Crashing Headlong into Business [Cryptocurrency + E-shop]

Well, I have been saying I want to get into business, and it looks like business is finding me.
I'll use this first post to keep a running tally for lazy readers and will give more details in later posts

Current Projects
Cryptocurrency Exchange to REAL money exchange (I'll call it "Crypto" for short)
Run a drop-ship e-shop (I'll call it "Eshop" for short)

Starting funds: $1,000
Current funds: $1,000

Total spent so far: $0
Total made so far: $0

Eshop goals

• 100 a week
• 500 a week
• 1,000 a week
• 5,000 a week

Crypto goals

• .25 BTC
• .50 BTC
• 1 BTC
• 5 BTC

Day 1

Total starting money: $1000 USD, 0 BTC

Project Crypto

I have always been fascinated with the world of currency exchange. The idea of trading money for more money sparked my imagination when I was a child and never left me! However, currency exchange is a very slow way to make money if you don't have thousands of dollars invested. In fact, most currency exchanges recommend at least $5000!

Thankfully, trading cryptocurrency has a much lower barrier to entry. I think I'll start there, gain some Bitcoins (BTC), then cash out as I head towards my dream of trading real money for even more real money.

After looking around, I have decided to keep my eye on Litecoin, Reddcoin, RazorCoin, and PandaCoin.

My Cryptsy account has been verified and I'm set up for transactions. However, I found out the hard way that the only way to send in any fiat currency to fund my account and get started is via snail mail using personal checks. Well, call me lazy, but I abandoned personal checks over a decade ago in favor of nice, fast plastic. It looks like I'll need to find other ways to get my coins!

What about mining? Well, I'm finding that coin mining with what I have at home won't be profitable. A few guys at work seem interested so I might eventually get a few workers mining together, but everyone seems too busy to chip in tight now. Instead, I'm seeing if I can find some reasonably priced mining contracts via auction to get me started. Wish me luck!

I am also stalking auctions to see if I can snag some reasonably priced coins. Sadly, most people sell for at least three times the going rate on cryptsy, so that's probably not the best way to get coins. After some frustrating hunting, I decided to toss out a few DOGE bids with my max bid being no higher than 1.5x the going rate on Cryptsy. I don't plan on holding on to any DOGE I get, but it trades well right now so I should be able to liquidate it pretty fast for other coins.

Eshop

I told the guys at work what I was up to with the coins. Well, our programmer, Chris, started asking more questions and found out I'm interested in getting into business in general. Originally I was considering affiliate marketing or starting another blog with heavy focus on plugging products, but he stopped me: his ex-girlfriend, Nichole, actually has experience running an e-shop using drop shipping and is thinking of getting back into it. Her last shop was a success, but she caught cancer and was too sick to keep going. Now she wants to go back into business, but needs backup both financially and to balance the workload.

It took a couple days to get ahold of her, but it looks like she's interested. I plan to meet up with her later this week to discuss finances, who needs to do what, and pay split. At the moment it looks like I'll need to sink in around $300 to get the ball rolling and will be taking a 30% pay split between Nichole, Chris and myself, but that's just Chris' guess from how things went last time. I hope this will stay reasonable!

You should trade in BTrex, bigger volume there

TheMasterOfMoney said:

You should trade in BTrex, bigger volume there

Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip. I'll check them out, too. So far I'm not 100% sure on switching, though.

Cryptsy has an easier to navigate layout, lower withdraw fee and lower fees on smaller transactions. BITtrex has a higher withdraw fee and a flat fee on all trasnactions, which makes it a bit rough for trading small amounts of currency (like what I'll probably be doing at first). Better volume is tempting, though!

Day 2

If you're curious, I intend on updating whenever anything interesting happens. Right now as I'm still getting set up and learning things, there will be more updates that are more detailed. Even when things are "ho-hum" I'll try to at least keep the tally updated weekly.

EDIT: As it turns out you can't edit a post after a couple days. Oops! I guess the running tally will have to be buried in posts, then. Sorry about that!

