The reason why it went up so much in the last week was because it was heavily shorted. If you looked at Binance fees, it had negative funding in a strong bull rally, which is pretty rare. Usually in a bull market we get positive funding and in a bear market we get negative funding. But this was the opposite.

So what happened was people got very bearish and shorted it to the max, and as it kept rising and rising they all got short squeezed. And hence why we had these crazy double digits days for the last few weeks.

This is pretty much what happened with Doge earlier in the year. Everything was bearish and shorted it as much as they could and ended up having a huge short squeeze.

ETH profitability is VERY hard to predict because unlike Bitcoin where all you care about is the difficulty AND price. Ethereum has another variable and that is "transaction fees".

For the past few weeks the network has been really dead, you could actually get a transaction confirmed using 5 Gwei fees. However in the past couple of days it seems there is some slight interest again in NFTs and DeFI and the network is busy again and as I speak the fees are in the 50 Gwei range.

This is important because a large portion of your miner revenue are these fees. And these fees are hard to predict when they are going to be high or not. Price and difficulty is easier to predict.

Price is probably going to stay flat or go down. Difficulty will for sure eventually go up. But transction fees? How can you predict those. Very difficult.

If I were you I would currently mine as many coins as I can, and convert all this to BTC. Then if we indeed did top at $64K and the next year or 2 will be a bear market then hold all your BTC and buy a bunch of alts when they are >95% from ATH in a year or so.

Some will basically go down another 95% and will be worthless but you will be able to get a handful of alts which can produce amazing gains into the next halving. Sure they might not all recover the 95% lost value but even if you buy it at the low and it ends up going another 50-100% from there, you will made good profits. Then sell those alts back into BTC and either hodl that bitcoin or just tether up or withdraw into your bank account.

Basically super low risk for you.... and sky is the limit in the amount of profit you can make. Well unless all your GPUs get damaged somehow, but that is rare.

I am not too technical with the details, but from what I understand it works like this. Pools implemented a type of safety to prevent this man in the middle attack from happening. So when a miner is sent a hash to "hash" and generate a nonce which is less than the difficulty, one of the parameters includes the pools info.

So miners end up hashing this code and if they find a block, the hash originally contains the pool info in the paramter. You cannot change this parameter after you find the nonce which solves the block. If you change the pool info, your entire nonce won't work since the hash will be different.

I don't know if you already know this and are trying to scam people or if you are innocent and you just don't know that its impossible. Either way, what you are proposing here is just not possible. It won't work. If you don't believe me choose some low hashrate ETH clone type coin OR fork your own and see if you can actually succeed in doing this.

Mine on your local pool and if you find a block, try and send that block to the network with your solo client, and see what happens. Most likely it will get rejected by the network or if it gets accepted the pool will get the block credit and not the one which sent it.

I had USB sticks go out so many times that I basically stopped using them. Just used some old 120Gb HDD (not SSD). It became vert annoying having to duplicate the stick and then have to manually configure everything. When i switched to old fashion disk drives I’ve never had this issue. Sure it uses maybe an extra 10 watts but worth it not to deal with failures in the future.

I think the reason why mine failed was maybe due to the heat or maybe to the poor cheap USB brand. Another reason I heard could be the write cycles however I don’t think a mining rig did much writing, mostly stood on idle. So no idea why they kept failing. Most of the time you could just reformat and reinstall and they would work again for a few more weeks/months.

I heard about this a few days ago and somebody pointed out that the article is false and they weren’t mining. Instead they were doing some farming to get some credits and they were selling those for profit. This is no different than those large iPhone/Android farms you see where you got some poor soul which needs to watch ads all day 24 hours.

Mining might be possible but the efficiency would be horrible because you got an entire console just to power one GPU. And most likely the speeds would be maybe 20mhs perhaps. And these days that is not as profitable as it was a few months back.

Either way, very clean and professional operation they had going.

An FX processor is a processor designed for games and it will have no problems running as a rig. I've ran rigs before with Semprom, yes, Semprom processors before. For those that don't know they are like $10 processors you get from eBay and are single core. And they worked.

