Just about every gambling site out there has SOME for of referral link. It's tagged to your account anyway. This just takes it and instead of just putting http://youwillnever.win/?ref=Dave someplace it makes it a nice pretty signature. There are no posting requirements or anything else so I don't see this as a real signature campaign just a nice looking referral campaign that happens to be in your signature.

Not that big a deal IMO. With that.

However, I can see this being open to a bit of abuse unless sujonali1819 keeps a tight control over posts. No min characters no max posts. Can spiral out of control quickly. Remember yobit.....

-Dave

I could not find it in a search but IMO a not your keys not your coins page either needs to be added to tweaked in a way that it can be found in a search.
If it is there ignore that.

Along that a nice piece on the dangers of custodial exchanges and such.

-Dave

For miners:
Looking at what people are paying others *NOW* on NH it looks like they are offering a nice premium above what most PPS+ pools are paying, even if take out the 3% you are still way above what you can get at PPS+

BUT that is NOW, if over Thanksgiving weekend a bunch of people stop putting in offers that rate can drop a lot. So a good PPS+ would be better.

The best answer you can give is it depends, if you are willing to keep an eye on it and switch when needed it is a viable option. For 'fire and forget' I have no idea.

They also have lightning withdrawals for very low amounts with is nice, allowing for small miners to get their small amount funds out for very little vs just about every other pool that has a higher minimum.

For people buying hash, depending on your needs there are better places, but since I think most of the SHA buyers are either lottery mining or mining some alt that they think will go way up in value or testing something it's probably a different mind set then most of us here.

-Dave

Yes, but the point I was making is a lot of people out there [looks in mirror] who setup 500GB nodes a while ago and have had them running on autopilot so to speak and hit the wall.

However, NEW 2TB spinning drives are now well under $50 here in the US and 1TB SSD and NVMe are at the $50 level.

So upgrading to a NEW larger drive is not that big a deal.

USED drives with low hours and good smart info are about 1/2 those prices.

It's no longer an expense.

And unless you want to trust a download you still have to download and verify the entire blockchain so no real bandwidth savings there if you are going to do it the proper way.
After that your daily download is the same for pruned or not.

Would also like to say that if you are US based it looks like for Black Friday there are going to be some 1TB 2.5" external drives on sale for $29.99 so if you want to run a node on a RPi you can keep a look out for that.

-Dave

There is still a lot of inexpensive power out there where you can host. But it's pure industrial mega space mega use locations.
Also, allowing for all costs and everything else in the end there is still and will probably continue to be a large market for used miners.

Even allowing for today's drop in price there is still the potential for profit, if you are running a lean operation.

As for the geolocation. Yeah well it will get you close, but sometimes it's not even within 50 miles close (80km)

https://www.iplocation.net/ip-lookup
And use as an example any of these IPs:
75.99.58.200
47.21.23.200
68.193.181.40
NONE of those listed are the correct city / town of where the equipment is.....

-Dave

If my old man memory is correct they used to give you a bit more. Not a lot more but a bit. Could have been fold, really not sure but I do remember getting a better discount someplace when using lightning for giftcards.

What they COULD do is keep smaller lightning channels open to them. I have opened a few and they auto close them after a while even while being balanced with a decent amount. Don't know why, and finally gave up caring sometime over the summer. Just stopped trying.

Back OT, did spend some time reading since my last post. I still think we should wait, but I do see the other sides view a bit more.
<shrug>
Beating a dead horse, it's going to happen.....

-Dave

I might be a bit thick here, but.....Kraken is not small it's not like going after 1 person who either had to choose to remain anonymous OR had to have a massive fundraising campaign to help out.
This is not a business that is going to roll over and take it. Not to mention they will probably get both legal and financial support from other exchanges.

Eliminating everything else, the tech, the BS, everything. Am I missing something in why he picked this fight?

