Centralization is a side effect of PoS by nature. There’s a reason people hate it so much and there’s an entire PoW industry. Some people don’t care though. They just want to play with a cool toy and smart contracts seem to fit the bill. This sort of change shows that the network is still very far from a finished product.

If you have a realistic timeline and expectations, buying some crypto and waiting has been a good bet. As long as you’re using your own funds and not playing with leverage or investing more than you can afford to lose it shouldn’t be stressful.

Close to a billion dollars was liquidated yesterday between ETH and BTC longs. Stay safe out there.

There are no doubt a lot of people who went too hard with GPUs that are going to be getting pretty desperate. A good time to build a gaming rig. I think as people come to grips with the reality that is the GPU mining scene things are going to get pretty hairy. Best bet now if you don’t want to shut off your miners for a while is to pick a coin to mine and hodl while you pray it pays off down the line.

Regular people still don’t consider Bitcoin real money. I have friends who I’ve discussed Bitcoin with for over a decade that still think it isn’t real money. They don’t understand that Bitcoin and dollars are easily interchangeable. This is how I know we’re still early. There’s videos on YouTube showing people taking $100 over 1 Bitcoin because, “Bitcoin isn’t real.”

It will be a long time before Bitcoin is considered non-fiction to a massive % of the population.

I don’t even think he understands that to be totally honest. I think he believes he’s doing a good job by trumpeting all these stats. Claiming a good job market when we’re at the lowest labor participation rate in 50 years. Claiming inflation is barely rising when we’re having the highest inflation in 40 years. He just gets told these things and repeats them thinking he’s doing a good job. I don’t think he realizes the only people who believe that are as financially illiterate as he is.

That cannot be true, can it? I think I’ve got a couple of these laying around next to my Butterfly Labs FPGA miners somewhere. For $100 each I could probably find the time to locate them. I’m a bit surprised to hear they’re worth anything, but they aren’t a bad collector’s item I guess. OP has them displayed very nicely.

Even if the wallet.dat file was real, it’s a fool’s errand to buy one to try and decrypt. The password on the encryption could be longer than the private key itself. Anyone spending time on this sort of thing is being scammed, not just for their money in buying the wallet from a scammer, but also their time and electricity as they attempt the (nearly) impossible.

I received a request to make the final shipping payment, which I have now done. The payment is now $700 and I’m told to expect my Metacycle by the end of the year. I was told via phone to expect it this month, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens. Good to see movement though. I mostly hope I get it before next spring’s ‘riding season’ arrives.

Yes. It means that if the judge has any sort of understanding about the case, Hodlnaut will be the winner. I think it’s been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that CSW has falsified documents in an attempt to prove he was satoshi and is now telling the court to take people’s word for it. If this works for CSW, I will also be calling myself satoshi and forking the chain to unlock his coins for myself. Anyone who is willing to state that I am satoshi can have a cut.

Getting your hands on non-KYC’d Bitcoin is going to become increasingly more difficult until it becomes impossible to do so legally. That’s part of the reason why a war is being waged on PoW. Miners can too easily get their hands on non-KYC’d Bitcoin, which is a problem for those tracking the network who want to know every little thing you do. I wouldn’t be surprised if calls to make Bitcoin mining illegal don’t intensify once a CBDC is available.

Daily volume is mostly due to traders.  Billions of dollars in BTC hitting the market will most definitely have an impact in the market.  The last time we saw this much fresh BTC get dumped, it sent the market down around $10K.  It isn't a concern to have right now though.  After still having no option to choose the type of payout, and knowing how slow each step goes, I think the odds of a distribution happening this year are around 3%.  More likely next summer we might see this BTC get distributed, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a sub-$15K BTC at that time.

This is the first I've heard of this potential trade and I'm sure it's just clickbait, but 'The Sportest' published an article this morning titled, Chris Paul With The Lakers Is ALMOST Set And Done:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nba/chris-paul-with-the-lakers-is-almost-set-and-done-nba-trade-rumors/vi-AA11Zi9n

I'm sure this is nonsense, but would be cool.  I don't think the Lakers have any pieces the Suns want, so I'm not holding my breath.

In other news, it looks like Kevin Love is finally going to take a buyout and move on from the Cavs.  They're saying Golden State or New Jersey are potential landing spots.  I think him joining the Warriors would really help fill the hole left in Draymond's 3 point shooting troubles. 

I don’t agree that the pet industry is recession proof. Shelters around me are already asking people to adopt due to animals being dropped off. People are leaving their pets as costs rise and they’re forced to deal with difficult financial choices. While pets have become part of the family, it would seem they are expendable in tough times.

In his latest televised interview he was talking about how inflation barely went up at all from 8.2% to 8.3%. I really think he doesn’t understand it and thinks that means prices were only increasing 0.1% because that’s how much the inflation rate went up. I genuinely believe he doesn’t understand even the most basic inflation reading. Whether that’s because he’s an idiot lifelong politician or he’s just suffered a massive cognitive decline, who knows.

Starting to feel like we may see new lows this week. Lots of bad news seems to be in the pipeline and support is buckling right now. Even though you know it’s coming, these bear markets show you no mercy. The question I think is on everyone’s minds now is how low can the price go before it turns around. I suspect the next volume spike will answer that.

They never really wanted to be in the crypto business anyway. I think they’re fighting to try and get control of the AI and self driving car markets for the coming years. With things like augmented reality & the metaverse becoming more common, I think they’ll do just fine no matter what. I’ve even been a buyer of AMD on this dip.

Feels like global markets are in free fall. Luckily job markets are strong so people aren’t losing their homes yet. I think the worst is yet to come, but that should be good news for anyone looking to accumulate Bitcoin. It is starting to look like things might get pretty bad over the next few months. Maybe not a bad time for a long vacation in the woods.

I think if he could have found a better team he would have. I don’t know the exact reason his value fell so much so fast, but I assume it probably has something to do with his behavior in the aftermath of turning down his massive contract offer. The Lakers giving him a second chance might end up saving his career.

Respect for what happened...  However, from a financial point of view (this is a finance related website) the most astonishing thing about this event to me is that 20 years later we're still trying to normalize rates and stabilize the economy and failing horribly at it.  The effects of Greenspan's lowering of the overnight bank rate in the aftermath of this tragedy are still being digested.  The housing market boom and bust that nearly destroyed out country, then the massive inflation as a result of cheap money to try and fix Greenspan's overreaction, and now the housing market boom and bust part two, where they hope the massive inflation wave will help for a soft landing...  I'm not sure most people realize this is actually the third housing boom bust (I didn't mention the one in 2003) as a result of post 9/11 interest rates.  If they get it wrong this time (seems likely, although they're failing in all new ways this time) we could still be dealing with this in another 10-20 years...

Looking back, you have to wonder how much better off we all would have been if Greenspan hadn't overreacted. 

With the news that Russell Westbrook will be coming off the bench this year most likely, I’m wondering who is going to be the starting PG for the Lakers. I think Dennis Schroder is the better player, but they’re paying Pat Beverly like 10x as much. If Dennis Schroder is the starter, I wonder if there’s another example of a starting PG making 20x less than their backup (Westbrook). That’s a pretty good sign of terrible team management unless the starting PG is on a rookie contract.