Spent so far
Eshop: 0
Crypto: 0.65

Made so far: 0.05 (Crypto)


ESHOP

It looks like Nichole won't be available until the weekend, so I won't be able to give any updates on the eshop until then. On the bright side, Chris has been dusting off his old shop script and is looking at revamping it a little. I suggested making sure there are variable markups to avoid problems with MAPS and tossed him an article on SILO structure to help him make sure the URL auto-creator is up to date. I hope he read it, the guy is always busy and tends to forget things...

CRYPTO

I found a promising miner: CEX.IO. The site is taking Fiat currency but it's in Beta stage and I'll need to have a three month old account before I can use it. In short, I'm still stuck buying via auctions right now.

It's a multipool merged miner with the option to auto-convert most of the lesser currencies into LTC or Bitcoin, which is something I am glad to see indeed! I just hope the exchange rate stays fair. There is an upkeep fee of 18 cents a month for using the cloud miner, but I think that's reasonable considering electric bills aren't cheap. Providing my own workers and not using the cloud is free, though, and I can add as many workers as I need. I'll probably do that later on.

I won a 110 MH of processing power via an auction for 65 cents. I figured tossing just a little power at it should give me an idea about how much I will need to buy as well as how long it would roughly take for me to make my money back. It looks like I'll need at least 15 GH per second power to start earning at a reasonable clip. If I buy at Ebay markup (around $35) I will make my money back in bitcoins in 53 days or less, depending on luck. That price is in earned Bitcoin alone and doesn't include anything else that is mined up, so I'm betting it will take less time than I think.

I'm sitting on a handful of auctions for more power. I should be able to actually add more soon if things go my way. In the meantime, I have things set up to convert some of the lesser coins to LTC as it's more stable right now and I'm watching the numbers slowly tick along.

I also found a place called Quoinpro that says it will give away a little free BTC as well as a few other currencies every day. It's going to be awhile if it actually pays out as I'll be waiting on minimum payout balances, but if it's legit then it's worth doing pretty much nothing for free coins.

So far getting into this has taken more wrangling than I thought! At least it's fun and interesting trying to make it work.

Day 6

Total spent: $74.28
Total Made: (just assorted small coins right now)

CURRENT BTC:
Mined: 0.00008631
Trading: 0.00412046
Total: 0.0042 ($1.68)

ESHOP

I got to Talk to Nicole and Chris yesterday. As luck would have it we just all showed up at the same place on a Friday night. After some talking we got things hammered out as to how much and who does what. Setup is going to be a pain with thousands of product descriptions to rewrite so Google doesn't hate us, but, once we get past the painful part, it shouldn't be too bad.

Me: Initial financial backing, product description rewrites, backlinking, informational pages, business card design and printing, order processing, monthly newsletter, support center, and weekly/monthly bank handling.

Nichole: Product description rewrites, Social pages (facebook, twitter, ect), Promo code creation and dispersal, Site design, order processing, and support center.

Chris: Site backend and hosting, order processing (backup only), Site Map and SEO Updates to current code, Support Center backend and (If I'm not handling it all myself) weekly/monthly bank handling.

It looks like we should be able to get the bank stuff situated this week. He forgot to add in the cost of a PO box down at the UPS store in when giving me an estimate, so it will probably run $500 to get things going instead of $300. It's a bit of a hit, but still in budget so I'm still fine.

Crypto

Mining is slow going. I finally have 18 GHS but that's just a drop in the bucket, really. I knew this would be slow when I bought in, however, the hidden conversion fees and other BS with CEX.IO have me very annoyed with this mining group. If only I had an older account so I could just resell shares. At least that seems like a reliable profit that would be faster, especially with their referral system in place. Maybe I can get in the Holidays gifting game at least? In the meantime, coins trickle in slowly as always.

On the other side of the coin, DOGE is my friend? It seems like I have a lot of luck finding these lately and trading them for LTC. All the nice coin faucets are really helpful in this and I am having some luck with a few of the Doge betting games. This coin really is very easy to get and very easy to trade! So lucky. Much easy. So finally.

