I generally only bet on winners, but sometimes if the odds are too low I'll consider handicaps. I must say I'm getting a good success rate on over/unders, but I rely a bit on tipsters (and odds). Sometimes I swear I need to learn how to maximise odds as I realise they tend to change quite a bit right before the game itself, but I haven't really studied how (if they go lower for the favourites often enough).

For example, right now Liverpool are only about 1.8 for -1 handicap for their final home game against Spartak. It's a solid bet for me, but wonder if I might gain or lose a bit more if I wait til match night to bet.

Last night, I stayed away, too tired to analyse and running low on funds haha. Your parlay was solid, though, even if close call for Bayern!

A lot has happened in the mining world, yes, but probably not any more or less than it has been for the past five years or so! In fact, I think the introduction of ASICs was the last really big thing to happen, so new chips are to be expected regularly. Miners themselves will tell you that it's hard enough to keep profitable on their own rigs, so you can imagine more so if you're on cloud mining contracts with lower profit margins.

This year cloud miners will say they made profits - but this has really been down to the price of Bitcoin which is >700% higher than it was less than a year ago. If you had simply bought Bitcoin with half your money and used the other half to buy a 1-yr hashflare contract a year ago... Now imagine if the price went down instead...

Still, good luck with your journey, don't forget to hit me up in PM if you actually do visit Hydro (I'm curious).

To your last question... can't say I've found TOO many useful places to learn, but you should of course spend time in this section:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=8.0

Goes without saying, don't follow anything blindly.

Hi there, can't see any of the images you posted so perhaps the transaction IDs can give us more details for someone to help you.

Also, move this to the Electrum section for more help: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=98.0

At a glance, I suspect what happened is you did not disable "change address", so when you made your spend, the remainder of the input used was sent to a change address (still within control of your Electrum wallet). This is likely the output you saw.

To confirm this, simply view all your addresses in address tab>all. You should see that output in one of the addresses there.

My answer will probably be one of the least technical, but I hope that will actually suit you, since you sound like the type of user I am, and I think we're representative of the majority. (By the way, online there are differing versions so even I can get confused on the specifics!)

I understand the "blockchain" to be linear, and since they are referenced with block height, I visualise them as blocks placed on top of another, with each new block going on top of the previous.

All miners are working to solve blocks, I believe using data from the last block as a reference, as well as transactions they collect from the network memory pool. So they're all competing to solve these cryptographic puzzles. When a miner solves it, the protocol would validate that block and add it to the blockchain.

Then the network is informed, so all peers update their blockchain, and then everyone resumes the race to solve the next block.

This is how I see it, I'm sure others can improve on it.

My question here: do miners have to throw out transactions they were planning to include when they discover it was already included in the latest block? And, let's say Miner A picks up transaction X, can Miner B still pick it up? I'm just wondering how that works, does it complicate their block solving or is that not really a factor?

Well, I can only wish you well. If it's any comfort, the ones who do come away with profits tend to be the bigger clients with significant packages - I would say you definitely fall into this category!

I'm not into recommending cloud mining projects, but there are some similar projects that work on the concept of cloud mining, except that you purchase electricity redemptions, instead of fixed hash power which is the traditional model of cloudmining. Two of these are Gigawatts and Hydrominer (you can check out their pages). They are both operational from next year and appear to be a bit more transparent than Genesis/Hashflare, at least in terms of hardware.

Don't know of any calculators that have good adjustment settings, but hydrominer above seems to have in their whitepaper historical data from some cloudmining competitors, I believe hashflare is one. Those are as close to facts as I've seen, if you can trust the data.

As a matter of curiosity, I do have a test account at eobot, where I've reinvested every daily faucet earning into hash power. It's not worked out to what I estimated myself, thanks to Bitcoin's price increase and difficulty, but months of reinvestment certainly seems to have cut full ROI time significantly.

Oh, and welcome to the world of crypto! I consider myself new too, despite being in it for over a year.

You've missed the point, which still stands. A lot of people who think they own Bitcoin actually don't at all. Until only you own the private keys to your wallet, you have absolutely no control over what happens to your coins, and no way of ever verifying if the exchange actually has your coins.

Sure, some exchanges can prove some of their actual Bitcoin balances, but in general most cannot reliably prove solvency. You must have not heard of all the problems with major exchanges to believe they have the system fixed.

And the point is, even if they do, you still have to trust that they will honour your Bitcoin withdrawals.

I did mention this yesterday... why I feel mass use and mass adoption is falsely expanded by a lot of newcomers who actually don't own nor use Bitcoin.

