I think the reason why many new miners get burnt is because they have no idea what the concept of "difficulty" is. I had this problem when I started mining in 2014. Bitcoin back then was like $1000 and I understood that if it goes to $900, I will make around 10% less money and I was fine with that and kept buying GPUs.

However I didn't realise that there is difficulty and that also kept going up, while price kept going down. I remember having a bunch of expensive R9 280X GPUs and I went from making $10/day/GPU in Dec 2013, to $5/day in Jan 2014, to $2.5/day in Feb, to $1.25March to pretty much breaking even with electricity. And price didn't halve every month. It was the difficulty which kept going up way too fast.

I don't think this sell-off has anything to do with Omicron. It did at the beginning of December however now its mostly due to the fed decisions on tapering and increases interest rates. The stock market is basically having a kangaroo market which means it goes up one day, and down the next and then back up the next day.

People are bearish one day... bullish the next. And this is leading to many people getting chopped in the markets. And I think bitcoins future holds alot in what the stock market indicies do for the next few weeks. If we keep going to new highs on the SP500, then I can see bitcoin bottoming at $39K and going higher. maybe even a new ATH. However if the stock market keeps dipping lower, so will bitcoin since its very closely correlated.

Yes however what is different this time is that we got the Bitcoin ETF. And this is one reason why there is a discount. People are buying the ETF instead of GBTC because the fees are lower for the ETF. So I don't think this is a correct analysis from last year.

Also GBTC premium/discount had lots to do with the massive amount of Cash and Carry trades that were being performed in Q1 2021. Remember the massive premium that the derivative markets were giving? Something like 50% annulized APR rates? Well many did arbitrage that way with GBTC and hence why there was such a big discount. Right now there are no cash and carry trades going on. The funding rates are neutral pretty much.

I am 50/50 on this. Right now everybody is very bearish and people think that bitcoin will go down to $30K or $20K or $10K. I see 1 or 2 scenarios happening.

We will bottom somewhere in the current range we are in. Maybe $38K or so will be the bottom. Right now the fear/greed gauge is very low. So I don't think we will go lower.

If we go to $30K, I don't think it will be the bottom. I think if we touch $30K, it will go to $20K or something like $15K. I don't see $30K as being the bottom in this cycle. Either $38K is the bottom or something like $18K.

Giving this a bump. I actually forgot I created this topic. I made this on Oct 28th and we topped less than 2 weeks later on Nov 10th. Honestly I really believed we would have at least 1 more leg up, into the $70's range before dropping. I didn't expect $69K to be the actual top.

Reading the main post again, I can now see how the signs were obvious and hindsight is always 20/20. Especially when people were getting home equity lines of credits and using that money to buy crypto or people quitting their jobs to trade full time.

On Oct 28,2021 i made this topic,

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5368047

The title was "Getting Early 2018 top vibes"

I basically listed 10 different reasons why there is a good chance we are going to top soon. Such as meme coins pumping, uber driver trading crypto, Jason Bourne doing crypto.com commercials, people quitting their careers to trade crypto full time, etc.

Nobody believed me. People were saying thats its not topping yet, it will top in 2023, etc, etc.

Currently looking at the results, it seems that 2x as much people, basically 66% as opposed to 33% think its going to drop below $40K. And if you go to the mining section of bitcointalk, you got miners panicking that ETH is going to break $3K and they will make half of what they made a couple of weeks ago.

All over Twitter people are saying they are going to buy bitcoin at $10K. And even that Peter Schiff Gold guy is saying bitcoin is going to break $40K, then $30K, then $20K, and eventually will go to $1K.

Since so many people are bearish, I think maybe the bottom is in.

You know what. I actually wanted to stock up on a bunch of old HDD at certain stores which sell vintage computer parts or some garage sale. And let me tell you. The hard drives are definately not going for $2 each.

I remember they wanted something like $25 for some old 80GB HDD. Same with Craiglist, they got people selling 60-120GB drives, they are all HDD, definately never going to use them again and they want at least $20 per drive.

Even though the HDD is worth $1, nobody is selling them that cheap.

LOL. I am pretty sure he is not actually driving the car while he is mining. The way we got these flimsy risers, poorly constructed open air rig cases, wires everywhere, it would probably crash (the mining not car) as soon as he hit his first pot hole. My guess is he only mines when he is at home and its parked. Then in the morning he shuts it down and drives to work or wherever he charges it for free and repeats it the following day.

Why he still needs to mine if he owns a Tesla? Owning a Tesla doesn't mean you are a millionaire anymore these days. Tesla's are what $40K or so. In my area most vehicles are in that price range pretty much, and nobody is a millionaire driving these types of cars. They got 7-8 year car loans and thats how they can afford a car this expensive.

Yeah I had this dilemma back in 2018 with ETH. Most don't remember but it topped at $1400 back in 2018. And then we all assumed it would go to like $5000. However within a short period it was below $1000. Then it went to like $1200, people assumed that it was the dip and it would go higher. However it went below $1000 again.

