It's often easier, simpler and more inexpensive for projects to pay their bounties in whatever coin or token they're offering rather than something bigger like Bitcoin. I'm sure most project managers and developers are aware of the benefits of paying in BTC or ETH or really any major cryptocurrency, but considering a lot of projects now are just money hungry and don't care about much other than than money, those running the projects are probably okay with the potential of dumping right after launch.

I used to mine BTC and alts, but I've since shut down all of my operations as my electrical rates have gone up to a price that I've determined to be relatively uncompetitive at the moment compared to my potential gains and the rising difficulty on most chains at the moment, and I also enjoy the peace of mind that comes with not having miners in my house. It's also become less interesting to me over the last few years, though I do occasionally take a look at new miners and developments like that.

That being said, most of my income from cryptocurrency tends to come from trading and holding. I dollar cost average a bit of what I can afford to spend into mostly Bitcoin and a few other altcoins weekly, and I trade just a small percentage of the coins I hold. I've made more from holding than trading to date, but considering the risks involved in trading I'm perfectly fine with that.

Interesting. I'm not a big fan of dice since I just don't find it extremely interesting most of the time, but I do like taking looks at the strategies people devise for it, and I might try these out in the future. Haven't ever heard of the first one personally, though I've seen plenty of variations of the Martingale strategy over the years.

House edge is typically pretty high on most dice games and you'll end up losing money over time mathematically, but if you're gambling responsibly with the expectations that the chances that you hit a large win are small, then it's fine in my eyes.

Even if the person happened to be legitimate, past performance doesn't indicate future success and even a good trader can end up in losing streaks from time to time. There's just an extremely high risk that any account managers you can find online might be scamming you anyways that makes it really not worth the risk or effort to find a legitimate account manager in the first place that's actually got any good knowledge and real experience in the crypto markets anyways.

In short, you're much better off just learning how to trade yourself. It's very tempting to take shortcuts to earn money, but most of the time you end up either losing your money or get scammed.

Advertising outside of specifically crypto-oriented places like this forum can be a good thing for some projects if these projects are designed to be simple to understand and newbie-friendly as you're getting a new set of eyes to look at your project outside of the typical crypto investors that might otherwise skip over your project for something else, but I do agree that it's certainly not the most effective way to attract investors as there are also plenty of people that just don't care about cryptocurrency or still think it's too difficult to understand or other reasons too. Might be a good idea to try if you've got the funds to do so, however.

If you're already losing money on your rigs, I don't see any reason why not to sell off your rigs. As much as I support PoW mining, there's no telling if mining could become more profitable in the future, and it's not a good nor safe idea to be hoping that it does. You're probably only going to get less money selling the rig(s) in the future as technology and efficiency advances pretty rapidly and used equipment tends to lose value relatively quickly, so if you do decide to sell, doing it quickly is best.

If you think a bull run's coming up ahead, you could use the funds you gain from selling your rigs to just buying some coins and waiting for them to go up as well.

0xBTC seems to be PoW mineable from what I've read in the past about it (click here for a link to its official website), though the coin doesn't seem to be very successful at the moment and hasn't seen much major price action since its first few recorded months on Coinmarketcap. For more specifics to its PoW mechanism, the coin's using the keccak256 algo according to its whitepaper (click for direct link) and it seems to work very similarly to other mineable coins like BTC (the total supply's even 21 million just like BTC). Just doesn't seem like it's picked up any major uses besides being a PoW mineable token, hence the token's currently low price.

If you're just looking to buy the coin and you've got money on hand, the simplest thing to do that might incur some fees is just to simply buy the coins through Coinbase and pay the fees that Coinbase charges for spread and all or try to buy those coins through Coinbase Pro, though the latter will probably take more time for you if you're newer to Bitcoin. If available, if you want to cut the fees that you're taking with these buys, try to purchase the coins through a bank account. You'll be paying less in fees this way.

I would be very surprised if a majority of the volume VinDAX claims to have is legit. The site does rank relatively high on the adjusted volume ratings that Coinmarketcap gives out, but that doesn't mean much considering there are still plenty of relatively new and not-so-reputable exchanges near the top of the list that also likely fake their volume, and you're likely better off using alternatives like Binance if you're looking to avoid problems anyways.

Someone's always winning on one side of a price movement, so it's not truly against everyone's benefits especially when leveraged trading's very commonplace nowadays (yet still very risky), even with altcoin pairs. A sharp decrease in price or dumping usually doesn't end very long, either, and there are usually plenty of opportunities afterwards to make a profit through using technical analysis if you're trading on shorter timeframes too, and if you've determined it to be a good time to do so, accumulating shortly after a dump can sometimes be a good move.

There's money to be made from any price movement. You just need to adapt to how the crypto markets work, especially with how almost everything tends to be correlated to Bitcoin at least to some small degree.