I also found someone willing to sell me 0.1 BTC for $40. Considering the going rate is closer to $48, it's a steal. I hope the deal goes through cleanly. I would love having that boost to my coins and immediate profit.

It's been over a month now. Time for updates!

Overall spent: 158.44
Overall made: 0.023316062 BTC from mining, faucets and trading. Worth 8.32 USD at time of posting.

Eshop

These people are like herding cats. It took weeks to get them to talk and set up the basic partnership agreement, and even then it's not a fully functional legal document. It's literally just something cobbled together hastily one night in an hour and a half. Our schedules just don't mesh: Nicchole will not work on weekends and is too tired to work on weekdays and Chris is always doing something else. I can't even get them to meet during lunch break!

Oh, yes: it gets worse...

Chris wanted to start with no partnership agreement and declared me "paranoid" for wanting one. Considering he got in a hissy fit about something unrelated one day and said that if things didn't go his way he'd just "dissolve the partnership" back when we weren't far past setting up duties, I think I have right to be paranoid. His bad attitude and mood swing scare me a little, too. Nicchole never seems to care one way or another about anything. She also doesn't want to work except on weekdays (remember: she didn't even have time for a meeting on weekdays!) and has decided she won't actually do much of anything except facebook and maybe charting nightly sales (although it looks like she wants to pawn that off on me, too), yet still wants 30% of everything just because the name is her idea.

I explained that I don't like where this is going to Chris and said that I want out. He went on a tirade about how "everyone uses him" and how he already "had the site setup" and that I'm just "treating him like dirt like everyone else." Yes, like setting up Zencart with some modules is really that hard. He then proceeded to guilt trip me about Nicchole. He keeps whining about how they really need my money and that my backing out effectively will kill the project. I know that's not true.

The two of them could go on and do this themselves if they really wanted to. My money isn't the real issue: commitment is. Just three days ago Chris went and bought a brand new PS4 and some games which cost about the same price as starting this project! This happened after I told him I wanted out and he gave that tirade on having the shop ready to go and how he really wants this shop to happen. I advised him not to blow money on a brand new game system and said he should consider investing or saving it instead, but he bought the PS4 anyway because "I never know when I'll have the money again." If he had just tossed that money at starting the shop with Nicchole he would have got something back. Now his brakes are squeaking and he is worried about where the money for that will come from. This is beyond belief.

Unless Chris has a 180 and Nicchole actually decides she wants to take some actual work on, I think I'm done here.

Crypto

Yeah, that cheap guy was a scam. Ironically, if he had been honest he could have actually made out OK. The price of .1 bitcoin has dropped since the supposed sale date. Oh well.

It's Amazing. Bitcoin in the USA is hard to buy! After weeks of hunting, I found that it's nearly impossible to find any exchange that sells bitcoin to US residents unless it's via personal check, wire transfer, or other cryptocurrencies. The only other option is Ebay where the prices of coins are obscene because they are so hard to buy otherwise. I talked with people from other parts of the world. Canada, Russia, and even China have it easier than we do. It's amazing.

CEX.IO has been kind of frustrating. I have found that the fees seem to scale nomatter how many GH/S I own. It always seems to work out to about a 50% loss. It was a 50% loss at 5 GH/S and it's a 50% or higher loss at 46.5 GH/S (my current rate). I just can't seem to get anywhere. I saw someone show a study on Zencloud and decided to buy a few Hashlet Genesis to see if they're any better.

Day 1 on ZenCloud (30 GH/S): 0.00002234 BTC earned. No fees taken (yet)
Today on Cex.io (46.5 GH/S): 0.00018853 BTC earned. 0.00076359 BTC actually made, 0.00057506 subtracted in fees.

Scaled up, if I paid for Zencloud entirely instead of CEX.IO I would have made 0.00022488 today instead of .00021087 from both combined. I'll have to give ZenCloud a few more days to see what the fees look like before I can call it better, though it is interesting. If the fees turn out to be enough to eat the profit margin, I might stick with CEX.io instead.

