If he loaded the phishing old version of Electrum, generated an offline transaction, then sent it over to his offline PC, signed it, back to his online computer, if he tried to broadcast the transaction he would have the fake phishing window saying to upgrade. Some people, especially since BTC almost hit $20K and some people are in a rush to sell before it drops, might click the link, download and open the executable. The fake electrum then sends the private keys to the hackers server. However since he has a cold storage setup, there is nothing to send over, maybe the master public key which doesn't really help them get anything. I don't think the fake version went thru the hassle of creating a fake looking offline transaction, hoping the user would sign it offline without noticing the different destination or change addresses. I never used the fake version but I am assuming its not this advanced. I think it went after the 99% of people who used Election online and assumed that if you are clever enough to hold your keys offline, you are clever enough not to fall for their phishing scam.

Right now I don’t think you guys will have too many issues since Nicehash has removed ETC mining. So if you are mining Daggerhashimito it will only mine one coin, ETH. So you will never get any reloading DAGs.

The issue I had in the past was when switching back and forth between ETC and ETH and dags kept crashing when new work was issued by nicehash. So I had to stop using it. However now the only possible DAG is ETH so you won’t get any switching even with new work. Yes it’s possible it’s some Ubiq coin but I don’t think anyone would rent hash at. 2x cost to mine those low cap coins.

There are many ways to do this. Basically you can sell for USD or USDT on any exchange pretty much. Just sell it for USD and in the future buy it back if you think it will go back up. Another way you can do it is if you use a futures exchanges and just open a short of the same value. Right now this is beneficial because if you are short then you will get paid a funding fee.

There are many exchanges like Binance Futures, Kraken, FTX, Bybit, Bitmex to do this. Just remember that if you are wrong and price goes against you, you will lose your BTC value of the difference that it goes up by. This shouldn't make a difference because you technically sold earlier so you will still get your original selling price even if price goes against you.

Yes we all know when that guy bought all those bitcoins. His average price if I recall is $11111 or so. He was actually a little underwater for a while on his position. The question to ask now is? Did he sell any of those bitcoins. Honestly it would seem irresponsible to not take a least some off the table.

We won't know until the reports are released from his companies holdings. However I predict that if the market finds out that a portion of his BTC holdings were sold recently then the market might take it as bearish news and a sell-off can start. Especially if its released in January when most people are going to be selling anyways for tax reasons.

However keep in mind when he was buying those BTC. He bought it very slowly. He didn't cause any type of FOMO. Price went below his average anyways. So him buying those bitcoins in secret caused no market reaction until it was revealed a few weeks after.

When price consolidates for a while under resistance its usually ends up breaking up. However the amount of traders that will get caught on the wrong side of the trade will be huge. I think that we will break ATH however it won't be soon. Most likely there is going to be lots of these fake outs, kind of like a few hours ago how we breached $19600 and now we are back at $19100's.

Seems that if the funding again will go positive we might get another rejection. Because whenever funding goes positive, the whales know that most of those positions are overleverage and its very easy to liqudate the people using 50-100x leverage. This is exactly what happened the last 2 times when we were "absolutely sure" that ATH was about to get breached, it came close and no cigar. So who knows when it will eventually break.

From what I can tell, there are too many retail traders going "all in" using leverage whenever BTC looks like its about to break $20K. You can tell because the funding rates get high and basically it comes close to ATH and then boom, gets rejected and there is a huge liquidation underway.

Seems that people want to catch the move when BTC breaks $20K and heads to like $25K and $20K should act as very strong support. However the last few times we did this, you can see how fast the rejections were. So I am assuming this will go on for some time. It will come close to $20K and then get rejected and cause a massive amount of liquidations and repeat. Eventually everybody will give up and then it will break the $20K.

Yes I am always wondering exactly how many of those E3 miners they have actually built. They never stated it in public. I think they made at least 10000 units however given by the amount of Antminer that they produced during the years. Might be less since they had to source actual ram to make the ASIC actually work.

The way that GPUs have advanced it’s pretty amazing however. Now there are tons of high end GPUs so owning an E3 isn’t really worth while anymore. The highest GPUs can make like what? 75Mhs from a single GPU? Pretty impressive in my opinion.

We will know when the same amount of hash rate leaves ETH and moves to ETC we can estimate it then the amount of units produced.

