Buying equipment is not illegal. Mining or minting coins that have no value to you might not be a good defense in a democratic country where people wish to mine them. So in that sense, governments cannot ban such coins from being mined, moreover it only creates more tension in the already edgy bitcoin economy where everyone dreads getting persecuted.

However I do agree that equipment manufacturers are going to be in a lot of profit from these sales. Trying to stop them from buying would be bad for their own business so they would not do that. However they may put in specific counter measures to prevent people from mining on their devices which in turn also turns their revenue against them.

This situation is pretty sticky indeed. But I am sure some middle ground will be achieved in due course between the governments stopping shitcoins and chip manufacturers.

Firstly, learn how to use the BBCode properly. Those bold tags did not function as you wanted them to.

I would agree with @mk4 here. Seems like you are misinformed about the subtle difference between Trading and Investing.

I would suggest buying bitcoin but at lower price. Currently the price is high.

This would be done better after checking charts and seeing which coins have been performing better in the mid-term. But this is theoretical, the more practical approach is again not buying altcoins because they have literally no long term value. Today you buy some shitcoin hoping to see a 10x gain in 6months and tomorrow you might find out that the project has undergone internal takeover causing the next price to dump as low as -100x

So in a way, bitcoin is the only safe bet.

On Reddit it is paid shills. On Twitter, Facebook it is paid bounty participants. You can see the similarity now?

Language barriers might be present for such incidents to be present. I specially found certain country users English to be barely understandable or sometimes even give a wrong meaning. Not that you can help that, but guide them to post in their "Local" sections. Otherwise, just report the post as "Offtopic" and most of the times it gets acted upon by mods.

News sites are niche and they run mostly on the news already being posted on mainstream news or paid articles from crypto related businesses. I dont think comparing the forum to news sites is same. There is a marketplace area in this forum too where some people running businesses and a technical and mining related section.

Social media is the worst place to be associated with crypto. In case you are a long time user, you would already know this.

Spam posts will not earn merits. Because merit sources are handpicked by the admin, you can be sure of this.

More people joining the forum is a good thing - it shows bitcoin is being adopted globally - do you not want that?

Lastly, if you dont like the content in this forum, why are you still here? You are free to leave if you wish to.

Take it from a different perspective, the FUD spreaders need to create FUD so they get a better price to buy. That is how a speculative market works, you try to manipulate someone into selling an asset to you at lower than market price so you can sell that and make a profit off the difference. Most of the time it works on weak hands who dont understand how things work.

You see there are three distinct phases to the content posted in this forum:
1. FOMO phase, when bitcoin rises - everyone wants to buy.
2. FUD phase, when bitcoin drops - everyone wants to sell.
3. Stagnant phase - here margin traders want to spread their affiliate links and promote futures and perps to their targeted population that is newbies, knowing fully well that newbies will lose money in perpetuals.

If you are a seasoned trader you will have learnt to ignore all three.

It was supposed to be like that. But did that work out like it was supposed to be? No, because this section is plagued by hype inducers and shills who make sure hype runs to allow them to make profit.

If something is allowing you to make profit, it is normal that people will show interest in it. I would agree with you that the depiction of this as "Selfish" by the OP is wrong and only a personal comment.

There are some art creators out there with genuine interest in this but will never get the attention they need to grow because of such profit making mongers. Sadly but true that real art creators will prefer to always stay in the fiat market and not move.

Rightly said, as with all hype backed crazes out in the internet and the followership of "trends" by social media, this will also die down at some point. So if you buying them, you need an exit plan and be able to execute that too. It will not last long, so dont get fooled into buying worthless shit like what happens in every hype cycle.

You cant just expect every human being in this world to have access to internet, electricity and a smartphone every second - because that is the necessary ingredients to run a wallet and use it to pay using cryptocurrency. That is where physical currency is used more - in the rural areas and less developed countries. The contrary is also not true - majority of the developed countries are trying to regulate a system to allow cryptocurrency but most of them have not been able to use it.

In either cases, fiat is the only failsafe, however bad that might sound to anybody, it is the truth for now.

Also, digital currency and bitcoin are not the same. Digital version of fiat needs similar ingredients to run but it is essentially fiat.

What some users have been saying about the pandemic, they are wrong - it is digital currency that took flight not bitcoin. Bitcoin adoption remained where it has been. This is logical too, since in the time of a crisis, you would want to use the more liquid version than the rarely used version depending on where you live.

