Cherry Blossom Development

So we did the crypto thing. We made money. I consider that a win! So, on to new horizons. We are now pivoting to doing 3d printing and have purchased a spiffy new Elegoo Saturn 3 12k resin printer. Stay tuned for development in this new area!

It’s been what, 8 months since my last post? Well, there is one thing that I forgot to mention and it is this. Cherry Blossom Development is now officially a thing! Like legally, we are now an LLC and have been so for nearly a year.

Why did we do this? Well, a couple of reasons. First, and most primarily we got a contract for support of a website which I used to manage years ago (actually something I helped build) and while that did not in and of itself necessitate the creation of a business entity, I figured why not create a company and use this as a learning experience. Like, actually do accounting and taxes and such.

I figured, all of these little annoying things like actually running a business would eventually become a problem if we were to suddenly come up with a real product so why not get that part over with right now and so that’s what I did.

So, now I can say with confidence that we are a business, and we have at least for our first year pulled in some small amount of cash in both our software support services and also the previously mentioned crypto mining. Is it enough to quit our day jobs? absolutely not, not even close. In fact on paper we have a small net loss but this is to be expected.

What else is new?

We are all still pulling in different directions with what we want to build so this is a problem, but one thing is fairly clear to me at least and that is this:

• If we build something there’s a good chance it will be a software based something (maybe, but we have other interests also such as electronics/art etc…) that said, we are all software developers so software would likely be a component of whatever we build
• If we build a software thing, it will probably need certain functionalities common to most software things, such as a user authentication system.
• If we build a complex software thing, we’ll need help.
• If we want to get help, we want it to be easy to acquire and relatively inexpensive

So, for this reason, I have begun to build Prosaurus.com, however I am building it in as most modular a fashion as possible so that the components can be re-used. It will have a backend API written in Python/Django because Python is what all the kids are learning in college these days and kids will be the cheapest/most available source of additional software development skills. On the front end I have decided to go with React.js due to it’s popularity among the youngins.

That’s about it for where we are at. Not a lot of progress but more than nothing.

So we have the mining rig, it’s churning away as we speak making us a few dollars a month. This is nice and it will go towards paying the bills and in theory will eventually pay for the server, but what now?

Now for the real plan. We need to build something for real, and my suggestion is that we build Prosaurus.com. For many years now we have all complained about the various products on the market for ticket management.

Jira is a nightmare of settings but it’s the only one that can be configured (if you spend hours and hours on it) sorta correctly. Prosuarus intends to alleviate that problem. I don’t want to give away exactly what it is we plan on doing different but with almost 100 years of experience collectively in this industry we are fairly certain we can do this better.

Stay tuned for more…

So after waiting what seemed like forever for the mail persons to deliver the stream of components, of course delivered in the reverse order that I needed them, so I couldn’t even begin to assemble the machine until the very last part arrived, I was finally able to construct my first mining machine.

We got two GFX cards for it. One, an Nvidia 1660 and another a Radeon 580. The Radeon was a bit tricky to get working as you have to use an older driver for it meant for mining instead of the latest versions. I also set up nsfminer instead of ethminer.

It works! The two cards produce similarly, in the range of 45Mh. The cash is rolling in so to speak.

So I’ve done it. As of this morning, I made my purchase of the components to build a mining rig. I haven’t built a PC of any sort in over 15 years, having lost all interest in such things, and relying solely on my laptops for development and entertainment.

The last time I built anything, it was a MythTV box for time shifting television (IE, a homemade TiVo). This used two video capture/tv tuner cards, a smallish mini PC enclosure, and a modest CPU and ram, and large at the time harddrive. It worked well until it didn’t. I only just recently got rid of it when I moved (it sat around for years).

This time around, I wanted two things. I wanted to mine crypto currency, but I also just needed a nice server for running development environments (probably mostly docker containers). Needing a server was enough to justify the expense. Crypto came essentially free (for one gfx card anyway).

Unfortunately, I waited just a tad bit too long. There’s another gold rush right now, and the prices and availability of the components went nuts just as I was trying to buy. I was lucky to get the one GFX card and the mining motherboard (specially designed with 13 PCI slots) for a few hundred more than I had planned. Afterwards I am seeing the mobo selling for 3x what it was last week!

So now, I wait for the delivery.

So a lot of us missed the boat on mining bitcoins. I remember it vaguely when it started and I thought about installing the software to do it. But I never did.

Then about 3 years ago I thought about why not build a small machine to start mining Etherium (Bitcoin was already too prohibitive to start for a normal human). Based on estimates I figured it would only take about 6 months to make the investment back. Instead, we just bought bitcoin and etherium.

Then a few months later, crypto crashed. In some ways I was glad I hadn’t spent thousands on a rig. I still “lost” money though not as much.

Fast forward three years and our coins finally came back up in value and then we cashed out just before it started to drop again.

And then I thought, is it still worthwhile to try and mine etherium or ZCash or something else? Turns out it is, but it might take a year for the investment to pay off. And thats assuming the coins don’t crash further. But if they come back up…

If I had been mining coins for the last three years I would have made money. Not a ton, but worth the investment.

Now that I have moved up north to Spokane, the electricity is cheaper and I have a huge garage to build a rig in. I also have spare cash. And at least in the winter, its cold and so the rig will be easier to keep cool. It seems like the perfect time to do it. I don’t want to think in three years why didn’t I at least try?

Oh, and, I wanted to build a server for development purposes anyway. I don’t like paying monthly for a cloud server if I am not making money on it.

So, here goes nothing…

Ok, so I have to give credit where credit is due. I may have created this site, but Aric is the one who decided to build a box to mine crypto.

Here is my thought. This company, whatever it is, is not a crypto mining company per se, however crypto mining is going to be an integral part of how the company will grow in it’s initial phase.

Being that most of us are software/network/dev-ops engineers and/or creatives in general, the real purpose of the company in it’s initial phase is as a development incubator. We have all had many ideas and we would like to think that one or more of those ideas could become a reality.

However, it’s very hard to devote any time to such a reality when we all have full-time jobs to handle. Also, we are not dumb. We look at the cost and the risk of any such effort and most of the time we convince ourselves that it’s not worth it.

Whatever we decide to build, will necessarily require some up-front expenditures. We will need to purchase hosting and potentially many other services. This is where the crypto mining comes into play.

We believe that if our initial effort as a company is to create a powerful crypto-mining machine this machine will serve dual purpose. One would be the obvious generation of funds to support more crypto mining, the other would be to act as a server for whatever software based business ideas we come up with in the future.