Tag: cryptocurrency

Validating Ethereum2 with Lighthouse in Docker

Benjamin Chodroff
Intel NUC 10 i7

Ethereum is shifting from Proof of Work “mining” to a Proof of Stake “staking” blockchain. This stake requires 32 ETH per validator to validate directly, but there are many custodial pooling services that allows those who have less to still participate with little investment or effort. However, I enjoy participating directly. I learned quite a lot in the process running my Ethereum GPU mining rig since 2017, and wished to do the same with staking. These are my quick notes how how I set up docker containers on Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS for Geth, Lighthouse beacon node, and a Lighthouse validator client. Using this setup, I am yielding about 6.5% APY this year on my ETH. As long as your computer is online more than 50% of the time, you will increase your Ethereum while helping participate in the decentralization that secures the network.

Read More

Building a six GPU Ethereum Mining Rig

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.
Read More

Python cryptocurrency trading bot

Benjamin Chodroff
Bittrex

As a fun toy to explore trading, I built a “flipper” cryptocurrency trading bot in python for the Bittrex exchange. It has a trading strategy of attempting to flip between two cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum and NEO, in hopes to obtain a small position growth each time it flips. Of course, this is just a very basic “strategy” and you will certainly need to modify it to avoid getting stuck on a losing bet.

Read More

Algorithmic trading using 100 lines of python code, using OANDA v20 API

Benjamin Chodroff

After reading Dr. Yves Hilpisch’s article, “Algorithmic trading using 100 lines of python code,” I was inspired to give it a shot. I wanted to apply his guide on how to use a time series momentum algorithm because I have been interested in forex trading with cryptocurrencies. I set up a free forex trial account on OANDA, jumped into a jupyter notebook, and got to work. I hit an issue. OANDA changed their API from “v1” to “v20” and all new accounts default to the new API. I ended up rewriting his sample code to work with the new OANDA v20 API using a third party python library.

Read More