Loss would be incurred if you sold at the bottom instead of buying or bought at the high. I havent sold any coins at such points and so I dont have anything to recover. My sell orders are currently at higher than current prices, waiting to be filled when the bull trend starts again.

Downfall may occur true, but the chances of breaking out are more. Since the last few weeks now, the price is trying to inch away to 51k USD but is facing a selling pressure at that range and dropping back down to 49-48k USD. But we can be proven wrong in case some bagholder decides to dump it all right now.

Focus more on buying and selling at the proper level than trying to recover a loss. Dont run behind a loss, instead try to even out a loss with more profit. Cycling the money between these two mentioned points is a risky move but not a bad move at this point. This is easier said than done, but good luck.

I was just looking at their social media pages and their instagram page is a complete troll page with nothing but a picture collage and same on twitter.

They are even "paying" for posting on bitcointalk forum - https://dogetrix.com/dogeaways

Namecheap not taking action is a bad thing, but nothing we can do about it, its beyond our control.

Also supermoney has been in this fourm for years and doing the same thing over and over, like I have said before, they are a troll at heart and there is nothing to be done on that account after all the warnings. Thanks to Musk et al, these type of scams will run and rip people off with time.

Flag has been supported yesterday, did not get time to reply.

Would also like to point out that this has changed a lot recently. It is not about being friendly, it about doing what is right and the SEC is going the right thing, even if you might disagree. Their objective now is to regulate cryptocurrency for the betterment of the investors, which is a good thing for some naive newbies who get misled into scam projects.

See in this sector, other than hype there is no other method to develop a market for a useless thing. Bitcoin does not come into this because it has its own deflationary growth and it is available to be spent on many places.

But all other altcoins are based on hype, the maximum of that can be seen by what happened to DOGE the last few months.

This hype cycle needs a new topic to run, they went from vapoware altcoins>ICO and its hundred other naming variations>DeFi>NFT. Very soon something new will come in and the NFT will be come useless too. It is how this market is, you can simply choose to ignore it and continue to focus on what coins you have felt will rise in future.

The main victims of these scams are those who are being told that mining is a profitable venture but nobody tells them how tough it is to ROI on today's hashpower competition. So they go for methods which can be a "short cut" and like our folks always taught us, there is no shortcut to success, likewise these are scams and they will steal your money if you make the mistake of giving them money.

Dont forget that mining on the physical grounds is a tough to ROI venture, but is the only way one can mine if they wish to. Any "cloud mining" is a scam, this you can assume to be 100% correct.

I am not sure about this Polka<>Pixel cycle, look what I found,

The Advisor Soowhan of this project is also the CEO of the PolkaTrail project - https://kr.linkedin.com/in/soowhan-doh?trk=public_profile_browsemap

Again the person posting the thread, from similarity of names I conclude that must be is also marketing manager of both PixelVerse (as per the link above) and PolkaTrail - https://kr.linkedin.com/company/polkatrail

This does not conclude anything though and I am reluctant to take any action without further information. The OP who posted the thread seems to be posting for many other projects too. Suspicious, but I would like to hear from others.

I am old school person who prefers going with things that are known to give good returns and do have any hype machine to run them. This is applicable to bitcoin and the first few altcoins that came, namely litecoin.

The problem with NFT and before that DeFi staking pools or ICOs which came even before is that each of them have a hype to run them and do not have any intrinsic method to create a market of their own. Therefore the long term value of such investments is grim, however big they may grow on this day. I can say this backed by experience, such new projects have been known in the past too but today nobody remembers them. This is because majority of people who lost money investing in ICOs never came back, but moved on.

Newbies fall for these and end up wasting money. Only to be left with frustration and bad memories.

You expect every mainstream company to stop running their stocks public and move to cryptocurrency? You need to get your head out of the mud my friend.

Even today the acceptance and use of crypto is a minuscule of the total economy. This is not pessimism but a place to show that there is room for improvement. But defenitely not going to happen to mainstream companies like that.

Rather what is possible is that crypto may become useful enough to be spent to buy stocks if you wish to. There is a market for this and even though the Binance Stock tokens was shut down recently, I feel there will be better implementation of this concept in future.

Real estate was facing a bubble before the pandemic. Most of the time you need time to tide over losses. It is possible that with the pandemic now showing signs of reduction in many countries you might see a rise in prices once again. So dont lose hope, you just need to carry on for a little longer.

