My Background

My name is Derek and I am not ashamed to admit that I am borderline obsessed with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general.  I’ve gotten into cryptocurrencies after an article in 2013 that wrote about Bitcoin miners consuming more than USD$150K in electrical costs daily to keep the network operating.  I can say that, in my opinion, Bitcoin is an invention that will carry all of us to a new digital age in finance.

I have just turned 39 in January 2014 and I live in Singapore, a city state where the costs of living is one of the highest in Asia, somewhat akin to Hong Kong.  A very popular tagline in the 80s was that Singapore’s only natural resource was the people.

Doubtless to say, for someone who learned about Bitcoin, the pull factor was the increasing value of the USD/BTC rate and the fact that anyone could mint Bitcoins.  It’s not surprising that the cost of energy in Singapore is also one of the highest in the world (almost SGD$0.28 per kw/h after tax), nonetheless I still went ahead to try my hand at Bitcoin mining just to see if I could leverage on Bitcoin to improve my lifestyle/quality of life.

Mining started with purchasing consumer components locally which consisted of AMD 7970 GPUs which got me started pretty quick and I placed orders for Black Arrow’s FPGA Lancelot modules as well as USB Block Erupters which by end of August 2013 I was running a pretty presentable farm of about 15 GHs.  I was also in batch 1 of KNCminer’s Jupiter units and received it in mid-October 2013.  It took me a couple of weeks to gather enough friends to collectively venture into the Jupiter purchase and I am very glad that everyone walked away with a healthy profit.  All in all, it was a fun hobby getting involved in mining, and making new friends on the forums.  It was also profitable I admit, but that was pretty much good luck as the USD/BTC rate shot up in the later part of 2013.  Without that spike, I would still be pretty much in the red.

But I digress…

Objective

Singapore is a modern society and the percentage of technological/internet penetration in this city state is the 5^th in Asia, even higher than Hong Kong surprisingly.  Singapore’s GDP per person is the world’s highest at more than $60K in a Forbes report released in September 2013.  In May 2013, there were 157K millionaires that resided in Singapore, making it the 10^th ranked city in the world of with the most number of millionaires.

With Singaporeans open mindset of adopting stable technology and coupled with the financial prowess of the people, it will not be difficult to have Bitcoin penetrate here to drive adoption and increase the visibility in this part of the world.  It also helps a lot that Singapore is akin to a trade hub in the region with many local and international banks situated onsite.

Thus I have taken up an increasing interest in promoting Bitcoin in Singapore and this blog will be somewhat like a diary to track and map the activities that I’ll be embarking on to put the word “Bitcoin” into the regular Singaporean lives.

Summary

I have a few ideas that I’m toying with to help make the term Bitcoin get noticed locally.  I’ll update the blog here as time goes by.

I’ve also engaged a semi-professional photographer to help shoot some pictures of life in Singapore for those who are interested to know more about us here.  I hope he can also help document in photos on my endeavors.

Recently, I’ve also taken part in an interview with a local reporter on Bitcoin mining and I hope that will be printed to aid in messaging to the masses.

~Until the next update.

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