I think unless you work at Tether its difficult to prove whether they are fake or not exactly backed 1:1. When crypto crashed in 2018, there actually was some tether which was redeemed back to US dollar however it was a small amount that would of not been proof whether they are solvent or not. Well it went from $2.8B to $1.8B so about $1B, not exactly small however if there was issues redeeming tether back then, somebody would of made claims.

So it proved that they at least had 33% in reserves which we all knew in 2019 when it was proved it had 75% in reserves. Hence even if BTC crashed to $5K again, and 33% of all tether was removed from circulations, it still wouldn't prove a "tether bank run" since it wouldn't remove enough reserves to make them run out of money.

I think eventually people will just switch from Tether to USDC or DAI and call it a day. Eventually in a few years, Tethers market cap can be replaced with USDC. USDC grew alot in the last year and still minting every day.

I don't think that is a wise idea. There are many people who are in your situation and who wants to do the same. However its not wise for a few reasons.

First of all, there is no guarantee that if will go back to $15K. It might go down to $30K or maybe even $20K and never reach 15K, what will you do then. Secondly what if you sell here at $33K and it goes to $100K+? You will hate yourself for selling so cheap.

Last reason is say, it topped at $42K this month, goes it goes to $15K and you get a fill. However instead of it going up, it goes down to under $10K and stays there for years. What will you do then? Hence you should just HODL.

There aren't many options these days. Your limitation is based on your hardware pretty much.

If you got a GPU with >4GB then you mine ETH. Nothing else is profitable.
If you got a CPU you mine XMR. Nothing else is profitable.
If you got a BTC ASIC, you mine BTC. You can try BCH however profitability is almost always equal.

That's pretty much it. Back in 2014 you could mine LTC, Darkcoin, DOGE, Maxcoin, etc and spread it out with your GPUs. But times have changed.

This probably is your best bet if you want to buy new because it seems like tons of work and im sure most people are way too lazy to go to a store and wait until they get a shipment and put it on the shelf. However I am pretty sure the employees working there might buy them out and re-sell them on Craiglist later in the day.

How are the prices at best buy? Are they at MSRP or are they marked up? Most computer stores in my area are greedy and instead of limiting the quantites they basically jack up the price 50% higher and eventually they find some buyer desperate enough to pay. Its a bad practise and they don't care if they get a bad reputation as a result. They probably make tons more money selling at a mark-up than at the MSRP which yields very little profit.

So the OP was correct and that instead of panicking you could of waited for the bounce, which went up all the way to $40K to sell instead of selling at the bottom at $30K. I think the reason why people are starting to turn negative is due all the FUD we are getting lately. There is the tether fud, last week was the MtGox coins supply hitting the market. Then there is always the fud about regulation since XRP got sued.

However institutionals like Grayscale keep buying and so do some funds which are staying quiet about it. Does it mean BTC can go down and break $30K, yes its possible. However the long term outlook is positive, no matter how bumpy the road is ahead. I think most people who use leverage are the ones which end up losing it all due to greed. Most is to just be spot long and like that you don;t have the risk of liquidation.

It seems that the Tether FUD is still ongoing. People are panicking like crazy on Crypto Twitter and people are Reddit are getting their posts deleted because there is too much posting of claims without evidence. I am actually surprised that so many people are talking about Tether this week because I would of assumed that tether was so 2017ish.

Either way, there is a post going around Twitter that 3 days before they handed in the documents that the tether prints stopped. So its been 5 days and no tether prints yet. Looking at the market cap for tether, they usually did a print every few days or so. So its either a coincidence, especially that its a weekend now or if there are no prints for the next few days or weeks. People will start to panic because they will think "Why did the printing stop " and maybe sell their BTC in anticipation of a crash.

This probably won't be the best idea however it can work. I remember back in 2017.2018 when all GPUs were sold out or crazy mark-up. People actually found that by buying an entire PC was cheaper than the GPUs. If I recall correct the company was Dell which had some high end GPUs in some of their gaming desktops. You could buy the entire computer, take out the GPU and sell the rest of the computer piece by piece to get some money back. Entire Desktops unlike GPUs and CPUs usually aren't sold out.

Another way is just to go on Craiglist and Facebook and you might get lucky. Someone maybe didn't hear about bitcoin and they have no idea that prices doubled and if you are one of the first few people to inqure and go pick it up right away, you might get a decent deal on a used GPUs. This option however might involve alot of trial and error. No other way around it during a mining boom.