Trading on Cryptsy has stalled for now. I tossed everything into Litecoin to help preserve value and have been just sitting on it until I see anything interesting. Trading small amounts is fun, but it's not much of any gain. I should get more BTC before I try to trade much at all. It just makes more sense!

On the side I have also started playing on Primedice. It's fun and a great way to learn things. Not much to report there, just wanted to say it's nice.

I gave ZenCloud a couple days and found out the small payout was because it was an "incomplete day". Apparently this site pays out daily instead of doing things live, which actually makes tracking your fees and gains a lot easier than on Cex.IO. I had to download a spreadsheet and manually figure it out to post what I made/lost on Cex.IO, which took a lot longer than I would have liked.

Three Day Average for Zencloud (30 GH/S): 0.00024275 BTC earned. 0.00041257 actually made, 0.00016982 subtracted in fees.
Works out to 0.0000809 BTC per GH/S. I paid $1.15 per GHS and they accepted my credit card with no issues.

Cex.io (46.5 GH/S): 0.00018853 BTC earned. 0.00076359 BTC actually made, 0.00057506 subtracted in fees.
Works out to 0.0000405 BTC per GH/S. I paid $2.5 per GHS. I was forced to buy over Ebay because they won't accept Fiat from the USA.

Apparently not only is ZenCloud cheaper and actually will work with Americans, it also mines better with lower mining fees. Looks like it's time to sell my shares and switch clouds.

Current Spending/Earning Totals

Current spent: 364.99
Currently Made: 80.48 (coins + reselling miners)

Currently sitting on:
0.01598836 BTC (or equivalent)
244 Hashpoints

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Still working with Zencloud. Things have gotten really interesting!

First, they were going to change their fees to be higher if someone with a Prime Hashlet doube dips into two pools or boosts their speed, but people raged so they changed their mind. More on the Double Dipping/Boosting thing later.

Anyway, people started dumping everything but Hashlet Genesis due to fees (me Included): the very hashlet I started with. Seeing prices go down on the "stronger" hashlets made me decide to try upgrading. The main problem? The hashlet market is in Bitcoins only. No bitcoins, no Hashlet (unless you pay more via a credit card). I picked up 2 Zen Haslet for $30 via GAWMiners and set up a CoinBase account. Although it took me four days to get everything up and running, Coinbase hasn't been bad as they will actually allow Americans to buy coins (finally!), but I have to wholeheartedly say you should 100% IGNORE everything but the "instant purchase". I saw the price of Bitcoin fall $5 within 24 hours on Coinbase. Normal non-instant purchases take up two two days to post to Coinbase. This can eat large chunks of your purchase.

I then went and bought 11 MH of Multi hashlets now they were as cheap as Hashlet Genesis. I thought I was getting a nice deal. Last time I looked fees per solo hashlet (read: everything except Hashlet Gensis!) were just .03 each, which was a decent price for the power upgrade. Well, I should have looked again because when I wasn't looking the fees went from 0.03 per hashlet to 0.08 per hashlet or at least I think they did. I could have sworn those hashlets had lower fees when I joined.

I gave it a couple days, hoping it wasn't a huge mistake, and here what I saw:

Three day Genesis Hashlet (30 GH): 0.00135887 earned. 0.00105653 actually made, 0.00030234 subtracted in fees.
Three day Multi Hashlet (11 MH): 0.01201775 earned. 0.00155639 actually made, 0.01046136 subtracted in fees.

That's $70 worth of fancy hashlets doing only 30% better than $18 worth of super basic hashlet due to fees. I attached a thumbnail of one day's worth. The higher fees/output are the Multi hashlet while the lower fees/output are the Genesis.

I didn't give up. Instead, I sold all my Multi Hashlets plus my Hashlet Gensis and bought Hashlet Prime. I did this because they announced a new coin!