-Dave

I don't see the big deal with Bitrefill. I use them on almost a daily basis now that they have bill payments too. Waiting for a confirm for a GC is not a big deal, and payments seem to go out overnight anyway.
RBF / no RBF I don't see why they would be caring that much either way anyway. Have to go read what they have said.

I understand what they are trying to do and why they are trying to do it, I just think as do some others that we would be better off drawing a line in the sand and saying as of THIS DATE (or block number) it is happening. That one last warning so to speak.

-Dave

Yep, post has not been updated in a while since it's still being worked on and there really is not much to report beyond that but:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5391131.0
Should probably poke him for a real update after Thanksgiving.

In that same thought process, just in general, more and more I see places / people using cheap wireless keyboards on machines that they are typing in sensitive information in a public environment.

-Dave

I have a gut feeling that people are stupid and a lot is coming from institutions bringing their BTC back in house so they can say "see we have it, it does exist, and it's not where other people can get to it"

In the end it probably does not matter, there were people putting money into a lot of things both crypto and non crypto that were obviously going to fail. There are people who keep more money then they should in unsafe ways. Lets face it, that box in the attic is safe, well except for fire, water damage, theft, depending on where you are animals nesting in it, but yes people still tell me it's safe.

-Dave

Interesting, never thought about the metadata adding something the wallet does not like. Wondering now if it's a combination of things.
Extra data, not the best screen, not the best camera all causing it not to scan all the time. It needs that 'perfect viewing angle' kind of thing.
Have to do some more testing. Might be a good excuse to get a new phone too :-)

-Dave

I have been using it on and off for years with no issues.
From my understanding, and it could be very wrong, a lot of the users are using gift cards that they got for doing things that they cannot cash because they are out of the region and Amzaon does not allow you to use a US gift card in India, and things like that.

Also, once again I heard do not know, a lot do come from people that are a lot come from the Amazon Mechanical Turk program. https://www.mturk.com/

Either way it purse.io has been fine for me and a bunch of people I know.

-Dave

Some places try to get 'cute' with a QR code:
Both of these point to 38s7D6x3hQP9uoYTEKJydwwxHnH7MgyRaq

The 1st one is the standard one we all know and love:


This is what (as an example) bitrefill gives you:


Close, but not great. Other places get worse with cute non standard QR codes. I was thinking that was the problem.


I'll see if I can get a picture of my friends phone, that I was trying to scan that started this thread, just after the bitrefill invoice I was trying to pay gave me grief. As I said some apps would flat out not scan it but WoS did in under a second.

Earlier in the week I was trying to pay a regular BTCPay invoice but no matter what I did my phone would not scan it on my daily use laptop. I took a screenshot and emailed it to myself and opened it on my home desktop and it worked. And my laptop screen is a newer and better then these ancient monitors I have here.

A couple of hours later I loaned someone here some BTC, he posted an address I copied it to mempool.space so I could get a QR code. And on that very same laptop with that very same phone that would not scan the other QR it worked. But, using a different app. Going back to blue wallet it would not scan. Went back to the 1st app and it worked. Tried to scan a different address in blue wallet and it worked??

So, we have 3 votes it's me / my phone. And 1 vote of yeah it happens to me too.
Lets see what others say.

The phone is a OnePlus Nord N10 5G about 15 months old. Not the best, not the worst.

-Dave

The thing I am looking for about the outflows is, is it 500 individuals pulling out their 0.5BTC or 1 major institution puling out 250BTC?
Same result for the amount moving out, but the way it happens matters.
Also, allowing for shipping and delivery and setup and everything else, how many of those sold hardware wallets are in use?

Individually here we are a small microcosm of the BTC world. I would also like to think that overall as a group we do know more and we try to convince our friends to know more. But, once we get away from that I just can't get a feel for who is doing what.

-Dave

So, here we are 3 months later and a really good implosion later. Anybody have any other views?

I still don't have any real funds that I need / count on stored in any exchanges.