Another site where you can get relatively detailed information on Bitfinex's BTCUSD pair as well the longs and shorts is Datamish (click for direct link), and the site also shows the total number of longs and shorts on Bitfinex as well as the daily interest or maintenance cost for those longs in percentages as well. The site also shows how many shorts are hedged and non-hedged as well, and I use it from time for time to view liquidations on Bitmex too.

If you want to change the timeframe of the data you're viewing, simply click at the top right of the page on the clock icon and you can customize it from there.

This is why you should set a price where you cut your losses before you even enter a trade. You don't want to be emotionally affected by a trade and be scared to cut losses while you're already in it and down in profits, and as OP said, there's no guarantee that even major cryptocurrencies won't go to zero or take a significant cut in prices. Determine how much you're willing to risk before investing, and determine potential rewards and size your investment accordingly. I've liked plenty of projects in the past (especially Bitcoin), but I've never become extremely attached to any of them to the point that it's overridden my trading and investment logic.

I also agree. I've been around for the last halving and from what I remember, nothing much happened and it was actually what happened in the ensuing months that was significant and was likely still tied to the halving, though, and I don't think many people actually expect the exact date of the halving or the days/weeks around it to be when the real action starts to happen, though it'll probably kick in soon enough afterwards. You also have to remember that history doesn't always repeat itself like you would expect, though, and I'm certainly ready for a case where the price doesn't significantly move upwards even a few months after the halving kicks in. Could certainly be a possibility considering a lot of people seem to be banking on it now and Bitcoin likes to screw over the majority.

It's extremely easy to forget your responsibilities and all when you're heavily addicted to something, and it's not always easy to realize you've deserted those responsibilities once you're in the thick of an addiction, though I do agree that you should always be managing your money well and practice good spending habits while you're still doing well so you hopefully don't ever become addicted to gambling in the first place.

For me personally, I only spend a fraction of my salary on gambling and I actually put most of the other money into my other hobbies instead. I'm not a frequent gambler, but it's always nice to have a bit of money set aside for it when I have time. I'm currently single at the moment so there's not much I need to spend on the family side, but I'll hopefully still be responsible with my money when I do have my own family.

Definitely the latter; the U.S doesn't play around with issues like this especially involving money laundering, evading sanctions and North Korea, and he's probably going to prison for doing so. No idea if he's going to get the maximum sentence or anything, but still a dumb decision nevertheless.

I've also found a separate article from Forbes that seems to go more in-depth on the issue (click for direct link). One of the quotes from here mentions that Griffith was told not to go but went anyways. Yikes.

Some devs cut corners on their product, and sometimes that means not actively taking steps towards getting their project, whether it be a token or coin, listed on a semi-reputable exchange. Doesn't make a ton of sense to me because the cost for listing a coin on an exchange should not be a significant cost compared to how much money many of these projects are still raising even when the alt and crypto markets aren't doing so well in general, but a lot of developers and project managers seem to be more interested in short-term profits than longer-term profit.

Most people new to cryptocurrency flock to centralized exchanges because they usually advertise themselves way more than decentralized exchanges with things like trading contests, promotions like reduced fees and so on. Centralized exchanges also typically boast more useful features than most decentralized exchanges and a boatload of guides and usually decently fast customer support, not to mention a lot of them are just way more newbie-friendly in terms of their interfaces, though DEXes have started catching up here. A lot of decentralized exchanges also have pretty poor liquidity at the moment stemming from a lack of people using them which loops right back to my first point.

If you happen to be talking about Bitmex, every contract represents one buyer and one seller and so the long-to-short ratio always truly remains 1:1, but it's currently not possible to know the leverage of those longs and shorts, and it's different to the BTCUSDLONGS and BTCUSDSHORTS that you can view for Bitfinex on sites like TradingView.

I agree that the ETH might not reach $1000 again, but we're currently at $154 as of today, and there's about $850 to go to even touch $1000. There's plenty of space for moves within this relatively large range, and even though ICOs are not as prevalent as they used to be, I expect IEOs and ICOs and fundraising efforts of this type will probably start to become popular once again if Bitcoin starts moving up towards its previous high of around $20k once more.

There's no guarantee that you'll be making profits in any sort paid group regardless of what the owner says, and most of these groups advertise themselves either as too good to be true or better than they actually are by selectively picking success, and I would highly recommend taking the traditional route of learning the basics of trading and adding bits and pieces on to that basic knowledge 'till you become a more proficient trader.  The admins of paid signal groups often make more from subscriptions than they actually make from trading sometimes as well.

Just doesn't make sense at the end of the day to be paying for some monthly subscription to make money when you could set aside your own time to learn something that'll stick with you for a long time and is free. The only thing learning will cost you is your time.