I know what you're thinking: "Yet another new coin on the market? Gimme a break!" Well, normally you'd be right and I wouldn't throw much at it, but I like their business plan. In a nutshell, they are using three pillars to make the coin both useful and stable: Merchant Adoption, Base Floor, and Miner Support. They have over 33 million dollars tied up to create a reserve as well as a "floor price" to prevent huge drops of the currency. They are already working with miners to get us in the door for less than the opening trade price of $20 a coin and plan on using a more secure and more flexible blockchain than Bitcoin. They also are talking with merchants to give us places to spend these coins and are planning to have a debit card where hashcoins can be spent like a credit card. A coin where miners can actually earn something and have somewhere to spend it besides exchange markets? Sounds good to me!

When I looked at them at the start of this adventure, Hashlet Prime were $150 each. I bought four at less than that and have them set up in two batches to see what comes out. For the curious, hashlet Prime are different than the rest. They are the most powerful miner on the site with the same fees as a Multi Hashlet. They also allow two options: Boost and Double Dip. Boost gives you 1.5 times your current mining speed for one hour with a two hour cooldown time. In short, every 3rd hour (or so) will be like owning extra miners! Double dip lets you simultaneously mine two pools at the same rate but you will only pay one fee. This one lasts 12 hours, but has a 12 hour cooldown.

I just did this last night so I'm waiting on actual numbers to come in... I'll be sure to post those when they arrive! I'm also testing both strategies with two pools of hashlets.

Blackberry Patch (3 MH): Boosting only as much as I possibly can. Mines Hashpoints only.
Steel Diver (1 MH): Double Dip only. Mines Hashpoints but also mines bitcoins every 12 hours.

I also turned my two Zenminers all to hashpoint miners while they still allow this.

Current conversion for miners: 400 Hashpoints = 1 hash Coin.
My two Zens are mining 33 Hashpoints a day (no fees!).

I will make back around $40 from my $30 worth of Zen Miners if everything goes as they plan. If not, I saw where someone else did the conversions and saw I basically would have made the same amount as if mining Zenpool the entire time. Either way, I shouldn't really lose anything. Let's keep our fingers crossed!

I hit an interesting snag in my calculations today: My Primes have increased in size. No, it's not the boost! Blackberry patch is now 6 MHz while Steel Diver is 2 MHz. Boosted I'm looking at around 3 MHz for Steel diver and around 9 MHz for Blackberry patch. I read that Prime hashlets will "upgrade over time", so I guess this is what they were talking about!



So far it looks like (with boosts) I'm making 101 hashpoints a day. This was from yesterday, before things randomly grew on me so I don't know if that will go up or stay steady with difficulty increases in mining Hashpoints.

For the readers: a new referral program has started in Zencloud! Just use a referral link from a member to join Zencloud, complete the tutorial (this part is important!), and get one Hashlet Gensis for free. Considering that the Genesis is one of the hashes that don't get eaten alive by fees, I think that a free start is great. Just PM me if you would like a referral link. Zencloud does all referrals via emails so I can't post anything here.

US Dollars:
Currently spent: 436.79
Currently made: 235.73

Currently sitting on:
bitcoin (trading + mining): 0.02192735 (worth about $8.5 at time of posting)
Hashpoints (Paycoin): 3,413 (worth about $170)

This is a happy day: I'm almost breaking even! Only $22 more to go and I will be profiting off of this!

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Zencloud Status:

As it turns out the jump up to 3 MHz and 9 MHz were temporary bonuses. The daily ability to double by using the rocket button has stayed, however, and it appears that my Hashpoint earning have remained pretty steady. I think the jump was there to make up for an outage that happened that day or something (I never bothered asking).

Average Daily Hashpoint earnings
Two Zens (2 MH zen): 38
Steel Diver (1 MH prime): 22
Blackberry patch (3 MH prime): 66

As you can see, the Primes really are the better mining rig. I don't care what the site says about Zens, primes are where it's at!

By the way, they announced the real name of the coin the Hashpoints will become: Paycoin!

