I remembered that I created this thread a while back and felt like I need to bump it, because as of two days ago I created a telegram account.  However, my username isn't anything anyone would recognize as being me.

Why am I bumping this thread with what seems like a silly, very minor announcement?  Because if it should so happen that I engage in a discussion on bitcointalk and make any sort of statement about telegram-related stuff, there might be someone out there that I've offended in some way who'd remember that I denied ever using telegram.  So that's that.

And while I'm on the subject, now that I've given the service a shot I have to say that it sucks ass.  I only created an account for a single purpose, and once the project or my interest in it evaporates I'm dumping telegram in a New York minute. 

Well one real change on the device is a change in the intensity or brightness of the display--and I swear, each time Ledger has messed around with that, it ends up being harder to see what I'm entering for my PIN.  I've said this before in other threads: I don't like it when companies change their user interface for no reason, because the end result is that customers are invariably dissatisfied. 

Why?  Because all those people in the middle of the bell curve prefer a consistent user interface, not one that makes you learn how to perform the same menial functions all over again every time the company fucks with it.  Ebay is a great example of a website that just keeps getting worse for no rational reason.

Some folks might complain that bitcointalk's look is like a disco revival, but I bet if Theymos was constantly tweaking little things here and there, we'd be hearing about five times as many bitches howling.

Anyone have any idea why Ledger needs to have so many updates?

Interesting that you took OP's question to mean crypto markets as opposed to stocks, commodities, and other traditional ones (which is what I was thinking about). 

And I'm puzzled about OP's talk of markets being negatively affected by the pandemic, because the stock market has been booming all throughout the lockdowns, the shutdowns, mandatory masking, and all that good stuff.  The way I see it, no recovery is needed because there's nothing to recover from.  Even with bitcoin it's true.  Remember what the price was in March 2020?  It was under $10k, and after COVID started to become all anyone ever talked about it dipped briefly and then began to skyrocket until it had hit a new ATH.  Therefore, since the start of the pandemic bitcoin's price has more than tripled.  What's wrong with a market like that?

Lol, I'm definitely not an early adopter of bitcoin.  If I was, I'd be filthy stinking rich by now instead of living in a hovel like some deranged monk.  The real early adopters are the ones who were mining bitcoin on their laptops and GekkoScience USB sticks and thereby generating huge amounts of BTC.

It's definitely been an interesting experience, and in addition to seeing a lot of new members with wildly different personalities I've seen some very large personalities leave the forum for various reasons, and it's the latter that changes the dynamics of bitcointalk more dramatically.  You can really feel the absence of a member like Vod or TECSHARE or Bruno.

Yeah, before I joined the forum I pretty much never thought I'd be passionate about bitcoin--and yet here I am in the present day, and it takes up space in my head for most of my waking hours.  And boy, I wish I'd bought some of those old physical bitcoin coins and some other stuff like the print edition of bitcoin magazine....oh well.

Man, you're telling me!  When I joined the forum back in 2015, I knew next to nothing about what exactly bitcoin is or what set it apart from previous iterations of digital cash not sanctioned by the government (like Flooz, which I've mentioned a few times over the years).  And of course I knew nothing about mining, the P2P decentralized nature of crypto, and a lot of other important attributes--I was so ignorant, you might be wondering how I found the forum, why I registered, and why in hell did I stick around so long.

I'm not going to go into all of that, but this was the first post I could find on my profile after un-ignoring a lot of sections.  I think I'd posted before April of 2015, so maybe someone can set me straight on that.  Here it is:


Nothing spectacular, wasn't written while I was in a signature campaign, and certainly wasn't as troll-ey as a lot of my early posts were.  I was a bitcoin skeptic back then but was a little familiar with the forum, as I'd lurked for months before joining.  I knew how bad the discussion was in general but didn't quite know why that was (sig campaigns), and I used to ridicule some idiots pretty harshly.  Maybe my earliest posts got deleted!

Looks like I'm either spitting in the eye of a beloved crypto retailer or I'm coming off as complaining about something that most people wouldn't think twice about--and both of those may be true.

