So the Libra is actually cancelled? I remember hearing about it years ago and it was even discussed on the radio that Facebook was going to launch a cryptocurrency. And Facebook being big, I assumed it would over come their regulatory issues.

I am not surprised however because there is just way too much regulation in the way.
And being new technology the government doesn’t want the Libra to be used for illegal activities. Even though cash is being used for illegal activities all the time.

I basically stopped replacing any fans on GPUs. The only time I replace the fans is when I am about to sell it to some gamer because I don’t want them to run into any heating issues.

Depending on what type of fan setup is in there, usually the very cheap fans you can take off the fan blade and add mineral oil in the bearing and it’ll work a few more months.

Or you can just take off the fans and shrouds and just add a case fan and run it on max speed. It’ll never over heat that way. If it does then add 2 case fans just in case.

ETH was suppose to actually go live with POS back in 2016. Everybody was talking about it like it was almost coded and going to launch. It actually prevented me from buying more GPUs in 2016.

I don’t know how the ETH devs feel when they have pretty much delayed POS by 6 years and it’ll be another 1-2 before it actually goes live. So don’t worry, it’s not going POS anytime soon. Keep mining.

There are many reasons why some mine at a loss. One of them can be that they are doing it as a hobby and the primary goal is not the money, they do it to keep themselves occupied. It takes alot of time to build rigs and maintain them.

Another reason is that someone maybe doesn't want to KYC to buy coins. If they mine them instead they don't need to worry about that until it's time to sell.

Obviously if you are spending more mining than it would cost to buy directly then it doesn't make sense. Plus if you buy directly you can buy months or years worth of mining instead of just waiting for the daily pool payouts. So if it rallies you won't miss out and get stuck with an increasing difficulty.

I don’t think it’s the institutions which are causing all these moves. Basically Bitcoin trades at something like 0.9 correlation with stock markets so many crypto traders are just watching the SP500 charts and following every move. And that’s why the correlation is there.

I haven’t seen it be this closely correlated for a long time however I just think many traders are taken advantage of that to make money. We saw what happened today with FOMC and crypto traders basically started the sell off when the stock market indices were crashing during Jpows speech.

I don’t think $34K was the low but I also don’t think $20K will be the low. And I also don’t think $30K will be the low. Most likely we will bottom somewhere in $25K area.

One reason is that too many people want to buy at $30K or $20K. Most will buy at $30K and have a stop loss at $28K. And when it gets trigggered it’ll go down to like $25K or so.

At $25K nobody will buy because they think $20K will most likely get tested and it’ll never go there. Maybe even $22-25K but I don’t think it will touch $20K.

At the true bottom of the bear market, even if you got cheap or free power, most of you will not bother to mine at all.

In 2019 when ETH was $100, the rx580 made about $0.20 a day in profit with 10 cents electrical it made a total of $0.00 in profit.

So even if your power was 5 cents or free, most wouldn’t bother doing this to make a dime a day per GPU. If you really believed in crypto you would just buy it directly instead of mining it.

I had this old Antminer S3 which I had very quiet and I decided to try my luck solo mining Bitcoin with it. This was maybe 5 years ago.

I mined for about 9 months before I decided to throw in the towel. Didn’t even come close to finding a large best share which was maybe 1% of the difficulty back then. I think a few guys on the ckpool solo had an Antminer S5 and they managed to find a block or two.

So try your luck but you need to be really really lucky.

I actually had that GPU before it was called Cedar or something like that. And I tried mining with it Litecoin back in the day and I got something like 10kh/s.

Which is horrible when back then a r9 280x pulled about 700kh/s. So even though it had like 1gb of ram which was considered a lot back then you couldn’t mine anything with it really.

These days a 280x is considered slow. So imagine how bad a 5450 will be.

I had to this this hot air removal job on a Jupiter before. Basically I had a few boards which had 1 or 2 dead components so i figured I would remove from a dead board and add to a board with 1 dead die and get all 4 working instead of having a Jupiter with 4 modules and each modules had 1 dead die.

So I tried heating up that part which I think was a large VRM but I had to keep adding heat. And after 30 mins i finally got it off and it still didn’t work. Most likely added too much heat and fried the VRM.

Soldering it back on was the easy part but getting it off was a pain.