It looks like Paycoin is meant as an "investor's coin" as they are already doing everything in their power to prevent people from just dumping the coin like crazy at launch. Firstly, they have a "floor price" set at $20 which I imagine will be enforced by GAW (ZenCloud's owners) buying back the money if it drops too low. From there they have introduced a "prime Staker" that costs money as well as paycoins and returns extra paycoins plus your initial stake at the end of your 3 or 6 month "staking period". Prime Stakers vanish when time is up so you only profit for a little while, so I'm not so sure I want one even if they have a guaranteed profit margin. Holding on to a Paycoin for more than a month makes the coin gain interest to fight coin devaluation, which I imagine will become the very poor and very rich man's Prime Staker. So far, so interesting!

Cex.io Update

I got sick and tired of paying fees that skyrocketed up to 80% or worse depending on my luck so I dumped all shares. When I say luck I'm not kidding. Your fees are calculated based on how lucky you were at finding blocks (Aka "Shares") that session with more blocks found making the fees higher. It doesn't matter how much you actually find when they coins come in, if you were lucky when hunting and unlucky when actually finding then you're going to actually lose bitcoin.

Anyway, when I dumped all my shares they sold out in 15 minutes. No, really. Then the buyers all messaged me and asked for MORE. I looked around: my prices weren't much lower than the competition and the incentives I offered weren't huge, either. Apparently people liked the idea of buying cloud mining shares for charity and decided to go crazy. It has been three days with three restocks and people are still asking me when I restock and how much I tend to stock. I'm getting shop stalkers.

Wow. I wonder how long this insane love will last? Maybe I should start an actual shop outside of the auction house and see what happens? Either way, looks like the shopkeeper in me is going to be selling stuff after all!

My suspicions are correct: the best way to win at CEX.IO is to not play... I mean, is to resell mining shares. Yes. That's what I meant...aranoid: Joking aside, most of my debt is due to CEX.IO and the insane price drop of mining shares since they decided to allow people in Europe to buy with credit cards. However, people in the USA can't use credit or debit cards which is where I come in. I hope my luck holds out long enough to help me get a good foothold.

This is a very interesting journey - keep it up!

@FromChinaWithTea
Thanks! It's been interesting and a little frustrating to me, too.
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Total sold over Ebay (last 60 days): 971.25
Total that reached my Paypal: 709.77 (Ok, I spent some on gifts. 'Tis the season!)
Net Total/Profit earned: 255.78

Total frozen/tied up in my Paypal: $602.15
Total actually sent to back my bank where it belongs: $88.71


I've been having good luck selling on Ebay but getting my money to my bank account and out of paypal has proven trickier than I'd like.

First I find out that you need over $250 in sales to NOT have ebay hold all your money for 21 days. Oh, I totally could upload a tracking number to try to speed that up, but my item is digital so I'm SOL there. No biggie: I topped 300 within my first week. I still couldn't get my money. Why? At first the representative argued with me saying I just hadn't made enough even though that's not what my account said. When they found out I was right and that I had earned enough, they blamed it on the fact my account is almost a decade old and I hadn't sold anything there in years saying I wouldn't get money instantly because I was a "casual seller". I swore up and down this couldn't be right and that it sounded like BS to punish a long-standing Ebay member for deciding to sell things. After a few hours of bring transferred I got the real answer: Because it was a THURSDAY when I went over $250. They check account earnings and update account statuses on WEDNESDAYS.

Ok, it's Wednesday again and the money should flow freely now! Hooray! Oh, wait- some stupid chick "had her account get hacked" and the hacker bought $5.55 worth of mining shares from me. I've been around IT enough to know that it's almost NEVER an actual hacker in cases like this: She probably logged-in on an insecure wifi hotspot or left her ebay logged in when she went to bed and her kid bought it. Of course she opens a chargeback marking it as an "unauthorized charge" which makes me look like a thief. I show screenshots showing that yes, I delivered my goods and she showed no signs of displeasure with me. She didn't even have the courtesy to ebay message me before doing the chargeback. If she had just told me I could have refunded her and had CEX.IO ban the hacker who stole the mining shares. I only found out about the "hacker" AFTER contacting her myself. How rude!

