I see all these comparisons to 2017, and I'm hoping we don't see a repeat of the aftermath--i.e., a crash that took a few years to recover from.  I hate to say it's different this time, because that's usually something idiots say, but there is a difference this time: we've got large, publicly-traded companies buying bitcoin in huge amounts, and they aren't likely to sell their stash anytime soon.  That certainly didn't happen back in 2017.  That bubble was driven by individual speculators and the ICO craze.

Now as far as this $125k prediction goes, I really don't think bitcoin is going to hit that level by June of this year.  If this bullish sentiment holds, it's possible that we could reach that level next year, but I think that kind of growth in three months would be way too much.  That would certainly be bubble territory.

Indeed, and it seems to me that those who've had such clanging brass balls when it comes to investing in crypto have made a fortune, including companies like Tesla and MicroStrategy more recently.

Makes me wonder if it would still be wise to go all-in at today's prices.  The reason why this guy made as much as he did was because he bought when things were looking kind of bleak, not when the bull market was raging (as it is right now).  And man, I wish I knew the answer to that!  All I know is that investors have gotten seriously burned when they buy something when prices are high--and obviously bitcoin is making new ATHs constantly at the moment. 

But eh....my goal was never to become rich through bitcoin.  If that were true I would have bought heavily in 2015-16 when I first got into it or even in 2018 as prices were sliding downward.  Maybe that was a mistake on my part, but I'm cool with that.  Money isn't everything.

You realize that Americans have had to pay tax on internet purchases for only a few years now, right?  That, IMO, was a major taxation event in itself.

And though I haven't read anything in detail about what Biden plans to do as far as hiking taxes, it would come as no surprise if he does indeed do that.  I keep writing that all of this Monopoly money and stimulus and quantitative easing has to be paid for somehow, and if it isn't through increased taxes I don't know how else it would be done.  Sounds like he's trying to get ahead of all of the debt that keeps accumulating, but who knows.  I never claimed to be able to see into the minds of politicians.

Regardless of what Biden does as far as tax policy, I'm glad he's president and not Trump.  I don't think the country could have taken another four years of that psychopath.

I'm not a gamer at all; I bought the computer because I wanted to kick ass in the Folding@Home project in which you tend to do a lot better if you're folding proteins with GPUs.  That's the only thing I used that beast for.  It's incredible to me that right now people are probably paying just for the RTX 3080 what I paid for the entire computer.  Hopefully the GPU shortage improves in the near future, but I don't think things are looking too good.

Plus there's a ton of altcoins you can mine with a GPU that still make it profitable to do so.  Lots of folks are apparently mining Ravencoin as an alternative to ETH. 

I appreciate your opinion on the OpenDime, and I realize how it works.  It's such a sexy little device, though!

And yeah, I don't think anyone ought to be using a regular Ballet for storing crypto because of that leap of trust, but that Pro Ballet one is very enticing--except for its price, which is too expensive for what it is IMO.  Buying a Ledger or Trezor would be better options than either the Ballet or OpenDime, but I don't know of any other HW wallet that doesn't have major problems.  I really wish I did.

The thing is, people in America are not starving--some are, sure, but I'm talking about the vast majority of Americans who are going to be getting those $1400 checks.  Doubtless many of those recipients are going to be using the stimulus money for nonessential things, bitcoin included.  They'll probably keep buying up all the graphics cards with >4G of memory, too, in order to mine ETH and a lot of other coins.

So yeah, I do think bitcoin will likely get another bump up after all those checks are processed and everyone has their money.  But the run-up to $60k was probably caused by institutional buying rather than individuals.  Anyway, we'll see.  The mood in the crypto space is extremely positive, so I expect if people suddenly get $1400 to spend that quite a few will be blowing it on bitcoin and other crypto-related stuff. 

I also expect the stock market to keep rising as well.  This is "good" inflation, but we might start seeing "bad" inflation as well.  As I mentioned in another thread, gas prices have gone up substantially in the past year and probably other things as well.

dkbit98, take note of the above because that's exactly what I'm talking about.  When you give someone a negative, it should indicate to anyone looking at it that there's a reason not to trust that member.  Being a spammer or shitposter or an asshole don't qualify as valid reasons.  If you're looking to review the feedback you've left for other members, just keep this principle in mind.

Drop me a PM if you want me to take a second look.

Well, that's jerry0 for you.  That's just the way he is.

How about an OpenDime for long-term storage?  The standard hardware wallets are convenient for sending coins whenever you want to, but I really like the OpenDime's concept and design--though I'm not sure if it actually qualifies as a bona fide HW wallet. 

