and download the prepared image for your Raspberry Pi in the download section. Click on “Auto Install” and the download starts. Once the download completed, extract the zip file with your favourite zip tool (like Winzip, Winrar, Archive Manager). This gives you the the file minera-latest.img.

As the next step, copy the image to the SD card. Depending on the operating system you are using, it may vary a bit. As mentioned before, this SD card needs to be at least 4gb.

  • Linux: If you are on Linux you can use ImageWriter or the command line below. You probably have to run it with the sudo command or as root:
    dd bs=4M if=minera-latest.img of=/dev/your-sd-card
  • Windows: If you are on Windows you can use Win32DiskImager
  • Mac OSX: If you are on a Mac OS X you can use ApplePi-Baker

Writing the image to the SD card may take a while. Once completed, put it into your Raspberry Pi, connect the Power/USB and the HDMI cable to it, attach any mining devices and boot it up.

There is not a lot to see on the monitor, as Minera is mainly controlled via the web interface. But it shows you an important detail: The IP address where Minera is reachable. So go to your computer and type in the following URL

http://<RaspberryPi IP>/minera

The default password is “minera”. There you go; welcome to your mining dashboard.

In the next article we look at how to configure Minera:

  • How to add your mining pool
  • select your favourite mining sftware (cgminer, bfgminer)
  • and explore some other features

Minera Settings

Minera Settings

Installing the latest bfgminer on Linux Debian

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In this tutorial we learn how to install the latest BFGMiner on your Linux Debian (or Ubuntu) machine directly from GitHub. At the time of writing version 3.10.0 was the most current one. First we will install all the required tools to build BFGMiner, then we download it from the GitHub repository and then finally compile and run it.

If a command fails, it may require root privileges so simply add “sudo” in front of the command. Lets start:

  1. Open a terminal (if it is on a remote machine, SSH into it)
  2. Run “apt-get update”
  3. Run “apt-get install git autoconf automake libtool pkg-config libcurl4-gnutls-dev libjansson-dev uthash-dev libncurses5-dev”
  4. Run “git clone git://github.com/luke-jr/bfgminer.git”
  5. Enter the bfgminer directory (eg. “cd bin/bfgminer”)
  6. Run “./autogen.sh”
  7. Run “./configure” (if you don’t want to use GPU support on the machine add the flag –disable-opencl)
  8. Run “make”
  9. When make completes, you can run bfgminer directly from within the directory: run “./bfgminer” and enter the pool, workername and password
  10. BFGMiner starts now to mine

First try with CPU Mining (incl Tutorial)

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After getting a quick overview of digital coins, having collected one or the other free coins, we want to give it a try to mine our first coins. Lets have a look at that topic:

To mine coins we got the following options to mine with:

CPU Mining: This is the easiest way probably to try mining for coins as a first run. The requirements here are pretty basic: You need a CPU. Luckily every computer got that. And you need a program called cpuminer. Cpuminer is also known as “minerd”. Sign up to join a mining pool and you are ready to go. Advantages of mining with your CPU are pretty obvious: almost no requirements, no additional hardware besides your CPU. Disadvantage is the performance of you CPU: it is pretty slow compared to the other methods. Your energy costs will eat up all of your profits.

GPU Mining: Mining with your GPU is already a much more efficient way to mine coins and was the next step after CPU mining. Compared to your CPU the GPU is able to solve the hash values much more efficient; you get way more out of your energy bills. To mine with your GPU you need a modest graphics card which is supported by the GPU miners like cgminer. Most modern Radeon or Nvidia cards are supported. Requirements compared to CPU mining are only the additional graphics card you need – or even better several of them – and mining makes much more fun.

ASIC: ASIC hardware are specialized devices produced for only one task: To mine coins. But this in the most efficient way: This gives you the best hash rate/power consummation ratio of all of the three methods mentioned. However, you have to have access to such a device so there is an additional cost.

To jump directly into mining and gain my first experiences, I have chosen for the first option, the CPU mining way.

So, these are the steps we will follow:

  • Download cpuminer for your OS
  • Join a mining pool
  • Run cpuminer with appropriate parameters for your pool
  • Watch the numbers and have it run for a while

That’s it really. So lets have a look at this in detail:

Download cpuminer
Depending on your operating system, you have to download cpuminer (minerd) from this site or you use the OS internal packing system (like apt or yum). If you have to download it, make sure to pick the right architecture (eg x86 or x86_64), download the archive and extract it to a directory of your choice.

To install with a Debian based system like Ubuntu you simply run “sudo apt-get update” and “sudo apt-get install cpuminer” and the system does the magic.

Join a mining pool
There are several mining pools out there, all with different rules like fee’s and payout models.

I tried my luck with a Litecoin pool and picked minersdream.com: most green boxes and no block fees. So browse to your chosen pool’s website and register your account. When done you have to add a “worker”. You need a worker for each of your device you will have to support your mining activity. As we just give it a try with our cpuminer, you need to add only one for the time being. Remember the name and the password of your worker, we need it in a second.

When you got your worker, we will start our miner soon. Depending on your OS, open up a terminal or command prompt and type in the following command:

minerd –url=stratum+tcp://stratum-eu.minersdream.com:3333 –userpass=USERNAME.WORKER:PASSWORD

(Please make sure to redirect to the correct path for your minerd binary. Replace USERNAME, WORKER and PASSWORD with you own values)

When you typed in everyt correctly, you should get an output like this:

cpuminer running in commandline

cpuminer running in commandline

 

Perfect, our first test is running successful; our CPU miner is mining.

Tip to have minerd  running in the background
To have cpuminer running in the background while you are  working, you can decrease the priority of it. In Windows you start up the task manager, tab “Processes” and then right-click on minerd and select priority “lowest”. (Not having windows, hope this all correct…)

In Linux you run the command like this:

nice -n 19 minerd –url=stratum+tcp://stratum-eu.minersdream.com:3333 –userpass=USERNAME.WORKER:PASSWORD

This sets the minerd task to the lowest priority and have it running in the background.