According to, https://etherscan.io/chart/hashrate it looks like its still pretty much at its peak.

If some pools are showing decreased hashrate then its most likely because,

1) According to some calculators, ETC seems 2x as profitable but this is due to an error and people are switching

2) Claymore stopped working at the current epoch

3) Some people using other non-claymore miners under Windows 10 might of ran out of GDDR

Pretty sure the E3 is still hashing away. Probably 1 more month left or so.

Its hard to say what will happen in December however I am pretty sure January 2021 will be a bearish month. The reason why is because many people who want to keep their taxes low will hold until end of year and on January 1  2021 they will sell their holdings. This way they pay less taxes if they fall under a certain bracket.

Keep in mind this screwed people before. Because people didn't want to sell at $20K back in Nov 2017, they waited until January 2018 and the price was already down to $11K. Hence its risky holding until next year. However I don't think there will be any rallys that month. The next 4 weeks are pretty much it so hopefully bitcoin makes most of its moves fairly soon.

There are 3 ways to gain coins.

1) Proof of Work - This is how Bitcoin works. Miners need to do SHA256 hashing and when a block is found they are given the reward. This requires no investment except for the hardware plus electrical costs.

2) Proof of Stake - This is how ETH 2.0 and other POS coins work - You basically need to hold the underlying coin such as ETH, leave your wallet open to stake and you process transactions using almost no electricity. All you need here is the underlying coin and some basic node or computer to run the wallet.

3) Tokens/ICOs - These you basically need to spend money on to buy. You can't mine them or stake them. Need to buy them and that's all is needed. No hardware or wallet needs to be left open.

If you want to hold it for 3-6 months the cheapest way is to use a futures exchange and buy the March or June 2021 futures. Currently the March 2021 futures are $210 premium. However you don't need to worry about funding fees or interest costs.

Right now the rates might be low like 0.02% per 8 hours or so but if there is a crazy bull market the fees will go up due to high demand and you will pay crazy amounts just to keep the long position open.

So use Kraken futures, bitmex, binance futures, ftx and buy the March or June futures and you are all set.

Basically there was a phishing attack on electrum that started a few years back. You could go to send a transaction and you will get an error that an update is mandatory, it provided a clickable link in the popup dialog and if you downloaded that software it would basically steal your seeds/private keys instantely. It leads to millions of dollars of funds stolen.

Now if you used cold storage and this happened to you, you would be safe. Because after you signed the transaction on the offline PC and tried to broadcast it on the online you would get an error. If you downloaded the fake software, there is no keys stored on your online computer, nothing to steal. Even if the thief was more sneaky and basically replied the "Send to" address to one of his addresses, you would realise this when you loaded the transaction on your offline computer and see that the address doesn't match up.

You are using 2 cameras for your QR codes? Or do you reuse the same camera back and forth. There is a slim possibility here that the camera might hold some private info, however this is very highly unlikely.

Most likely all the bitcoins which are mined will be bought up by GBTC because there are funds like Guggenheim that want to allocate up to $500 million worth. Whether they actually buy that much at ATH doesn't really matter. People and other smaller funds are all going to be looking at this and want to rush into BTC as soon as they can.

This was observed earlier when CME gapped up and instead of making an attempt to fill the gap on Friday it instead kept rising higher and higher. I think most that wanted to sell already sold and there is a very small supply of BTC to go around, especially for GBTC to buy. So I wouldn't be surprised if we had an attempt at the ATH sometime this week or next.

Basically we might get another attempt at $19.5K sometime this week and ATH later in the week. Reason why is the Guggenheim fund which wants to purchase $500 million worth of BTC on the GBTC market. As soon as the CME opened up we gapped up and been trading higher and higher ever since.

Most likely when the stock market opens tomorrow there is going to be more rushing into GBTC at the open and we should propel higher. This fund obviously is going to get other funds to rush into BTC because nobody wants to be left out before $20K. Was sceptical a few days ago when we hit $16K but its looking very strong right now. Should be an interesting week. Would maybe sell, hedge but not short this market.