And this time people wanted to sell at $1000, however if you look at the charts it never went to $1000 again until years later. It went to like $980. Basically the orders got front-run and all the shorters and whales all got in before $1000.

Then it just kept going lower and lower and lower. Same thing is happening now. So it'll either reverse soon, or it will keep going lower and it'll go to like $2000 and we will want to sell at $3000 but it will never go to $3000 again, until years later. That or it'll go to $7000 when we are all bearish.

The reason why stable coins like Tether became so big is because most people got 2 exchanges typically. First is a fiat on-off ramp exchange, usually like Coinbase. And another is generally an altcoin crypto exchange like Binanace.

People would deposit fiat, convert it to tether and that tether they can send to an exchange like KuCoin or Binance and trade tons of alts and they don't need to worry about any wiring details to those exchanges. Make it much easier to trade alt coins pretty much.

Another reason is for people who want to sell bitcoin or alts when they go up and leave it in tether on cold storage and buy it back when it goes back down cheaper. This way they don't do too many transfers back and forth between their exchange and bank.

Man its crazy how cheap SSD's have gotten. Even at $20 that is sure a steal.

Back on topic, I had this issue also with flash disks. Usually you can format and re-install everything and it'll work for a month and then the problem will happen again. Then you can try reformatting and do it over and over again or it'll just be completely dead.

I also went to the old HDD route. Had tons of these in the basement and never had any issues with them burning out. Only issue might be they use a few watts of power however the stability was worth it for me.

I don't own an electric car so I am just assuming this. However I think that he probably goes to some charging stations and gets to charge it for free. There are malls where you can shop and if there is a free spot you can charge your tesla. Obviously this must be the case because why else would he do this.

If he was paying electric then he would get power loss into charging the tesla first and then mining with his GPUs. Also this isn't the first time this was done. Somebody did this at the peak of the 2018 top. There was a photo of the trunk open full of GPUs.

I don’t think $40K is really significant. A better figure would be breaking $30K or at least last years low or breaking $20k which is obviously the old ATH.

Right now people are very bearish so you might be right and $40K might not actually break. However going by the trend it looks like it’s very bearish and there is no reversal signs yet. So we obviously might break $40K before bottoming and heading higher.

It’s hard to say what effect the fed will actually have on the markets. We already know there will be tapering, reduce balance sheet, increase rates so it won’t be a surprise if these actually happens. It’s priced in.

I think what is more important will be if COVID-19 continues to mess things up and there is no fed rate increases then that will obviously not be priced in.

Or if they raise rates much much sooner or do more hikes then actually planned. So your theory might not exactly work out.

Basically you need to understand this.

Currently there are a few KYC free exchanges you can use. However keep in mind that at anytime they can add KYC and this goes one or two ways.

1) Poloniex and Bittrex basically did mandatory KYC and they didn’t let you withdraw at all if you didn’t want to do it. People got their funds frozen on those exchanges

2) Bitmex and Binance were nicer. They announced ahead of time of the KYC and gave you enough time to withdraw.

So which option the exchange uses it’s up to them. But there is always a risk.

Did you read Arthur Haynes new article. He is basically going to do the opposite. Sell all his alt coins now and buy more BTC and ETH. Why is he doing this?

Well he states that if there is a bear market then BTC and ETH will drop the least. Altcoins can drop 90% or more. So if you sell them now instead of buying them and buy Bitcoin you will end up losing sell. Or you can sell your alt coins now and wait until everything bottoms out and buy BTC then and most likely the alt will be like down 99%.

Yes these days it’s very easy to google stuff. You just put in “site name scam” and see what pops up. If it’s a scam it won’t take very long to find out. I’m surprised that people send their hard earned money to services like this. But I guess we were all newbies once and we might of also made the same mistake.

Whether the site is legit or not, the fact that they blocked him is not a good sign. No legit service would block someone just because they had a complaint. The only way I can see of why he was blocked might of been because he was using foul language and they had no choice. Either way just be glad it’s only $250 and not something in the 5-6 figures.

I have never heard of Cryperterium so I have no input if its a scam or not. However how did you buy the $250 worth of BTC exactly? Did you buy by Credit Card? If so you can try and call your credit card company and make a chargeback. Before you do this however contact them again, threatened to call the CC company and they will usually try and do what they can to prevent a chargeback on their account.

In the future don't use these unknown bitcoin exchanges. Use Coinbase or Crypto.com or Kraken or Gemini, even if they got higher fees. They got more support staff and you won't get issues such as this on their platform.

Nobody knows what will happen. I was around in 2018 and whenever it dipped, people were saying they bought the bottom and we’re going to sell at a new ATH. Then it dipped again and again and again and then people assumed $6K must be rock solid support until it wasn’t.

Then people assumed $4.5K was the low, until it wasn’t and then it went to like $3.5K and did nothing for many weeks. Many sold out of boredom and it was the low.

So who knows if 2022 will be a repeat.