I zoomed in and it doesn’t look like it touched. It’ll touch maybe if the sell off keeps going on this week and we head into the $25-30K then I see a potential bottom somewhere there however at $34k I think we are just getting a dead cat bounce and nothing more.

This week has a lot of news like FOMC and major stock earnings which are all supposed to be a miss like Netflix last week. So if Microsoft has horrible earnings and tanks like 10% then Bitcoin will most likely follow.

The nasdaq is just an weighted index for the largest 100 stocks on the nasdaq exchange. Just like the dow30 is the top30 blue chip stocks. They are just an index so you can see how the overall market is doing.

Will it help you trade Bitcoin. No not really because you have no idea whether the nasdaq will go up or down on a particular day. If you did have a crystal ball then you can just trade the nasdaq instead of Bitcoin.

Usually they move at the same time because tradings are watching them closely. However keep in mind sometimes the correlation disappears and following the index can lead to chop.

Most of the people that started investing in 2021 only did it because they knew Bitcoin went from $1K to $20K about 4 years prior and they are expecting the same kind of returns.

So they take out a calculator and put $20K x 20 and are expecting a price of $400,000. So this is the reason why many retail didn’t take much profits before $100K hit. They all believed that planB guy on Twitter who said $100k was guaranteed in November and never took profits at $69K.

Same with people who bought ETH, they were expecting at least $10k and perhaps $5k and neither were hit.

The only thing that Dogecoin and Shiba coin right now are good for is shorting every single spike that they get. Whenever Elon musk says anything about Doge it pumped like 25%, usually one pump followed by another and then it starts to fade and go down.

Just pull up any doge chart and have a look. Every single time that he tweet doge, it ends up going back down to where it was. Too many people still believe it will go to $1.

Yes real estate is a great investment however investing now seems very risky. Real estates in some parts are crazy. And it’s getting to the point where all the young professionals are just packing up and moving to a different city to be able to finally afford a house.

Look at what happened with San Francisco, it had one of the most expensive real estate prices. And it became too expensive to live so people either went homeless or moved elsewhere. Now the city is full of crime that the police don’t prosecute certain crimes such as shop lifting. Now as a result many large retailers are closing shop in the area and moving out.

So it’s not always a risk free investment.

I also never had any luck with Elliot waves. I used to study them 10 years ago and basically in hindsight they were very reliable. However the issue is when you are forward trading instead of back testing it’s very difficult to see which wave you are in.

When you zoom out it’s always easy however when you are trading it live you will keep incorrectly guessing the waves and it’ll be very unreliable.

I think that C won’t happen, it won’t be a higher low but mostly likely has a better chance at being a double bottom. We will see. Most likely this week the $30K area might get tested.

I don’t think it was the bottom. The stock market futures opened and went up 1% and so did Bitcoin however the stock futures are trading nears highs but Bitcoin is starting to correct itself and retrace the entire move, it’s pretty bearish.

Some low liquidity traders basically took advantage of the stock futures opened and quickly brought it up, but now that volume is returning seems like the bears are in control.

If stock market during NY opens negative then I can see us breaking lower than $34K.

No the returns for Bitcoin aren’t going to make you rich anymore. Maybe $34K was the local bottom and we can go back to $70K or even $100K. How much profit is that? About 3x. And that’s only if you buy at the low and sell at the absolute high which is not realistic.

Gone are the days when people bought BTC at $100 or mined 50BTC blocks with their GPUs. So Bitcoin won’t make you rich anymore. This is why many people are putting money into NFTs, DeFI, Meme coins, Meta, etc.

Imagine buying doge at 1 penny and selling at 70 cents a few months later. Those are amazing profits. However those investments are extremely risky.

One thing I just realized is that, it’s no coincidence that whenever Litecoin has a quick pump, it usually leads to a bear market for Bitcoin.

Pull up the weekly chart and check. Whenever it has these pumps, it quickly retraced and the local top is in for Bitcoin.

It seems they sell BTC for LTC and then they sell into fiat or tether and the cycle repeats a few months or years later.

Market sentiment right now is extremely bearish. So I think that $34K was the local bottom for now however most likely it might reach some resistance near $40K and head back down and break $30K.

Many people were liquidated and many sold at a huge loss. Imagine buying at $69K and having your investment lose half its value within 2 months. Lots of fear right now. Complete opposite of what it was when we were at $69k and $100K was gauranteed to hit in nov/dec just like that guy plan2 predicted with his charts.