However, after I wrote the OP I did a DDG search for "bitcoinmerch.com ripoff" just for the hell of it, as I'd never seen any online reviews for them.  The first result that I thought was thorough, if lacking in evidence for a lot of its claims, was this one.  One of the interesting points the author brings up is the extreme lack of transparency as to where their base of operations is.  It's not unusual for an online retailer to lack a physical walk-in store, but after looking up 18375 Ventura Blvd Suite 320 in Tarzana, CA I found that it looks to be one of those modern strip mall/villages which have only started to appear in the past 2-3 decades.  Googsy Maps says it's here, though BitcoinMerch's name isn't listed on the sign--but who knows when the pic was taken:

                     

So I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here, and I'm not going to keep bumping this thread.  I really think BM doesn't have all the cards they have for sale in hand.  I'm not even sure they get whatever stock they have from distributors; it looks like they might be doing what I joked about above, i.e., just buying GPUs from Newegg as soon as they become available and then marking them up a few hundred dollars apiece. 

That's just wrong.  I really would like to hear from anyone who's bought products from them, and I bet there are plenty.  If you disagree with me, go ahead and say so.  I encourage discussion and don't have my feet dug in on this one.

When I read this, my thoughts immediately went to Ukraine as well, although in a much more cynical fashion.  I'm wondering if Russia putting out a news story that no doubt will be received favorably (since crypto is extremely popular in Russia and because of cheap electricity must be lucrative as hell), attention might be directed away from the hostilities that are brewing between both countries.

It's not like that hasn't happened before; it has, and all throughout the world in many different era.  Governments/politicians use misdirection as a tactic to keep their popularity up when they're undertaking much bigger, far more important actions that would not gain them any favor in the public eye.

Now as far as the substance of the story itself:  YAAAAY-UHH!!!  I'm not Russian, but Russians are Russian and they're big (and numerous) in the crypto world.  It would be one hell of a shame if their government regulated bitcoin to the point of it being practically unusable.  Kuckle-bump to all my Ruskie bros out there.

Yeah, it kind of makes me wonder why there were so many web wallets that actually weren't scams, because given the nature of bitcoin they seem like they'd only be advantageous to scammers.  And so many people have used them over the years (including myself before I really knew much about crypto) that it just makes me scratch my head.

I never used btc.com's wallet, but the blockchain.info one had that same problem of jacking up the fees and not giving users control over how small they want the Tx fee to be.  Anyway, it's not a huge loss to the bitcoin world that btc.com is closing their wallet service, but it's just another thing being added to the "remember when....?" list of things we'll be reminiscing about in 10 years when the whole crypto space has lost the wild west feel altogether.

OP, both of these statements almost seem to be complete non sequiturs.  The first sentence about wealth being concentrated in the senior citizen population shouldn't cause any alarm.  Unless you're a person who made their fortune early in life (or inherited it), the tried-and-true method for accumulating vasts sums of wealth is to do it over a very long time period.  So who would the richest folks be?  Yeah, the boomers and whatever generation Warren Buffett belongs to (don't crucify me if he's a boomer; I'm too tired to check).

The second statement begs the question "Just where are the crypto markets going, and in what state will they be once the average 21-26 year old shitposting bounty hunter that makes his/her living from bitcointalk reaches retirement age?".  Nobody's got the scoop on that, so it's pointless to even write something like that.  There are no guarantees bitcoin or any other crypto will be around in 40+ years.

There's only one "someone" who pays that amount as a maximum per week as far ask I know, and if you're in that campaign and are spitting out low-value, one-liners....I'm not sure how you would have gotten accepted into it in the first place.  But pay rate aside, I've never had a problem with campaigns and bounties primarily, and I think their existence enhances the forum like nothing else.  It's the members who either abuse the privilege with alt accounts or who stubbornly refuse to do anything above the bare minimum to get paid.  That's why bitcointalk has had so many quality problems directly related to campaigns and bounties.

By the way Lucius, I'm sure you know exactly what I'm talking about, and the above wasn't directed at you specifically.

That should tell you what kind of person Bitcoin SV is.  And at least one member on his extensive list is dead for fuck's sake.  Give it up, BSV.