The Ballet is another design I really, really like except for the fact that you have to trust that the manufacturer doesn't have a master list of all the private keys in its possession.  There is a new model, the Pro series, that seems to eliminate that concern (though it's much more expensive than the standard Ballet).  I just love the card design, which is aesthetically pleasing and compact enough to be hidden away.

Other than those, I haven't experimented too much with other HW wallets as I don't exactly have tons of crypto to keep in any of them.  The few that I have purchased are more as crypto collectibles rather than ones I'll actually use.

They're not death threats at all.  Saying that you wish someone would die is not the same as saying you're going to kill them, it's as simple as that.  I've seen this scenario quite a few times on bitcointalk over the years where someone claims death threats were made, and it turns out that it was nothing of the sort.  There was probably a language barrier involved in some of those cases, but I'm not sure that's what's happening here.

On a related note, I still maintain that the tag dkbit98 left for jerry0 was wrong, and taking a look at some of the other feedbacks he left I think he probably deserves a ~ at this point, because it's obvious he doesn't understand when negative feedback should and shouldn't be given.

That's never been the case across the board, not even before we started this rotating system (which hasn't helped matters).

I agree, that's a wrongly-left feedback on dkbit98's part.  Members shouldn't be getting negative feedback because of perceived trolling, especially not by anyone who's on DT 1 or 2.  And as far as I'm concerned, Jerry0 might be a little bit paranoid as far as hardware wallets are concerned, but he's not a troll.  He just writes a lot of posts and tends not to take to heart the things other members are telling him--he certainly doesn't deserve a tag for that, and hopefully dkbit98 will reconsider it.

Edit: After looking at some of the feedback dkbit98 has left for others, I decided to exclude him from my trust list.  If he removes all of those "spammer" and related negs, I would reconsider this if it's a big deal (but it's probably not).

Yep, that's almost always the reason in my experience.  You'll get a PM if either a moderator or a self-moderator deletes one of your posts, but you don't get a PM if an entire thread you've posted in gets nuked.

So if you're posting in spam-laden sections like Altcoin/Bitcoin Discussion, don't be surprised if your post count isn't always what you think it should be.  It's happened to me quite a few times before, and it's one of those things you just kind of have to accept.  IMO it's a good thing that mods delete shit-threads or those that otherwise have no reason to exist anymore.

It is amazing indeed--however, I think the reasons for bitcoin being as high as it is right now are scary.  I'm talking about extremely low interest rates and all this free money being provided to citizens in the form of "stimulus".  It's no wonder bitcoin's price is inflated, and it's no wonder stocks are as high as they are.  Gas prices, too, in case you all haven't noticed.

So while I'm standing on the sidelines cheering bitcoin on, I can't help but think there's going to come a day of reckoning for all of us.  Someone has to pay for all of this free-flowing money.  It might be us or it could be our grandchildren, but nothing is free.  I'm also hoping we don't start to see hyperinflation, because that would be disastrous.

On the other hand, all the institutional buying didn't hurt--but I believe that was made possible by the low interest rates I mentioned.  If you have access to cheap money, the sky's the limit.

Part of me thinks they're insane for buying that much bitcoin, but only because they're a publicly-traded corporation.  But as long as their shareholders don't have a problem with it, there's no issue.  MSTR certainly has very large, clanging brass cojones for having purchased as much bitcoin as they did.  We all know how volatile of an investment it is, and unless MSTR is somehow hedging their purchase they stand to lose a TON of money if bitcoin crashes--and that can never be ruled out.  Everything seems very bullish right now, but any kind of bad news or a change in sentiment could send the price crashing.

They helped drive the price up, no doubt, and I'm sure a lot of bitcoin hodlers are grateful for that.  I do wish MSTR (and those other companies that bought bitcoin recently) the best.

LOL.  I guess you have to keep editing that number as bitcoin keep chugging along.  And actually I didn't realize it got as high as $60.4k but I'll take your word for it since it's not that far away from that valuation right now.

If that is indeed the all-time high, I suspect bitcoin will probably surpass that by the end of the weekend.  The bullish sentiment is still very, very strong--and that's aside from all the "fake news" OP mentioned (and I'm not exactly sure what news or what's fake about said news anyway).  People are just buying bitcoin like crazy right now, and just wait until the Americans get the next stimulus check.  A day or two after those are received, you can look at $60.4k in the rear view mirror and wave goodbye to it.

So you say.

Yep, and I got scammed by them last month when I was unable to withdraw some Curecoin.  They slapped me with a KYC requirement that I wasn't willing to submit to (because who knows who they are or what they're going to do with my info).  Fortunately the amount involved wasn't substantial, so I just ate the loss and moved on--but they're scammers, no doubt.

It's nice to see Coingecko have a warning like that.  That's something Coinmarketcap ought to do as well.  I can't imagine HitBTC is pleased that there's a banner on Coingecko, so that'll either light a fire under their asses to do things right or it'll take business away from them.  Either way, it's a good thing the warning is there.