At the moment I do have 1.5ETH sitting in coinbase that was paid to me as part of a debt, that I never thought I was getting paid back on so if it goes away I am no worse off then a month ago, I'm waiting for an increase in price have a sell in at $1515 before trading it to BTC and puling it out. But if it was sent to me in some sketchy (IMO) exchange I would have pulled it out in a minute.

But beyond that, probably under $50 total.*

Anybody else seeing anything else. You HEAR about the people pulling funds out, you HEAR about the spike in hardware wallet sales. Is anyone seeing people actually doing it?

-Dave

*Also, I do have a bunch in Gemini from their credit card rewards, but it's not being pulled out for tax reasons will fix that Jan 2nd....

Side note, but depending on your install / configuration people running with 500GB drives are now starting to hit the storage wall.

I had 2 machines run out of storage overnight. I knew it was coming with the 500GB drives they had and the LVM default layout. Base OS install, some swap space, a few small utilities they are now full.

Was hoping for another week or 2 since I figure 1TB SSDs will be under $50 for Black Friday, but so be it. I moved some files around and got enough empty space to keep them up for at least another month.

-Dave

For the hardware wallet side:

Assuming you are good with component level soldering you can build your own coldcard:
https://github.com/Coldcard/firmware/tree/master/hardware

If you want something easier, you can use a RPi and the trezor firmware more or less:
https://www.pitrezor.com/2018/02/pitrezor-homemade-trezor-bitcoin-wallet.html


For the OS / side all you need to do is follow any one of the guides that is out there to install everything.
You can as others have said use one of the prebuilt images, but if you want to be sure you can do it yourself.

Which ones you use is more of your personal preference. C-Lightning vs LND or one of a few electrum server options and so on.
Everyone has a preference but it's better to find what you want / need / like rather then listen to others. A lot can get lost in the signal to noise ratio of people talking about C-Lightning vs LND instead of us saying try both, play with both, and use the one that works for you.

-Dave

Probably all the big ones. Don't see that it that bad as long as it's the pools giving the geo data and not the actual IP information.

It's also at this point just about meaningless. With the IPv4 exhaustion and the sale and leasing of IP space and the general fact that a lot of geo data is just flat out wrong. The best you are going to get is an approximation, and even then sometimes it's not even close. In the end most of the large mining operations are in known locations anyway. As for the smaller ones it should not be difficult to find a legitimate registered business. For the home / hobby miners it is what it is. If you want to talk to another service they are going to know your IP and I am sure their ToS says they can sell any of your info they want to.

-Dave

People have been putting up with crap exchanges since exchanges existed. But, so long as people use them they will keep doing what they do.
Really starting to wonder how much of why people think BTC is a scam / ponzi / whatever is because people like us give them a decent understanding of it, how it works and so on. And then they see something like Binance and wonder what the f--k is really going on.

Pick your saying, "there is a sucker born every minute", "there is an ass for every seat" whatever.

Either way, the mempool is empty now so outside of a few days where it cost a few cents more to move money it's all over, for now, until they again do something stupid.

-Dave

As of now 3:45 PM EST on 19-Nov-2022 1 and 2 sat TXs are confirming and there are about 30 blocks till the mempool is empty.


No they ran a 0 reserve. Fractional implies there was SOME money there :-)

As for the Binance TXs. I am starting to really think their coding is just really broken. I just did a withdraw from another exchange and it came from what was a deposit from someone else. Only had 2 confirms before it was sent to me. How much back end coding does that really take.

User 1 sends 0.1 to exchnage

User 2 does a withdraw for 0.025
User 3 does a withdraw for 0.025
User 4 does a withdraw for 0.010

Send users 2 3 and 4 coins out from the 1st users deposit. Send the rest (minus fees) to the storage wallet.
Coin control it's a thing. Accurate accounting so you know what addresses you control have how much BTC in them with a quick database is also a thing.

-Dave