It is possible to make a profit by trading, but it's much more difficult than what most people first think.

First of all, you need to be able to know exactly when to buy, that is, identify the lowest local point in the price graph in real time. That's practically impossible.

Then, you need to know exactly when to sell, that is, identify the highest local point in the price graph in real time. That's also practically impossible.

There is a consideration here as well, you don't know if the buying or selling point will arrive in a day, month, year, or never.

Let's say you bought low and sold high after carefully checking the market, reading news, running bots, whatever reason.

Then you need to consider your costs, that is the fees you need to pay to the exchanges for putting money there, buying, selling, and then withdrawing money back.

Another cost is capital gains tax. Depending on your country this can be a lot, from zero up to almost half of your gains.

So at the end of the day, you might be able to get some money by trading, but you need to keep paying attention to it all day almost like a job, and it's not even guaranteed to get you money.

Yes, you will hear from the few cases that got lucky, but no one talks about all the money they lost.

With Bitcoin it's much easier to just keep buying and use it as a savings account while you live your life.

Those numbers seem extremely low for high cost of living places around the world, like Oslo, San Francisco, Sydney, New York, Toronto, etc.

Over there you're looking at buying a nice one or two bedroom apartment for more than 1 million dollars, usually the loan would require around 10-20% at a minimum, and that's 100-200k that goes to the deposit.

It's crazy out there in some cities.

I wouldn't say buying is a bad decision always, but you definitely need to run the numbers, you might be better off renting in high costs of living areas.

Lightning can be used instead of SWIFT.

That's what Strike is doing.

I can see that maybe fiat part could be tricky, but instead of a direct conversion, you could always go through am intermediary fiat.

Money cannot be stopped with Bitcoin in my opinion.

"crypto" is very dangerous because it's full of scams.

Bitcoin is a different thing though.

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I have an old NUC and I've tried running pretty much everything with it, and it works great. I've even run some miners there just for fun and they have run with no problems.

At least my NUC has required a lot of maintenance over the years as some hardware parts have broken down (I think it's almost a decade old or so), but I've managed to keep it running fine, for example the disk connection in the motherboard died, but I was able to just connect the drive through USB and run it like that

I see no reason why you couldn't run a Bitcoin Node there, it's a very versatile machine, small and super quiet.

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I'll take one spot.

64. nullama

Thanks for this amazing raffle!

My bar arrived just in time for Christmas!

It's an amazing work of art, it comes in a great presentation box, certificate of authenticity, satoshi millionaire stickers, nice touches all around. Excellent buy.

The bar itself comes protected in a transparent case, it has a very nice weight to it and the size is perfect. Also the design is amazing. I'm very happy with my bar.

This is an extremely well made bar, can't wait to see what Frank makes in 2022!

Merry Christmas to everyone!

I think they didn't show them intentionally, just have a look at when they showed the wikipedia page of Satoshi:



You can visit the German wiki page to see who's not there.

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AFAIK with sovryn you are swapping BTC for some random token called SOV, and they put that into some smart contract. Doesn't seem amazing to me.

AFAIK with mintlayer you are swapping BTC for some random token called MLT, and they put that into some smart contract. Doesn't seem amazing to me.

Inflation is one thing, but I also really enjoy having full control of my own money.

No need to ask permission to anyone to spend it in whatever I want.

It's great to spend your money freely. Money is freedom. Bitcoin is freedom.

Just found this application that allows you to send SMS worldwide with lightning:

https://lnsms.world

They even have an API so you could interface this with a server for automating stuff.

Checked a couple of countries, and the price was about 150 sats, not bad!

They also have unicode support.

Seems like a nice project.

Here's what people from Mexico think about this:


Reading the parent's company wikipedia page it seems that they're mostly a financial services company, processing a lot of remittances, loans, etc. Basically if you go and buy there you can get a "mini-loan" on the spot, for example you end up paying the TV for months instead of just one payment:




My guess is that probably they want to acquire a lot of Bitcoin first by exchanging their stock instead of paying cash, to then create some kind of financial service based on bitcoin for the money transfers (maybe to compete with Strike and others).

This reddit comment kinda matches this idea, they want to keep bitcoins for themselves:

The supermarket is using Bitpay, you can pay with any wallet you want.

I'm not sure if Bitpay accepts lightning, but note that you can always order online, so waiting time for on-chain shouldn't be a problem:



In any case, fees are very low on-chain, for example this recent transaction for more than $3k just paid 7 cents in fees

Also, their clients paying with Bitcoin are getting 20% off until end of the year, that's a great discount.

Elektra supermarket in Mexico recently started accepting Bitcoin payments and is encouraging their clients to do so, as they offer a 20% discount when paying with it (until end of the year).

Here's the promo banner (in Spanish):



Now people in Mexico are able to buy groceries, and retail in general using Bitcoin directly.

An interesting thing to consider is that the parent company, Grupo Elektra, has operations in these countries: Mexico, US, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Panama, and El Salvador.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grupo_Elektra

That means that they already accept Bitcoin directly from at least 2 countries: Mexico, and El Salvador. Some of the other countries in that list could potentially be the next one.

Read a bit more about that project, and it didn't seem amazing:



I prefer to keep my bitcoin in my own cold storage. They don't disappear there.

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2. Michael Saylor