Because they've chosen not to go into the mining business, that's why.  They're analogous to the folks in 1840 selling shovels instead of flopping around in the mud on a mad quest for gold.  It's more profitable and probably less risky, too.

But what really makes a sense of outrage boil up in me (which usually doesn't happen since I've become as cynical and jaded as you have) is that in this case BitcoinMerch was sort of presenting itself as being a part of the bigger cryptocurrency community--which technically they are, but their actions demonstrate that they're not living up to the spirit of the phrase.  Anyone who preys on the ignorant or gullible and engages in such blatant scalping ought to be shunned outright.

Question: Does BitcoinMerch have a good reputation, say, on bitcointalk?  I've never really gotten a sense of that.

Hey, I didn't even consider that section (and I'm not sure it's the right one either).  I'm going to let the mods decide (unless one of them directs me to move this thread).

I have no clue what was happening before the GPU crunch started, as I wasn't following the action, so to speak.  In early 2021 I started the Folding@Home project which uses CPUs and GPUs and thus became better informed as to what was going on with ETH mining, GPU availability, and so forth.  I have to say, I really did learn a lot about computer hardware in the last year.

However, despite not knowing BitcoinMerch's behavior prior to COVID, prior to whatever, what I think is this:  They see one last opportunity here since ETH should be switching to PoS fairly soon--and once that happens, nobody knows what's going to happen to GPU mining.  So it's a cash-grab on BitcoinMerch's part, plain and simple.

Here's their mottos.
Newegg:  "Welcome all you desperate and impatient GPU miners with pockets flush with cash!"
BitcoinMerch:  "All you suckers please take a seat in the room with dick-sized holes spaced on the walls at regular intervals.  You leave with a product that'll never ROI and we run off with your cash!"

I mean seriously now, who would buy anything that overpriced when Newegg is so well known?  You can even pay with bitcoin for any of those GPUs I showed.

Oh...how the hell do I resize those pics?  I did the image width=500 thing but they're still huge.  But I'm so tired right now that I'm seeing smurfs walking across my refrigerator.

As mentioned in the title, I'm not sure where to put this thread.  It has to do with GPUs, but it doesn't necessarily have to do with altcoins.  It's a bitcoin mining and miscellaneous merchandise retailer, so I guess it could go in Bitcoin Discussion, but since I'm giving some harsh criticism directed toward one entity I think this is the right section.

Got an e-mail from BitcoinMerch on 2/10 but just saw it today.  Because my e-mail host sucks and uses frames from which I can't take a complete screenshot, it's chopped up as follows:





So their big announcement is that because they took possession of a larger facility, they can store more GPUs and "We lowered all our prices just for you, so you can start mining ASAP."

Here's what pisses me off big time, and I'm hoping I don't offend any loyal customers of BitcoinMerch too badly, but if I do you'll get over it pretty quickly.  They're coming off as "We're in your corner, miners!!" but what they're actually doing is rectally sodomizing all the folks out there who desperately want to either break into ETH mining before it goes PoS or just want to pick up an extra graphics card since they've finally become available again.

The proof of said sodomy lies in Newegg.  Newegg and BitcoinMerch.com are both US companies, so the comparison is fair.  Let's go card by card, starting with the 3090.  BM is selling an ASUS ROG Strix model, whereas I could only find a Gigabyte one on Newegg, but they're both OC and both have 24GB of VRAM.  I should state here that in upcoming differences like this, when it comes to mining....if the specs are the same, that's probably all you care about.  Here's what Newegg's got:


$3099.99 vs. $2243.98.  Gouge=$856.01.

Next, the 3080 Founder's Edition (open box) which Newegg did not have.  What they did have was a brand new ASUS ROG Strix 3080 OC with the same specs bundled with a mobo:


When you look at what the card is going for all by itself:



So, $2399.99 vs. $1599.99.  Gouge=$800.  

Moving straight on to the MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Super.  Newegg has the exact same card in stock:


In this case, $799.99 vs. $499.99.  Gouge=$300.  