I hope you see the irony in ranting about how people talk about Bitcoin on the pure basis of sentiment, with no foundational reasoning to the argument. It would make sense that you appear to think that is the key argument for Bitcoin if you cannot also think beyond that. One side spreads FUD, One side spreads FOMO. You're part and parcel of the problem you seem to see only on one side.

Change your crowd and your sources of news and info. Spend more time in this forum outside speculation and economy threads. Don't miss the point of Bitcoin.

Not sure how you managed to miss the hundreds of threads created here about cloud mining and how it's a borderline scam (though more people would just say it's an outright con). Since I'm in the mood:

You have a couple of assumptions with your calculations, with serious consequences:

1. The amount of BTC you "mine" will decrease almost exponentially, given Bitcoin's trend of increasing difficulty (what about the dips due to Bitcoin Cash, you say? Well take a look at the charts, the difficulty still climbs, in fact, spiking after the dips). Your contracts, as specified in the FAQ (not that I needed to confirm it), are subject to "maintenance and electricity fees". Unlike your earnings, these are static and will probably increase. You can try researching just how many times and how often cloud mining companies adjust their fees. Things always get more expensive, you know, as cloud mining is such a costly business with those armies of rigs that keep breaking down.

2. Because of assumption #1, your contract will not live to see its end. At some point before the 365 days are over, your "mining income" will actually be less than the daily fees deducted. At this point, your contract automatically expires.

A combination of 1 and 2 means that in a best-case scenario, you will probably only recoup your investment after many months, with very little profit to show, if any. If you're fortunate enough to have this happen, you'll also have a high number of inputs in your Bitcoin wallet, making your coins very expensive to spend. You'll get frustrated to see your profits diminish further with fees.

The more likely outcome: your contract expires, and you've earned less than you paid for, as hundreds of cloud mining customers have taken to the Internet to rant about.

Actually, I'm really curious to know which actual Bitcoin developer ever said that Bitcoin cannot be hacked. I think the only message I can ever recall coming across is that the method used to secure the network makes it practically impossible or economically unviable for anyone to attempt a hack - with current means at disposal.

Of course, no tech is unhackable, just as no tech is unachievable given unlimited resources. Surely the network will look to improve on security over time, along with other issues that must always advance, such as scalability.

On the article itself, happy to know that Bloomberg analysts still don't see how the Tether hack is not the same as a Bitcoin hack. Gives me hope that FUD can keep Bitcoin's price slow and steady, a pace I'm happy with.

Op put into words what I have witnessed in practice from the "new Bitcoiners" I know of. Every single one of them hasn't actually used an actual Bitcoin wallet nor bought actual Bitcoins or transacted in them.

They have simply deposited funds through a third party, with "Bitcoin " reflected as balances on an online account... some can't even withdraw those Bitcoins, they can only sell it back for fiat.

So I am beginning to see now that these so called new users aren't adopters at all. Mainstream adoption is still a distance away, with the bulk of newcomers merely investing in something they believe to be bitcoin, but without actually owning any. None ever see themselves using it, all believe they will liquidate when the time and profit is right.

That's just my observation.

While the decision itself may not have come as a surprise, what's puzzling is that it took so long to come, particularly when there are enough lessons to learn already from what the rest of the world is doing in terms of recognition. Morocco may always be slightly on the back foot with innovations to its financial structure, so one can't really blame the Ministry of Finance for its lack of resources to deal with possible regulation.

In that sense, an outright ban clears it from immediate expectations to regulate, although this may heap on the pressure for enforcement as surely Bitcoin traders won't take heed otherwise. Then they might find it even more cumbersome to chase down offenders who'll no doubt be able to easily take their trades farther away from prying eyes.

How about we keep it to very simple, very basic facts? A recent study showed that 88% of Japanese surveyed had heard of Bitcoin. Care to throw a careless guess about how many of them would have heard about Bitcoin Cash? I'm willing to bet that the most optimistic estimate wouldn't put even half of those who knew of Bitcoin to also know of Bitcoin Cash.

Within my own circle of associates outside crypto industry, perhaps fewer than half would have even heard of Bitcoin, let alone Bitcoin Cash. From the questions on social media already there is so much confusion with people mixing up Bitcoin Cash with Classix, XT, Bitcoin Gold, Segwit and Segwit2x. Why? Because amongst all the pretenders to the crown, no one can distinguish one from the other.

Think of the real world. To depose a recognised King, you'd need supporters of your own, you'd need people to come under your banner and declare you rightful king. How can a pretender be king if few have even heard of it?

