First off, I would like to thank the two generous folks that donated grc to me.

You may be wondering why I am five days into the journey, but only have two posts. I wrote the first post ( https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@stevescoins/starting-the-gridcoin-journey )on day three of the journey, and yesterday's events took up all my brain processing capability.

Next; although I intended to discuss some performance benchmarks of the computers I have set up to mine, events have given me another subject to look at.

To start with, in my last post, I suggested http://pool.gridcoin.us/Faucet.aspx as a source of beginners' stake. Let me make it clear that you have to choose a BOINC project with a project RAC of 333 or greater to qualify for the bonus. Since I chose [email protected] (RAC of 77), I didn't qualify for the gift of grc. I had read the quals wrong, and thought that I personally needed to put together a RAC of 333 or greater. So make sure that if you want to pick up this bonus, you take care to choose a project with a RAC that qualifies.

You need a minimum of 100 grc to begin staking (AND you need to let that sit in your wallet for 16 hours before staking). Since I had been counting on that pool bonus of 500, I decided to go ahead and fund my wallet by buying grc. I had some btc I bought last month to transfer.

So I sat down and tried to send my btc to an exchange and found that I forgot my wallet password. OH NOOOOOoooooo! I screamed to myself; what I said out loud isn't fit to repeat in public ;> ) I had written down some phrases to help me remember the password, but I outsmarted myself in that I threw in some decoy phrases just in case I got hacked.

After a couple of hours trying various combinations, I broke down and started to research how to recover a lost btc wallet password. What I ended up using was the btcrecover program from github https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover

This required installing Python 2.7, and some additional routines (PyCrypto and pywin32, all download links can be found at the installation page found at the github address above). Once I got everything up and going (and made sure to suspend BOINC!), I was able to recover the password within 10 minutes of crunching. I would have slapped myself silly at that point, but I was already there. Once I saw the password, I saw where I had outwitted myself.

Another option to recover the btc wallet password would have involved downloading a virtual operating system and running Debian ( a Linux package) from there. I didn't try this approach, but the process can be found at:

http://www.gobitgo.com/articles/1005/How-To-Recover-Your-Bitcoin-Wallet-Password/

Now that I was able to get to my money, I was able to transfer it to a cryptocurrency exchange I had opened that day. I used C-Cex (link contains a referral link - just copy up to the .com if you don't wish to go to the site with the referral)

https://c-cex.com/?rf=6C35678000B81068

It took another two hours for the btc to transfer and to complete my grc order. C-Cex charges a 2% fee on the transaction.

I am by nature impatient. I have to keep reminding myself that this is a long time commitment and that there is a possibility, not a certainty, that grc will increase in value. Even if it doesn't, I am still using the processing for something important.

Next time, I'll discuss the process of staking, and of sending out your beacon in addition to showing the work my computers have done so far