January 2018 - benchodroff.com

Building a six GPU Ethereum Mining Rig

January 31, 2018 Benjamin Chodroff

I have been working with blockchains since 2013 but always wanted to know more about how the mining process worked. Last year, I fell in love with Ethereum and was excited to learn the project uses a GPU friendly algorithm. I convinced my wife to allow me to spend some money to build a GPU mining rig. At the time I built the rig, I calculated it would take over a year to break even in mining Ethereum. Luckily, the Ethereum project has taken off in a big way. The rig paid for itself in a few months, and continues to deliver. I had a lot of fun building the rig and learned a lot about how Ethereum works in the process. My rig does about 160 million hashes a second and dual mines Ethereum and Decred. Here are some details on the setup.
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Shadowsocks in Docker for bypassing China’s Great Firewall

January 31, 2018January 31, 2018 Benjamin Chodroff

If you have travelled in China, you likely know that many websites such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter are blocked on most internet connections. Typically I have purchased a VPN service to access blocked sites. Unfortunately, many VPN services are being detected and blocked by China’s “Great Firewall.” The best solution I have found is either to purchase a premium VPN solution, such as ExpressVPN which is specifically designed to work in China, or to use an open source solution called Shadowsocks hosted on a remote server. This tutorial provides a detailed setup of how to run Shadowsocks in a docker container deployed on a Synology NAS.