Installing windows took forever and it took a long time to boot from cold but when it started mining it was perfectly fine. Barely any CPU usage while mining. Only issue with your FX will be it uses more power than most newer CPUs and it'll make your rigs a little inefficent.

This is a scam.

People tried doing this back in 2011 or so to cheat pools and this is why most pools send a special hash which if a block is actually found will credit the pool AND NOT the individual miner.

You get a hash sent from the pool where you generate your nonces and if you find one with a difficulty high enough, which results in a block, you CANNOT send that hash yourself to the network because it contains the info of the pool which will get credit for finding the block.

This is simply not possible and it seems people are already about to get scammed.

EDIT, what a poster above said is true. This is called a Man in the middle attack. Before anyone get scammed just do some googling first and you will see what he is describing is just not possible.

ETH on the daily chart looks horrible. Basically we have support at $1700 which held however last time we bounced from there we had a week bounce and only reached $2400 instead of retesting the prior pivot of $3000.

The way its trading currently looks like it will go and test $1700 again and most likely it'll hold, at least if there is low volume however I am pretty sure it'll end up breaking down. And also looking at the ETHBTC chart it confirms this. Basically 0.055 was support which held however each time it failed to make a higher high. Most likely 0.055 will break and the dominance will be on bitcoins side and most alts will also start to bleed.

With bitcoin its hard to say. Could go either way. I think it might hold the $30K and go to like $50K before going back to $30K, breaking it and heading to like $20k-$25k or so. Either way. Won't happen until maybe Sept. Right now there is no volume.

What you need to realise that just because the stock market is doing good and large companies are setting record profits doesn't tell the entire story. Due to the pandemic alot of small and medium businesses had to go bankrupt while their larger competition like Walmart, Costco and Amazon took all their business. So obviously the latter had great profits and it made their stock go up while made the index go up and the stock markets hit a record high.

However it doesn't mean that the economy is healthy as a whole. Look at how many people cant buy a car these days because they don't want to pay same price for a used one as a new car. Look at how many people can't buy a house because every month the housing index goes to a new record high. Then there are other things like lumber which is different because its a supply constraint.

However it looks like this is a huge huge bubble and it might burst any minute. I don't think this is sustainable.

In a bear market I found that the best deal is to buy ones with a dead fan. You will see a few which are dead GPUs for like $20 but a few GPUs with bad fans for $30. So its better just paying the $10 extra and just having a bad fan to deal with rather than the entire GPU.

However this was last bear market not this one. So right looking looking at eBay gpus are never a good deal, even ones with dead fans. However maybe in a few months try and score some deals with some GPUs with bad fans. Gamers for some reason never buy them because they think its difficult replacing a fan when there are youtube videos everything and you just need some basic screwdriver tools.

For Windows you don't need to boot in with a monitor. If your GPU is stuck in like 300Mhz all the time then you need to use one of those fake hdmi dummy plugs, but i've been running many headless setups for years using software such as Teamviewer. I even remember I upgraded all my Win7 rigs to Win10 without having to connect a monitor or keyboard, all it was done thru teamviewer.

When you need to do something low level like going into a bios, then obviously you got no choice. You need to plug in a monitor in there and at least a keyboard. A good tip is that if you are building your open air rig, make sure to mount the GPU0 (plugged into pci3.0 x16 port) somewhere, where you can easily access the DVI connection if you need to plug it in.

If your computer fails to load because a keyboard is not plugged in, then there is a setting to disable that in bios. However most of the time, newer motherboards don't give this errors only legacy motherboards which fail to boot if a keyboard isnt plugged in.

I think reinstalling the chip would be the easy part. You already have it disassembled and you can easily use a solder wick to remove all the excess solder from GPU and PCB.

Then all you need to do is recall it which is easy if you got the adapter that goes with the stencil. It makes it easier. If you don’t have it then it will be a pain putting a single solder ball per pin and sometimes you will bump it somewhere and have to start over.

Then when done you just put it into the PCB , align and heat again until it melts into place. Then plug it in and pray that it boots.