Guess how long it's going to take to have this woman's stupid mistake cleared up from my account? 15-20 days. What is it with the 20 days thing? It's like a fetish or something. 20 days for everything! If I'm lucky I'll be cleared up this Tuesday (day 10). If not, then maybe my name will be cleared by Christmas. Maybe. If it goes my way.

In the meantime some guy named Yoshi keeps buying mining shares from me in batches of three- literally. He buys using three transactions in a row each time. This trips Ebay's "hacker" warning system which freezes the money in my paypal with one of those 21 day holds. As insult to injury, that stupid five dollar and change chargeback prevents paypal from unfreezing my money and ebay won't do anything until the chargeback has been cleared as a suspicious transaction (the chargeback) makes me look like Yoshi's sales weren't legit and they were right to freeze my money. Oh, and if Paypal handles things wrong that mark will be on my account for a long time to come....

I suspect that damned chargeback is also preventing me from getting money out of my paypal through regular a bank transfer withdraw. I have had one request to send money to my bank actually fail, resulting in the money being sent back to my paypal. I see a second that I sent after the failed one has been "completed" yesterday but still hasn't posted to my bank account as of this writing. If it's not posted by Monday it looks like I need to get on the horn again and start shouting. At least Paypal generally knows their stuff and seems polite when I have called them, unlike Ebay. I hate calling Ebay support.

I ended up getting a paypal debit card. If things aren't cleared up soon I suspect I'm going to have to use the paypal debit at my bank to withdraw money (paying fees along the way to do so), deposit my money manually and from there continue business. I shouldn't have to do this considering I have done absolutely nothing wrong... I hope I can get things sorted ASAP.

I knew the first month would be full of set-up and rocky stuff. It really sucks that I was right.

I am finally at a positive number overall- not just when you count in the Paycoins!

Total spent: 1086.96
Total Earned (Cash only): 1157.03

Net Profit (cash only): $70.07
Net Profit (Overall): $333.45

Currently sitting on:
bitcoin (trading + mining): 0.02732531 (worth About 8.83at time of posting)
Hashpoints (Paycoin): 5,091 HP (Worth about 254.55 at time of posting)

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I got ahold of Paypal with mixed (mostly positive) results.

Apparently they had one too many zeroes in my bank account number. This is really strange considering that I had my first transfer actually work, so the number should have been right at some point. Anyway, I had that fixed and confirmed within 10 minutes. I'm trying to send my money yet again. I hope it arrives soon- as it is I'm going to have no stock for about a week until the money hits my bank. I'm very tempted to take some of my regular money out to keep selling.

I was found not to be at fault for the chargeback (no bad mark for me!), however, as she was hacked she still was refunded her five bucks. I don't care about five bucks, so this isn't a problem to me. I'm just glad it's over and that it hopefully shouldn't come back to bite me in the butt any further. People of the world: please learn to use the logout button and don't do sensitive stuff from public access points. Thank you.

With the chargeback gone and my name cleared I managed to get about $100 of what Yoshi sent me posted to my account with around $75 still pending. Oh, and according to Paypal, yes, all of the holds on Yoshi's money are entirely Ebay's fault so they can't prevent it from happening again. Thanks alot, Ebay. :guilty: At least everything else is posting normally!

A fun fact: you can report buyers on ebay now. It won't get them banned right away, but it can make them get banned if they keep doing stupid crap like chargebacks or "I didn't get it" scams. Also, CEX.Io will ban you if they find you stole someone else's voucher code or otherwise cheated your way into getting GH/S. Finally, some justice for sellers (even if not much)!