From what I understand the process works like this. At least it was this way back in 2017. No idea if its the same as today.

Someone wires money into Bitfinex, they don't want to trade any USD pairs on Bitfinex but want to send the USD elsewhere to buy alts like on Binance. So then Bitfinex converts the USD to USDT. Then that individual withdraws this USDT and sends to any exchange they want that accepts USDT. Right now Bitfinex has USDT pairs however back in 2017 they didn't actually trade Tether on their exchange. Their BTCUSD pair was actually against USD and not USDT.

When the individual sells their alt back for tether, they send their tether back into Bitfinex and Bitfinex converts it back into USD or you could go to the Tether.io website and have the funds sent into your bank account. I never tried the latter because the Tether.io function to withdraw was disabled and you could only trade better back into BTCUSDT, then sell that BTC on another exchange like Coinbase or Gemini for USD and withdraw that. Was annoying due to the fees involved.

Yes this is very common ever since USB risers came out back in 2015-2016. There are 2 reasons why this happens. One is that the SATA cannot handle that much wattage and second reason is that the SATA connector that is included in these cheap USB risers is very bad quality and melts easily, even if there is very little wattage draw.

Don't use SATA ever to power your risers. You can use the Molex as long as you don't connect more than 1 per chain. Best way is how was described above, using the PCIe cable to power the USB Riser and this way you would never deal with these issues.

Will this cause a house fire? Usually this doesn't cause fires. The cable melts, and no longer can deliver enough current which causes the GPU to crash which causes system to hang. When the system hangs, current no longer travels thru that melted cable. However you still need to cautious. There was a few ASIC miner farms that burnt to a crisp in the past. Haven't heard of any GPUs burning down a house however.

We already produce electricity when water pours down the river, ever been to Hoover Dam?

Sure you can have 100 people running and transform that power to power maybe 1 GPU. Would it be worth it ? Most likely not.

There was a show called Top Gear ( or Grande Tour) where they hooked up a bunch of work out machines to power an electric vehicle, they worked out for hours and the car went like 50metres before running out of power.

So currently, electricity and solar is the best way to mine.

Nothing is forked from Claymore because Claymore was always closed source. The miners like PhoenixMiner and Lolminer are also closed source and they are completely different from Claymore.

Reason why its closed source is because the developer put in a miner fee and if it was open source, people would just make the miner fee 0% and the dev would get nothing. Its been like this way for years. Most people trusted his software and nobody had an issue.

Miner software is different from wallets like bitcoin core, those need to be open source however miners with fees generally will always be closed source unless its a free miner like ethminer, cgminer or sgminer.

I Think it was CNBC that made a news article saying something along the lines of "BTC lost 20% so now its in a bear market". However those CNBC analyst need to realise that BTC is not like a stock indicies like SP500 or DOW 30. Generally when the stock market corrects >20% its considered a bear market. That is the trend percentage pretty much. Not normal for SP500 to lose 20% in a single day unless its some flash crash. BTC is completely different and it can lose 20% multiple times of the year.

Yes it was a brutal day when it lost $10K within 24 hours however in percentage terms its only 28% and we had this dips many times in the previous 2017 bull market. Its the same story, it keeps rising and rising, go people go full leverage and there is a cascade of stops which ends up liquidating all the longs and the pattern repeats itself yet again.

The reason why BTC dropped to $4K back in March was largely due to liquidity issues and the fact that most of the volumes was on derivative platforms like Bitmex. Most people weren't trading that day but the reason why it crashed to $4K (even slightly below $4K) was because there was maybe $1Billion in Long liquidations and there was absolutely no buyers who were taking the asks. So price kept going lower and lower.

Other exchanges also went lower due to the algo bots. However at a certain point in time. Many of these bots shut off their service and you could see when Bitmex was trading at like $500 discount compared to index exchanges. It kept going lower and lower. $1 Billion in asks and maybe $20 million in bids. And eventually Bitmex did a forced shutdown and they probably prevented BTC dropping to $0.

When they reopened it quickly recovered and we never saw that price again. Right now I don't see that happening since spot exchanges are leading the markets.