This actually is somewhat true. I think before the pandemic the most you could get for an RX 470/570 was about $75 or so. Right now however the cheapest is usually $90 and average price is around $120. Which I think in my opinion is a little too much for a 4GB mid tiered GPU which came out about 4 years ago. Its pretty much on par with the R9 290 which came out like 7 years ago. However whenever I list an RX 470 4GB on Craigslist now, it would take maybe 2 weeks to sell and right now it probably sells in 2 days. For a slightly higher price than what I could of got back in pre-covid19 days.

If you look at eBay you will see similar trends. There are many that sell for a large price. Sure there are some which are low but they usually got some issue with fans or they are some "VisionTek" brand that nobody wants. However seems that demand is outpacing supply at the moment because people are at home and want to game, especially since its winter now.

I don't know where ETHUSD will top but I have a feeling that ETHBTC will probably top at 0.05 and stay there for a while before heading higher. I don't think we will ever see ETHBTC at 0.10 maybe in a few weeks at a different bull/bear cycle.

The charts are pretty clear that 0.05 or slightly before is a great place to take profits. The price of ETHUSD is hard to predict because it will most likely be based on what happens to BTC. If BTC never breaks ATH then most likely $600 was the top. If it breaks the ATH and heads to $25K or so, then I see $800 or $1000 on the books.

However if it goes to some crazy number like $50K+ then I can see ETH in the $1000-$2000 range also. However  this is difficult to predict. The ratio is easier to predict since it has a good history and by BTCs dominance you can tell it probably won't trade higher than a ratio of 10% ever in the near future.

The only time that I felt like BTC could go to $0 was during the March 2020 crash.

Most of you guys probably weren't home trading that session but what happened was pretty brutal. March 7th BTC was trading at $9K. Then the next day went down to $7500 and settled at $8K. Then a few days later on March 12th 2020, all hell broke lose.

We opened the day at $8K, then had a massive crash to $6K a few hours later. And this is where the danger began. Too many people wanted to buy the $6K support and bought it on leverage. Shortly after we went down to almost $3K on Bitmex.

The selling was crazy. There was no bids, except maybe shorts taking profits and there was tons of those $10M liquidation orders dying to get filled. Only they kept pushing price lower and lower. I think there was like $1 billion in long liquidations and maybe $10Million on the bids. Obviously a crash to $0 at least on Bitmex seemed possible.

Eventually they paused the trading due to some glitch, people got their senses back and started to cover and buy. And we recovered from that crash shortly after. It was a day I will never forget.

This is why its not a good idea for leverage exchanges to control the market.

Been mining for many boom and busts with BTC and altcoins and I can tell you one thing. The best time that you know there is going to be a GPU shortage is when someone puts a GPU for sale on Craiglist and it gets sold out within the hour or 2.

Back in late 2013 and 2017, if you wanted to buy GPUs second hand you had to pretty much "speed" to the sellers place to buy it before he checked his inbox and raised his price OR decided to start mining on his own.

Generally it got very stressful loading up on GPUs. Later what happened was that inventory in stores dries up and later on when inventory is replenish the prices are raised by some crazy amount. And most Craiglist ad at the time also have some crazy inflated price like $500 for a RX 470 GPU.

This time is clearly not it. Until we are seeing $5/day/GPU days, there will be no shortages of GPUs.

I am not exactly too technical on the details but won't the miner (or staking) rewards still be the same. I think its a hybrid type of system where say every 5th block out of 100 blocks is done on POS and the rest 95 blocks is done by mining. SO in the end the miner rewards are going to be the same just POS is going to lower the issuance a little since some blocks are solved by POS. However I might be wrong on this one.

If POS causes too much supply I am pretty sure the eth devs will release a new update which will reduce the miner reward per block to even a lower amount like 1 ETH per block which they did twice already. They dont like miners in my opinion and the fewer miners dumping coins the better for the ETH devs.

This is not always a good idea. Trust me. I was around Dec 2017 and basically had a limit order at $10K which filled shortly after it peaked $20K. And from $10K it didn't come close to $20K again that year. And later eventually in the New Year it broke $10K and then you only had a few short hours to sell to get out before Nov 2018 crash to $3K. Most ended up bag holding and sold at either $6K or $3K.

So buying the dip isn't always a good idea. People sell when BTC goes up and buy it back maybe 5% cheaper. Which is great however not great if price eventually reverses. Because then instead of selling at a profit you can end up selling at a loss instead.