I dont think concentration has anything to do with profit in that sense. If you are talking about day trading and being able to run it since it runs 24x7, then to make lives easier you can develop your own bots that can monitor markets and send you information on the go. This is not possible for those who lack a programming background but it is possible to learn and execute.

Otherwise keep life simple and not day trade - keeps all the anxiety and social problems away and makes sure the trader remains sane and continues with the natural livelihood.

Whether one can make a specific amount like the OP said, I would not bet on it. It is possible but not necessary to make. Being able to profit a certain percentage of your capital should be your target not a specific amount, but the market changes are not in control of your hands so even then there is no harm if a certain month goes negative for you.

It is not about agreeing to a statement, but a necessity for any trader willing to take part in speculative assets. I would go on saying that only invest what you can afford to lose.

When you are taking a risk, you have to assume the worst and thank your lucky stars if you make a profit. That discipline is important and it is lacking among many traders. Specially when the money that you get from your day job is being put into investing one must make sure they are dividing the income properly and not over spending on any of the possible expenditure routes.

The reason why many traders end up frustrated after trading is that they assumed profits when in reality they may have incurred losses. So if the mindset was different they may still be able to tide over the bad times and continue. These statements have not been made by some book - they come from experience of older traders.

Newbies should not start trading right away.

In coming to crypto, one must first learn how to secure their wallets and keeping their coins secure. This will prevent a lot of problems in later on when they are actively trading.

Once that is done, they should start with reading charts and learning how market movements occur and see if they are able to predict movements. This is where dummy trading comes into play like some other members have suggested. Without having done that for at least half a year one can end up making the most horrible mistakes that every newbie does in the real field. If you make those mistakes on paper, you will learn quickly.

Capital is in my opinion not an important constraint. If you are a bitcoin trader, your capital does not change much. It starts making sense to allocate capital only when you are into shitcoin trading and newbies should defenitely not do that.

I remember the days of Centra tech pretty well and the number of celebrities involved in it. Their bounty was going on pretty well too - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2057569.0

Take a look at these from 2018:
Two Celebrities Charged With Unlawfully Touting Coin Offerings

and the court preceeding https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2018/33-10578.pdf

Additionally, forum user @yogg was being forced to giving positive trust to the account promoting the Centra ANN on this forum.
Read more here - [CENTRA] Trust abuser offers to buy positive feedback for ICO token dev profile

Pretty nasty how promoting a ICO could end up with problems that can tarnish the reputation of established celebs. In most cases the celebs themselves are pretty ignorant of it and only paid and told what they need to know. It is a paid up hush hush thing and that is why one must never use the names of celebs as a positive point when evaluating projects, rather use it as a negative point.

With time some more similar scams may get unearthed. Shows how shady this sector can be at times when you get your hands dirty with altcoins.

Why dont you build a time machine and find out yourself?

Makes sense to invest your money in them - does it not?

If they go public, the price will rise in the long term. In the short term it may drop but not the long term. You have to understand the politics here. The advisors of Binance dont want their product to lose value, so they will buy into it. But for how long it is not known, so if you buy make sure to sell after a short holding. Dont keep them for the long term because that is not feasible for a worthy profit.

Unlike bitcoin though, these coins are fueled by influence and that my friend, is a thing that is temporary.

Just "lost"? You are not telling your complete side of the story. You cant just deposit coins on an exchange and have them "lost" - you either sent those coins to a phishing site which cloned HitBTC pretty well or you lost money when trading on margin which has been recently started there. Either way it would be a fault from your side, because if it was not, then the exchange would have restored the money.

hitBTC is not that shady that they will outright rob their users' funds like that so stop lying.

Then why are you still using them?

I feel this post is just to add mind-made accusations on HitBTC, I know they are shady but they are not scamming users like that. If you are having some genuine problems, you can post on their telegram channel too, it is pretty active and they might be able to solve it.

You will not encounter losses or reduce them if you keep yourself focused on bitcoin and shun all altcoins. Just think of this: if the biggest share of your capital was into bitcoin bought at low price - how much unrealized profit would you be making?

I doubt any trader actually is able to make so much without showing proof. I suggest you to focus more on yourself rather than comparing with others a common mistake everyone commits. Instead of going for shitcoins, DeFi, NFT, you can use the hype created by them to get into more bitcoin. This can help you get more profits if you know when to enter into bitcoin.

In the long run, these hype machined projects do not have significance however they may try to speak of it. They are only trying to get the money out of your pocket.