It looks like we are separating the believers from the posers today. This is where rational thought needs to take over, as you cannot expect a coin to continue to rise upwards indefinitely without a few pauses.

Over on the exchange troll-box I cannot believe the fools who base their trading decisions zoomed in to the narrowest chart possible. If they would simply extend a bit to even a 4 day view, preferably a week or better yet a month, it becomes apparent this is simply another pause in the longer scheme of things. ETH is still up a bit from a few days ago, and significantly up from where it was a week or two back.

Time will tell I guess, but it is not quite yet the time for gloom and doom.

Don't cash out at a loss. While $15 may be a lot to you considering your replies, cashing out at $6.00 is a guaranteed loss.

Unless you need the money urgently, which if this was the case you had no business investing it in such a speculative market in the first place, just let it ride. It may take awhile to get back to where you bought in, but with time it will. For now just move on with life and keep checking back day-to-day on the price.

It may be back above your entry point in no time, or 3 months, but seeing the interest in Ethereum, I think this is the first of many rides we can expect.

They never are in the end it is always the same. With most of these so called "faucets", you probably spend more on electricity using your computer to surf them than they payout.

A couple of years ago faucets were what they claimed, a way to give out a few bits of a coin to help spread the word about that coin and to help promote adoption, now they are just a get rich quick scheme for the operators.

So while faucets may be good for a chuckle, or to teach someone very new about wallet basics, etc., at the end of the day they are doing more for their owners than the users.

It only takes a few weeks of posting (14 posts every 2-weeks) to get to Jr. Member though, and I believe some signature campaigns are still are open to Jr Members. This is probably a good thing to eliminate a ton of newbie accounts spamming non-stop, at least Jr Member takes a little effort and acts as a basic filter.

Anyway back to the main topic, I also think the signature campaign route is good for new users. Spend your time building up your account to a Jr member by reading up on the various threads here so you can contribute to the conversations once you are ready. Most campaigns don't allow spam, or small posts such as "me too" or one sentence posts of little meaningful content.

As you work on you member rank, continue to plug away at the faucets. You will gain very little in the form of BTC, but it will still keep you interested until you rank up your forum account a bit. Once you can do signature campaigns, then you will start to earn enough BTC where you could begin to trade. Remember to buy high and sell low. This sounds easy, but wait until the bottom of a cycle to buy in and sell near the top of a cycle. This will take time to learn the rhythm of each coin.

Gambling I would not recommend as there is no control over the outcome. Sure you could win, but even with 50-50 odds, the house would still have an edge so it would be more like 49-51 in the house's favor, Over time that guarantees you will lose your coins. At least with trading, if you watch and learn cycles, you have a bit more control, so while it can still be risky, with proper study and timing you could at least shift the odds to 51-49 in your favor. Hopefully more, but even at 51% (probably 55% factoring in fees) you would make a small amount trading.

I agree with this that regular corrections on the way up are healthy, but it would need to stay above the 0.01 range, preferably sideways 0.012-0.018 range for a week or two to change my previous outlook. These quick drops and then right back on the moon express still indicate a bubble in the making and too much manipulation going on.

A healthy rise is going to inevitably include profit taking while holding support levels for longer stretches of time are the only indicator of true support. The higher ETH goes the longer these periods will need to be for people to really have confidence. If it is still holding up here by the time March gets here, I might start to change my thinking, but until then its still in bubble territory for me.

Lol at the 10 BTC replies. The days of starting some rink-dinky exchange are over as there are now more well funded and robust BTC exchanges available to trade on, with plenty of alt coins selections to play with as well, than there were a few years ago when these types of start-ups were more common.

Even if you somehow did manage to get a secure, responsive exchange up and running with just 10 BTC, I doubt you would get much business, especially with Cryptsy fresh in everyone's mind.

If you were serious, as others have already suggested, you would need to setup a business first, establish relationships with banks if you were to trade in fiat, as well as comply with many laws and regulations, hire good programmers, security experts, and support staff, initially fund the exchange, hire marketers and pay for advertising. To get people on-board you would also most likely need to offer promotional credit, something like deposit and trade with at least 1 BTC and we will credit you .1 BTC, offer free trade fees for awhile, or something similar.

As you can probably imagine by now, the kind of money required to launch such an endeavor would probably be better invested elsewhere, as it would be approaching or exceeding the $1 million mark.

Sounds reasonable, I might need to add an extra zero or two on one of those numbers to make it work for me, but if we are just dreaming.

If you ask me, PayPal is more scammy then BTC anyway. Just ask how many people here will accept PayPal payments for their BTC. I send you BTC and that's it, you send me PayPal and bam, you complain to PP of fraud and now you have both my BTC and your Paypal money.

This isn't limited to just BTC transactions either, just try selling on something on eBay and if the buyer complains it is almost always reversed to them. This is a one way street for the most part. I am not saying buyers can't be scammed by sellers as well, but I wouldn't consider thinking of accepting PayPal as my only payment source, and certainly not as new money. Just another form of Visa/MasterCard for the most part, complete with the 3% transaction fees.