On a related note, I wish Curecoin's team would take HitBTC off their list of exchanges.  Look at this:



They're an obscure coin that I'm a fan of, but there are other coins as well that have scammy exchanges listed on their websites.  It drives me nuts when devs don't keep up on these things.

$290 away from $60k as I write this--and I think that's pretty cool, but $60k isn't exactly a huge landmark like $50k was.

Let's put it this way: the market for bitcoin right now is extremely bullish, and I would be willing to bet that by the end of the day it will have broken through the $60k barrier.  As far as what's next, well, probably it'll keep going up until the next correction.  But frankly I've learned that making predictions is just a waste of time, because I'm usually wrong.  Bitcoin tends to not do what I want or think it's going to do and I've come to accept that.  It's got a mind of its own.

What I'm wondering is when $100k will be reached, because considering where bitcoin is now, that landmark isn't too far off--and it's crazy to think that's the case, but it is.  I never would have predicted any of this for 2021.

I don't think I can add much to what everyone else has said, but I just want to reiterate that merits are not routinely taken away from anyone.  There may have been one case of that that I've heard of over the years, but I'm not even sure about that.  In any case the only one who could reduce your merit count would be Theymos, and if he did that he'd probably let you know why he did it.

OP is probably mistaken.  Maybe he's looking at his sMerits and mistaking them for received merits?  I dunno, 'tis a perplexing mystery that likely shan't be solved lest The Great One Theymos deigns to come explain Himself.  (I still would like my name changed to Sceptical Chymist, Theymos).  Lol.

No, I absolutely didn't need to use the ATM.  By the way, I rode back there again today and bought some Dash in addition to bitcoin.  It's been a long winter and the past few days have been relatively mild, hence the desire for cycling--but I also like bitcoin ATMs and this particular one has much lower fees than the previous two I'd used.

And I agree with you that crypto/bitcoin ATMs are an unnecessary thing since nobody really needs bitcoin so urgently that they'd need to take a trip to that ATM to get it.  A normal crypto user would just buy it through an exchange like Coinbase, as it's much cheaper.  I'm curious to see whether these ATMs survive for exactly the reasons you and I just wrote about.  For right now I think they're a very cool novelty.

Some of them do, some don't.  The one I used today and a few days ago only required me to receive an SMS text code and to input my name.  You can input any name with no problem.  I'm sure that camera that's in the machine is watching you, and they all have that.  The first one I tried to use wouldn't work, as it kept getting stuck at trying to take a picture of my driver's license.  That was annoying as hell.

I've never used anything like that, and I'll have to look into it.  As far as why I chose to use this ATM, I think I've pretty much explained it.  I didn't need bitcoin or Dash really badly, but I felt like riding my bike and I like to have a destination when I ride.  And again, I think the concept of bitcoin ATMs is very cool.

LOL, you're way too suspicious.  Why would any of the factors you listed necessarily make anyone think I'd be above or averse to using a bitcoin ATM?  I'm an average guy who likes bitcoin, and Chipmixer doesn't pay what it used to anyway. 

I've never been a miner and usually would be completely ignorant of a situation like this, but in the past month or so I've done a lot of reading about ETH mining and didn't realize that you could mine it using a GPU.  And the more I read, the more the GPU shortage situation kept getting mentioned, especially cards with >4gb of memory.  I've looked on Newegg and invariably all of their gaming graphics cards are sold out.

Not too long ago I bought a new computer that came with an RTX 3080, and I didn't realize how sought after those graphics cards are, so I consider myself lucky to have one.  Now as far as the scalping goes....that comes with capitalism, plain and simple.  It's an ugly practice, but as far as GPUs are concerned it isn't illegal (nor do I think it should be).  I don't mind that places like Newegg limit the number of specific cards you can buy from them, but I'm all in favor of free markets.  And free markets aren't always nice and fluffy; sometimes there's ruthlessness involved and usually greed as well.  Think of all the old oil wildcatters, the railroad barons, and so many other instances of free markets screwing people over--but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Hmm...right now bitcoin is above $57k and seems to have some momentum behind it.  I'm afraid you might be wrong in your prediction here that $58k is going to be the highest bitcoin ever goes.  I would have said the same thing this past week when it fell even lower than where it is now, because I suspected that was just a dip in an otherwise very bullish market--and that's exactly where we are:  in an extremely bullish bitcoin market.

Just wait until all the Americans start getting their second stimulus checks of $1400.  You can bet your sweet ass that there's going to be a lot of bitcoin buying.  A small percentage of Americans, no doubt, but the collective buying power of those who do buy bitcoin with their stimulus money might be enough to drive the price up even further.  We shall see.