Not really that difficult if you got the right equipment. However these days I don’t think there are too many dead GPUs out there which would make it worth investing all this equipment.  How many dead GPUs are there on eBay? Not that many and most of the dead ones you can’t repair because they are dead because they are burnt and you can’t fix a GPU if there is a large burn mark on the PCB.

There is a lot of reasons why the supply decreases. Sure there are companies like Tesla which buy billions and which are going to be held in cold storage. But there are other reasons.

Like what was mentioned above. Some retail newbie might lose their BTC due to whales and the whales withdraw those profits into cold storage.

Another reason is people have hardware wallets these days and are worried about security on exchanges and withdraw them. Especially since price hit $64K at one point. So if you had 1 BTC and before it was worth $10000 you might of not cared as much as it’s worth $34K now and decide to buy a $100 hardware wallet to protect yourself.

From what I am reading most people who want to invest, usually buy Bitcoin and use their savings. Then they get some hardware wallet and hold it long term.

However there are also those people who want to trade Bitcoin, usually with leverage and usually with borrowed funds. Whether it’s from a credit card, loan, line of credit. Those are usually the ones which get liquidated at first. And we saw this back in late 2017 when people were opening up Coinbase accounts and funding with their credit cards. What that led to was visa and MasterCard blocking those transactions because if the market corrected they would be on the hook if it led to people defaulting.

Hence why it’s difficult to buy crypto these days with credit cards .

A few months ago I assumed that once covid was gone, which it pretty much is in most of USA then the world would get back to normal. No more printing and stock markets and crypto would pullback. However not really seeing that yet. Stock market keeps making new highs. People not wanting to work. Everything being expensive like cars and houses. Even luxury clothes or handbags having lines full of people. When will this end?

I don’t see it going on forever. Market needs a correction. Maybe when Fall comes and we are a massive correction in the stock markets we will finally see some pain. But right now markets keep going up and up and nobody knows when it will get in with reality of how the world works.

You should always average in and average out of positions. Basically if you don’t know how then just buy at a certain time of the week or month of whatever price Bitcoin is at. This way you get some good buys, average buy and some which are overpaid but at least you got a good average. Much better than going all in at the wrong time.

Same with selling. You should average out, especially when price is going up. Most people assumed we would touch $100K at least and nobody knew we would peak at $64K. So those that took some profits are in a better situation than those that didn’t sell anything at all.

We all know that trading Bitcoin is safer than most alts. However keep in mind that the profits won’t be as high as say some low cap coin like Shiba.

Look at how much money people on Tiktok or Robinhood made trading Doge. I think most bought in the 5 cent range after it peaked at 9 cents after Elon’s tweets and right before it went to 72 cents before his SNL appearance. What is 72/5 about 14x of gains. If you bought BTC before it broke $20K you would of made about 3x in gains.

So there is a reason why many people buy these low cap alt coins because the profits are much larger.

I had a bunch of Tahiti (7950/7970/280x) GPUs throughout the years that all needed to be reballed. Basically if you somehow could manage to get Windows to boot, it would mine until the GPU got cold again. But eventually with enough heat cycles it would stop working all together.

Had a hot air station already so just needed the stensil and solder balls. Bought all that stuff on Alibaba for $10. The issue was removing the old GPU chip for PCB. I kept heating and heating and heating it up and couldn't get it to move. Couldn't go higher in temp because it would burn something. Eventually gave up. Basically you can easily remove something like an iPhone chip because the area is small. However for a large GPU chip you need a special workstation like they used to repair Xbox's back in the day.

Basically not worth the hassle to fix a GPU worth maybe $100.

Most people never have a monitor, or a keyboard or a mouse connected to their mining rig. They basically either use Linux and just ssh into the terminal or use teamviewer if they are using Windows.

The only time I had to physically hook up a monitor and keyboard was during install or if there was some issue that I couldn't diagnose remotely. So there is no point in leaving a monitor plugged in all the time.

Actually if you leave it plugged in, especially to your GPU it will decrease hashrate or even lead to crashes such it takes more power to output to a display.