I will say that I do not claim to understand much of the block size debate as the technical details quickly become overwhelming. The one thing I will say is from watching this unfold over the past months, first with XT, and now with classic versus core, is that one side (classic) always seems to be pushing this "we must upgrade now or we are doomed" philosophy while the other side (core) has a more "we realize the blocksize issue must be addressed but we also want to be careful when we introduce changes to the protocol..." type of philosophy.

I am no expert in any of this, but the "we must change now or BTC will die" type of rhetoric does not resonate as well with me as the seemingly more reasoned response that core offers.

I have had a bunch of doge tied up there as well as some BTC, but giving up hope on recovering any of it at this point. Even if it goes to bankruptcy, I would probably only get a few cents on the dollar after lawyer fees steal whatever is left from us. The only hope I have at this point is Big Vern gets apprehended, prosecuted and is sentence severely enough to set an example for these scumbags.

I think the ultimate hurt was I had my doge withdrawals already in the queue for a week or so before they shut down, only to watch a few days later as doge went from 40-50 sat to over 120. I could just imagine in my head Big Vern and co. somehow pumping doge to extract even more profit from our stolen coins.

P.S. I am not buying the hacked story at all, this looks exactly like how Mt. Gox went down with embezzlement written all over it.

Pool shows 1% fee, here you list 2%, which is one correct? When is the fee deducted, when it is credited to my account or when withdrawn?

This brings me to the second question. All my withdrawals seem to be exactly 0.00126 ETH short when they are deposited into my exchange.

For example: Dwarfpool shows 1.15779951 ETH sent, but Poloniex shows 1.15653951 ETH deposited.

Where does the missing ETH go? I only been mining here a short while, but all 30+ withdrawal transactions I have so far are each 0.00126 ETH short.


Update:
Well after looking at the example transaction above on etherchain.org, I see the 0.00126 ETH is indeed made up of the transaction fee (Tx Price below) of 0.00105 and 21,000 GAS (or 0.00021 ETH).


So clearly the transactions are not being paid by the pool as claimed:

It will be trusted to be my "real money" once I can use it to pay for everything, including my taxes. Until that point it is simply a speculative investment. Sure I may be able to buy stuff here and there with BTC, but every single place that does accept Bitcoin, also accepts other forms of payment. So while I like and use BTC, it is still way down on my list of trusted places to put all my money into.

I think the problem people have is they tend to equate 1 BTC with other units such as 1 USD. So this leads to thinking along the lines that 21 million is not that many, after all even if everyone in the US were to acquire some BTC, there would not be enough for everyone to possess a full BTC.

It may be better to think of 1 BTC as something like a $1,000,000 Bond or some other form of monetary holding and the satoshi as the more common (everyday) form. I picked the $1,000,000 example since that is the value BTC would need to be for 1 satoshi to equal $0.01 or 1 cent.

I believe there was discussion early on they could always tack extra decimals places at the end if needed, but never about raising the 21 million cap.

I think they are all on holiday yet. Not sure if everyone takes off and ignores everything else, but you definitely notice a slowdown during the Chinese New Year period.

I voted yes, even though I am holding (and mining) some and hoping to cash in on it. After all even BTC was a bubble back in Nov 2013, so it isn't necessarily an outright scam, but there is no denying the recent rapid rise is definitely looking bubble-ish.

I plan to short once it goes a bit more parabolic. Looking at other past pumps/dumps, it is still in the slow but steady rise stage, although admittedly picking up speed recently.

I think possibly a day or two yet, but you never really know, it could make a big pump overnight, crash, and then it's over. I am thinking a top somewhere around 0.05 ETH/BTC range or ~$20 Eth/USD. It is around $6.50 as I type this, so I am thinking we will continue to pick up steam to around $10-$12 before a final violent push up to $20's before bursting the bubble.

While that physical coin (medallion) may be cool for a conversation starter, using it to introduce people to Bitcoin would indeed need a good conversation behind it. Someone who doesn't know what Bitcoin is, or maybe has only vaguely heard about it, would walk away even more confused thinking bitcoin was another coin like a silver dollar or something.

For me, I guess I would fall into the camp where a paper wallet would be the closet thing I would have to a physical bitcoin.

Exactly what I was thinking, no way to keep up with the price going from $1 to over $5 in a month. I am sure the original payouts were based upon the assumption any rises would be slow and payouts could be adjusted slowly. Kind of crappy they bailed without paying out, but not surprising.

It is really hard to say, as some pointed out ETH could be the next BTC or could also be the next LTC pump/dump at this point. I am in it simply because even if it does crash I don't really have a ton of capital tied up in it, so no big loss, but I do have enough in it in case it is the next BTC I am not left out. How many of us haven't wished we got in BTC back when it was trading under $5.00? Of course I do not see ETH reaching BTC prices mainly because of the greater supply of coins, but even if it hits $50 it will be a good ride for many of us.

Yeah, I cannot believe how ETH has took off. I have been expecting it to dump since it first hit over 500k sat. Every time I think it is going down it goes higher. Fortunately I have been able to buy back in most of what I sold, by trying to watch for peaks to sell into and not get too greedy when buying back the dips, but I have still left several hundred stranded at lower prices. I suppose if/when th ebig crash happens i can get back in. Since I mine most of my ETH I don't feel too bad, as I like to cash out my electric bills once in awhile anyway and let the rest ride.