I have read in these forums how people have had their paypal accounts banned because they took out all their money at once. The rep I talked to said it wasn't true: there's no policy that would let Paypal do this! In fact, the rep himself takes out all the money he gets once it hits his paypal and has been doing it for a decade. I bet the folks on this forum who think they had their paypal shut down from taking out all their cash in one chunk had been up to other stuff to get themselves into trouble. This is a black hat forum after all!

So overall I got most of the things I had in my way handled. I just hope everything works this time! I'm glad the problems happened at small scale before I bump things into high gear. It's better to be stuck waiting on $500 than to be stuck waiting on $5,000.

Total spent: 1297.61
Total Earned (Cash only): 1464.5

Net Profit (cash only): $166.89
Net Profit (Overall): $

Currently sitting on:
Paycoin: 13.95 (plus random hash points). Worth about 111.6 at posting time, give or take.

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Paycoin launched... and is tanking hard. So much for that "$20 trading floor"! Cryptsy has had the coin going for between $6 and $8 USD lately. It doesn't help that this stupid coin is going to be earned via interest and taking out what amounts to a certificate of deposit from ZenCloud. They call this glorified CD a "hashstaker". Irony: the amount you'd get from buying a hash staker is only marginally more than if you just bought the coins, put them in a personal wallet and sat on them. If anything, buying a hash staker means you're losing about $10-12 per staker. I feel bad for the folks who bought hash stakers this round. At least I still have my regular miners!

I recently learned that taxes come out of the Net amount earned, which makes sense. This means even if I sell pretty hard I'm not likely to deal with federal taxes on my sales this year. Hooray! I may have to deal with state taxes (boo!) but I'm still under the amount needed for a business license so I'm still good. I have already started the paperwork for a business license, so that should be good to go before it becomes a problem.

The money hit my account finally! It looks like things are fixed on paypal's side so I can restock and finally get back to selling. Thank goodness! I hate when things go sideways like that. Now, if only Ebay would stop being stubborn...

Ebay seems to keep putting stupid barriers in between me and my rightfully earned cash. The latest one? First it was that my account needed to be at least 90 days old, now it's that I have to "sell regularly" for at least 90 days. Oh, and if the buyer doesn't leave me positive feedback then it doesn't count as the item having arrived so I will have to wait longer to have my money actually be useable. The story keeps changing. I wonder what they will do when I have 90 days of "regular sales"? Will they say "No, you have to sell things on 90 different days!" or will they stop dicking around and give me my money? Enquiring minds would love to know.

Speaking of people dicking each other around, I found my first chargeback scammer! At first I thought it was just me, but when I looked at their feedback I found a lot of very recent (within the last 24 horus, in fact!) seller comments that the buyer gets their codes, issues a chargeback for "unauthorized funds" then makes off with the GH/S. Money be damned, stealing is stealing. I contacted every single person they bought from this week and let them know about Ebay's lovely "report a buyer" feature and that they can also contact CEX.io support to report if they are having problems with a particular user. At first CEX.Io blew me off with a "vouchers are one way- what happens once you send them is none of our business", but when I sent them all the details and they started to have others contact them about the same guy the tune changed to "That user's account has been frozen pending review from the higher ups."

RIP "Baamadam" AKA "civhubernard" AKA "HOYT JONES". One down... and I will happily report anyone else like them and repeat the process until they get the idea and stop ripping off people who just want to make a living.

I also had another strange chargeback: the lady bought her vouchers, decided she didn't want them after all and wanted a refund. As the vouchers weren't used I just took them back and tossed her her refund. No harm, no foul, even though I wish she had contacted me instead of trying to file a chargeback. It would have been just as fast and it would have been nicer on her part. Oh well.

The upside, I talked to Paypal's Security division. As I have done nothing wrong, nothing bad is going on my account. The refund lady just wanted a refund, so she got it. The scammer has a bad track record and is on the way to a ban. In both cases there are paper trails that show I did my part and was honest. Paypal said they aren't going to restrict my funds or ban me or anything crazy as I am innocent and so far it's all true. Today's sales went off without a hitch and all the money is flowing exactly were it belongs. Justice is sweet.