You need to consider that fact that, it will take a few 20% days to reach that people. If BTC is at $40K, then it would only take 20% days to reach $100K. And look at how many days in the past BTC had 10-15% days. So its definitely possible. Look at how fast it reached $40K when it broke $20K.

If you go to Deribit which is the largest bitcoin options platform. They actually have $100K,$200K,$300K,and $400K call options which expire at the end of the year. And you would think "Who in the world would buy a $400,000 bitcoin call option that expires in 11.5 months?" Well there is currently a $2500 price for that call option and open interest is almost 100 contracts.

Seems there are people out there that think that 6 figure prices are possible and they are putting money behind it.

Well January 15th came and went and bitcoin didn't crash and USDTUSD didn't go to 0. So FUD as usual. Most people didn't even know what the Jan 15th date was about. It was just about submitting documents to the NYAG.

Seems its very easy to create FUD these days. If you looked at the USDTUSD and USDCUSDT pairs yesterday you would see that people were actually selling their Tether in exchange for USDC just in case there was some negative reaction. The %'s difference was very little however.

Yeah I checked my local Craiglist and its getting pretty ridiculous to be honest. I think its worse now than it was in 2018. Basically in my area you got people who are reselling their GPUs at a 50% markup and they don't even have them in their possession yet. They are claiming that Amazon will deliver on such and such day and time and its yours for a huge markup.

This reminds me of the iPhone 4/4s/5 and iPad launch days. People would basically camp outside the apple store and buy max quantity which was usually 2 phones and later resell them on eBay and Craigslist for double. And surprisingly people actually paid that much. However I remember reading those eBay listings and people would basically make the auction BEFORE they actually had the phone in hand.

Wonder how much longer this will last.

Only place right now without over paying I would say its your local Craiglist/Kijiji/Facebook Marketplace. The issue is that most people, but not all know there is a shortage and they want to take advantage. This is why you see GPUs basically for 50% over MSRP pretty much for used gear.

However there are people out there, who just want to get rid of old gear because they don't want it sitting around collecting dust that they just sell at a fair price. Problem is you gotta pick them up ASAP. Because they will find it odd, why there is someone asking "Is it still available" every 30 minutes after its been listed. Some people will realise that "Obviously I am asking too little" and they will remove the ad, relist it again at a higher price. However there are people out there that just want it sold and will sell it at a good price to you.

Speaking of smoke detectors, they are good however they won't help you when you are not home. I think its rare to have someone's house burn down due to mining. I had many melted cables, PSUs blow up, GPUs go Kaboom and emit black smoke and make the place stink afterwards, however none actually started a fire.

What I would do in the future is just keep the rigs on metal frames and keep the frames on a metal rack away from anything flammable. So don't put it next to a wall or near boxes which are easily flammable.

They sell these type of blow up balls which basically you can put near your rig, if it detects any heat, they will blow up and send fire extinguisher powder everywhere and hopefully put out the fire. Never tried this however.

In the past 2 bull miner cycles (2013 and 2017) I had decent luck with Craiglists. Basically I had alerts for certain GPUs like back in 2013 I would track the "Radeon 7950/7970/280X/290" and in 2017 something like "R9 290/RX 470/RX 480" and when someone would post an ad, I would get notified.

I would check the price and if it wasn't something outragous I would immediately tell the guy "I AM COMING FROM OUT OF TOWN TO PICK THIS UP ASAP FOR MY SONS BIRTHDAY, PLEASE HOLD IT! WILL PAY ASKING PRICE!!!" And basically would get there as soon as possible.

Only once did someone text me half say saying "Sorry sold it for more". The rest just sold it at the agreed price. One guy if I recall said something like "Can you pay more, I got like 10 people wanting to buy this for 50% more". I would just show them all the money I got in my wallet, which was exactly the asking price, and they gave it to me anyways.

Ahh! Those sure were crazy times. Lucky I don't have to go thru that again.

I think a better method would be just to do maybe 1 or 2 of them GDDR5 chips and leave the rest. So instead of going from 4GB to 8GB you would just go to 4.5GB which should be adequate for the next 6-12 months or so.

The GDDR5 are expensive each so buying as little as possible would be more beneficial instead of replacing them all. And it would be less work because there is less chips to desolder and solder back on.

However it would be fun when you are selling these GPUs on Craiglist in a year or two and the buyer asks "Why does this GPU have 4.5GB of memory"?