Now, Newegg didn't stock the ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 3050 Twin Edge OC model, but they certainly did have a 3050 that could do whatever the ZOTAC one could have done (which isn't much from what I've heard).  Once again it's in one of Newegg's stupid little bundles, one of the ways they rip their customers off:


And here's the price of the 3050 if it weren't tied up to that sad little B450 piece of shit that's probably gathering dust in the warehouse:


For the crappy 3050, the ripoff from BitcoinMerch's end is $649.99 vs $379.99.  Gouge=$270.  That's the most outrageous one in this list IMO, because at Newegg you could have picked up a cheap 1650 4GB and the 3050 for what BM was charging for just the one--and both cards suck for mining anyway.

The light's at the end of the tunnel, folks.  BM lists the GIGABYTE NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 LHR AORUS Master, whereas Newegg has what looks to be the same thing in stock (again with the combo):


And the price inside the combo:


Results: $1199.99 vs. $729.99.  Gouge=$470.

Onward to the Asus ROG GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition.  Newegg has the same card bundled with a decent motherboard (but why???):


Price separately:


Extent of BitcoinMerch.com's fuck you to its customers: $949.99 vs. $549.99.  Gouge=$400.

And last but not least, the PowerColor HellHound AMD Radeon RX6600 which Newegg also stocks:


Distance from scrotum to sphincter in this case: $749.99 vs. $519.99.  Gouge=$230.

---

Now why in the world did I decide to make this thread?  Well, it's been my observation for years that anyone in the bitcoin space who's both selling you something and telling you he's looking out for you is either figuring a way to fleece you or already has the plan in place--and I've also been noticing that all the mining-based retailers that I know of are engaged in price gouging in some form or another, and they're the ones you'd think would be least likely to do that, no?

All of the prices I showed were Newegg prices, not Newegg affiliates btw.  Even a big faceless company like them is figuring out ways to get a few more dollars out of the crazed GPU miners, but it's nowhere near as bad as BitcoinMerch.com.

I think BitcoinMerch recently put their egg-fried heads together recently and came up with a new business model.  It goes like this: When GPUs become available from big box retailers again, let's scoop them all up and then jack up the prices as hard as we can and scalp anyone with a pair of eyeballs focused on 6GB or higher cards, because FUCK THOSE MINERS.

These jokers should be ashamed of themselves.  And I'd like to reiterate that they said "We lowered all our prices just for you, so you can start mining ASAP".  Uh, yeah.  Anyone who buys one of their cards should be mining from the mailbox to the porch, 'cause the time to hit the break-even point on it is basically extended to infinity by BitcoinMerch because of their greed.

Been awake many hours and if I made mistakes, let me know.  I probably did.

Pfft.  $1000/month in the US is living in poverty--seriously, even if you don't have a family to support, and especially when inflation is creeping up at around 7% annually.

I'll be honest, I have no idea what OP means by a side job or at what threshold said side job becomes the main job.  I've often heard talk of "side hustles" which are usually schemes or off-the-books work that doesn't get reported to the tax man.  If that's what OP is talking about, I'd say that if your side hustle is making you more money than your regular job, there's probably something illegal going on (like drug dealing, for instance).

But as long as your side business isn't hurting anyone, who am I to say that a person shouldn't try to supplement their income--especially if that income is insufficient to begin with.  The government has stacked the chips so hard against the average person that I'm not one to judge harshly when it comes to these sorts of things.  Ya know?

Yeah, that's a bunch of bullshit if you ask me.  I really dislike all of these "emergency powers" that the government can just bestow upon themselves basically whenever they think it's necessary.  And yes I realize that they're not a new thing at all, but when you look at a situation like this with a bunch of protesters you start to see how politicians being able to level up straight to God Mode is not a good thing.

I wouldn't have thought Canada would stoop to the Draconian measures the US and some other countries have imposed on their citizenry, but I guess we're really living in a different time, eh?

Not sure what the status is of the protest and the truckers, but I'm rooting for them all the way.

Damn, once again I've arrived at an interesting thread late, where everything I could have said has already been said--I was going to mention ninjatastic.space as well.  I rarely visit that site or BPIP, but I spent some time on ninjatastic today looking at my posting stats, as I knew I'd been seriously slacking in the past few months and wanted to see the raw data (and damn was I on the money to my chagrin).