Fantastic parlay here ralle, very, very comfortable for a good 150% return, you might even have got a higher handicap for Real Madrid. I lost my bet on Liverpool, thought it was well enough at half time, but I suppose I already knew Sevilla were too good to just sit back and take more punishment. At least on the current table, Liverpool look quite safe... they could suffer a 3-goal margin loss on the final group game and still get at least 2nd place. To be honest, that might work in their favour, to meet a big team in the last 16 and get that out of the way.

Also, good tip on Man City, but they were expected to do so anyway, given their extreme comfort on top of the group. Sterling still gave them a last gap winner, the bastard

@Ciccio: you must hate Sterling now too, although I guess a push is still better than a loss. Would have been a great parlay too - curious, if one side of the parlay is a push, do the others still count? I actually never had that situation.

You must be getting your news from a very different source. All I can see these days is nothing but clear blue skies from the media, both the online crypto ones and mainstream offline.

Okay, sure, we get the Dimonesque rant and the odd central bank weighing in but those are opinions, not otherwise noteworthy.

Even those played up fears of Segwit2x are dead and buried.

Took me a while to dig this out, just reminded me about an old idea seemingly abandoned by creator: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1964768.msg19532430#msg19532430

Setting aside my own natural scepticisms and reservations on libertarian societies, most painfully obvious to me is the propensity of individualism to somehow emerge as the dominant threat to those ideals, I wonder if there would be an opportunity for other "talents" to also participate? Perhaps not as a resident but someone who'd (seriously) contribute external to this development team?

At current price, even "21-Club" members would barely have half of the required amount. Can't say for sure these people would want to reveal themselves either.

I do agree though: just because history remembers the (many) failures of such extreme ideas, shouldn't mean we shouldn't continue trying.

Whoa Stephen, very daring bets I'd say but well worth their value. Real should be able to make short work of APOEL, even away from home. Ronaldo will be keen to end his drought and that's a fearsome motivation.

I have reservations about Dortmund. I know this is a must-win match if they are to even have the slimmest chance of qualifying, and Spurs have wounds to lick from the weekend, but I feel the odds aren't good enough.

I got Liverpool to win at -1.5, not sure they can continue to score more than 2 goals, but with Sevilla very able to hit back on home turf, I think 4 goals is well worth 2.4.

We already have one surprise so far, Maribor 0-0 away to Spartak. My surprise prediction: Manchester City to lose to Feyenoord. It's football, isn't it?

Pretty jargon-heavy on the technical analysis there, but I think the $10k valuation by year's end is taken a lot more seriously by previously conservatives (myself included, with some humility). I think the long-awaited correction may never come until 2018, so if indeed it pips beyond 10k to 12k, there's always that chance of a massive sell-off followed by a sustained period of correction. This would be rational, based on the irrational psychology of that 10k mark.

A lot of long-term investors must have set take profit at above 10k levels, perhaps earlier this year: to realise 1000% profits if they bought at 1k, this would be the 11k level. With orderbooks still a bit thin on the sell side today, buying pressure is likely to grow even quicker.

Very heady, however it turns out.

The important thing here is that your effective fee (in terms of cost per byte and not actual amount) actually has no direct impact on how fast transactions are confirmed (as blocks are found and txs included on an average of 10 mins).

But since miners choose which txs to include in the blocks they find, the higher your effective fee, the more attractive your tx is to miners. Since they have limited space per block it makes economic sense to choose prioritise txs which earn them more fees.

So, the more you pay as fees in proportion to the size your tx takes up, the higher its chance to get picked up by miners for block inclusion, hence confirmation.

Personally, all in. I earn 100% in crypto now anyway, amd with the outlook of Bitcoin in particular, it just makes sense to sell only what I need for living expenses and store the rest.

Some context: I spent ALL of my fiat savings around last year for a major life move. So anyway, I had no savings until this year.

Also, savings from my partner's income is strictly in fiat. We have never bought crypto.

So, not all in when taking into account family context. That's simply too risky, whatever I feel about Bitcoin.

@hilarious I had last night's at a 2-1 home victory, so whoever got the draw outcome at least bagged 10 points. What's annoying it to get more than your current average weekly score and still not climb a single position! I am pretty happy that Liverpool gave me two 3-0s in 2 matches finally. I suppose 2 out of 12 exact scores is fair return.

@tokeweed Ten bucks you're on, but is it only if our pick wins #1 or as long as pick finishes higher? How about we just remember this sidebet and no need for escrow and all that? End of season, you remind me or I remind you. I'll let you have first pick =)