Somewhere in the back of my brain I knew these add-ons existed, but I just have BPIP and ninjatastic.space bookmarked and it's easy enough for me to use either one quickly if I need to.  And yeah, it'd be cool if Theymos officially added a feature that linked a member's profile to one of those sites....but I wouldn't hold my breath.

I'm not sure I've ever consciously thought of Theymos as an OG bitcoiner (perhaps because I know so little about him).  Yes, I am aware of the history of his association with bitcointalk and if you'd asked me if he was a super-early adopter of bitcoin I would have answered "yes" with no hesitation, but that knowledge has apparently just lurked in my subconscious because seeing that post about him mining BTC with an Intel CPU sort of made me say wow....

Kids these days, eh?  Twelve years ago to me seems like yesterday when I'm thinking back on what I was doing at the time--but oddly, when I think about it in the context of bitcoin it seems like an eternity.  But by the year 2002-02 it seemed like a lot of people I knew owned at least a desktop PC, and I live in the US.  I definitely knew quite a few folks who didn't.  By 2010?  Yeah, if you didn't own a PC or laptop, you still had some type of mobile device to connect to the internet with.

By the way, how powerful was that Pentium for its time?  Was it considered a high-end CPU?  I plead ignorance as to Intel's offerings, especially for processors that old.  And how long was it until faucets started popping up?  I remember seeing one archived from 2011 or so that gave away what would be a massive amount of bitcoin today.  That's how a lot of people got their start with bitcoin, and it's too bad that they've all but disappeared.

Yeah, I can only imagine how much of a bummer it was for relatively-newish members right when the merit system was rolled out.  The day before the merit system existed, all the lower-ranked members were well on their way to becoming Legendary with enough time and posting....and ever since the day the merit system has existed, it's become harder to get to Legendary probably by a factor of at least 8.

Congrats on getting to Sr. Member, OP.  I suspect if you just posted more, you'd probably have been at least a Hero member by now.  One thing newer members need to realize is that unless you're a superb poster, the fraction of posts that you'll earn merits for is fairly low--so in order to have a shot at ranking up in a reasonable amount of time, you need to post frequently and make those posts stand out.  If you only post a couple of times a week, it's more likely than not those posts are just going to get buried, unmerited and forgotten about, and that'll happen within less than a day.

Agreed.

Edit:  BTW, OP, if you want to take me up on my offer of a monthly post history review, feel free to drop me a PM asking me to do so.  I don't know how many posts you average per month, but it might pay off and help you rank up faster--and it certainly couldn't hurt, right? 

(And as always, I extend the same offer to any member under Legendary rank who doesn't already have 1000 merits).

In other words, grow a thicker skin if you want to stay sane whilst being a member of bitcointalk.  There, I said it in a semi-polite manner--and heed that advice, OP, because it's valid.  The title of this thread alludes to some sort of disrespect on the part of the mods and directed toward you, but I'm 99.99% sure that isn't the case.  Nor is it even disrespectful for them to delete posts in general; it just happens, and it happens to the best posters from time to time.

Since your post wasn't exactly so valuable that its absence deprives other members of valuable information, just let it go.  Why are you so concerned about a post on movies in the Off-Topic section of such concern to you anyway?  I did read what you wrote, but in the end it's really no big deal--so just move on.

Seriously?  Lol.  I don't know how even the average person who has no interest in crypto could avoid knowing anything about NFTs even if they wanted to (which they should, because they're crapola).

There's already an active thread about having an NFT subsection, OP.  That's in addition to all the other ones I've seen over the past few months--and you're going to get all the same responses, so you might as well lock this one up lest it get filled with shitposts.

The bottom line is what you've been told in the first few posts here: NFTs belong in the altcoin section, and Theymos (as far as anyone knows) has no plans on adding a separate section for them.  This is, first and foremost, a forum about bitcoin--not about cryptocurrency in general.  The altcoiners are lucky Theymos was feeling generous when he created the altcoin sections, though there's so much garbage being cranked out that it's nearly torture to try to read anything there.