I'd like to consider that I only mine BTC.  I do have some GPUs mining Ethereum on Nicehash, but it pays out with Bitcoin so to me it is the same as when I used to mine Bitcoin with GPUs back in the day.  I do have some ETH staking in the 2.0 contract earning interest, so that's sort of like mining Ethereum I guess...  For the most part though, it's all about stacking BTC.  Sometimes I might make investments with that BTC, like metaverse land or coins I need to use for something, but the vast majority of crypto assets I have are in Bitcoin.

^ I’m glad you didn’t end up losing any money. Any clue as to how your account became compromised by the attempted scammer in the first place? In my experience, every single time someone has mentioned telegram they have turned out to be a scammer. At this point I try and avoid anyone who ever uses the platform. It’s for the best. Stay away from telegram. There’s literally not a single good thing that will ever come out of using it.

Man, they’re really moving on this. I don’t know what Roger was thinking with this arrangement, but apparently it isn’t as cut and dry as him being liquidated. He had some sort of a handshake deal from what I’ve read where he has historically been adding liquidity as needed when requested. This time instead of adding liquidity, he asked for the remainder of his funds. That’s where the problem lies. Roger thinks they should have returned his balance and they think he should give them more funds. My guess is that the funds are already gone and Roger knows it, so instead of tossing more money their way, he’s going to dispute this and then recoup what losses he can when they file for bankruptcy. They’re trying to shame Roger into giving them more money and he’s playing chicken with them being able to stay solvent. Both parties are huge losers here. An 8-figure loss hurts. I don’t care who you are.

Your question is one that someone who wasn't here for 2016-2017 would ask.  A lot of people poured thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars into building businesses on Bitcoin when it was younger and relatively unknown.  These people took insane chances that nobody else was willing to take to help build Bitcoin into something.  Then, suddenly the rules changed and Bitcoin was pushed as a store of value where users were urged to hodl instead of transact.  Many of these businesses found themselves asking users to pay $50 transaction fees to buy a 'cup of coffee' as they say.  Developers drew the line saying 1mb was the limit (look up all the shady stuff that surrounded the NY Agreement) and basically forced these businesses to fork the network or lose their entire investment of time and money, which they did to grow Bitcoin and was wildly appreciated at the time.  The world was watching and they didn't want to risk a rogue developer with an inferiority complex destroying their future businesses, so they eliminated that risk by issuing their own altcoins.  It was a perfectly reasonable response that was met with extreme hate, as Bitcoiners wanted their coin to be the only game in town, and for them to have to do nothing but hold it to get rich.

Any recognition or regulation of Bitcoin at this point is probably a positive development.  It will lead to more institutional investment and make 'price go up' which everyone loves.  I think this is a good path that we're on, which will eventually lead to us not having to give up our social security number to buy a burrito.  I've seen proposals already to recognize Bitcoin as a form of payment and make transactions under $500 tax free.  I think this is the sort of advancement Bitcoin needs before the masses can truly accept it.  Nobody wants to have to calculate their lunches into their tax return.

TNT is reporting that John Wall is going to sign a new deal with the Clippers. I hope this means we’ll actually get to see him play. I must admit, the idea of him alongside Paul George and Kawhi Leonard is pretty intriguing. The Clippers have underperformed expectations  pretty wildly since picking up Kawhi. Maybe this will end up being the piece they need to take it to the next level.

Kyrie has opted into his contract with the Nets. He’s secured his bag, now he needs to find a team to trade for him. By opting in, he ends the Lakers speculation that LeBron will get him to sign for the minimum and then get him his Nike deal back.

DeAndre Ayton is now being speculated as a trading piece for the Nets. This is sparking talk that Kevin Durant might join the Suns… That would be interesting. I don’t think it’ll happen, but there’s talks happening…

I think there are 3 major hurdles remaining for Bitcoin in order to decouple from traditional markets for the next leg up.

1) Mtgox coins:  These coins have been hanging over the market's head for quite some time.  Until they've been distributed and we can get a good idea of how many of them will be dumped, many market participants will be on the sidelines.

2) ETH 2.0:  ETH?  Who cares?  Well, with such a massive supply of crypto frozen out of the market that has risen in value so much from the time it was locked away, there will undoubtedly be a lot of profit taking.  Can the overall crypto market survive another massive amount of coins hitting the market?  We'll see.

3) Spot ETF:  With no spot ETF available in the US markets, lots of fund money is sitting on the sidelines waiting to enter.  When they have a secure route to do so, it will likely lead to a lot of fresh money hitting the market.

So basically, we have 2 downside events and 1 upside event likely occurring in the near future that will effect the price of Bitcoin.  If we can survive the first 2, the third one will carry us to the promised land.

Bitcoin has never disappointed me.  It's always worked as it should.  The community has been a bit of a disappointment, but when there's money involved you can always expect people will take shortcuts or try to gain an oversized influence.  For me, Bitcoin was an awesome discovery and the community seemed like a utopia up until the blocksize wars.  The hate and trolling during those battles brought in a new crowd of Bitcoiner.  One who didn't care about Bitcoin, but cared about how they could use their vile behavior to make money.  This led to spamming, trolling, paid attacks, trust manipulation, forks, shitcoins, ICO scams...  We are still recovering from this mess, and now we have the blowup of CeFi.  However, all of these are problems with people interacting in the community and not shortcomings of Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is great.  People, not so much.

It's not always so simple.  There are plenty of bad actors in DT and many of the DT members don't even interact with members of this forum outside of spamming on their threads for signature earnings so it's really about who agrees with whatever nonsense they are spouting here.  As someone who has been left negative trust by DT members attempting extortion or just bad actors acting out of jealousy with ridiculous claims, I can tell you that DT still has a long way to go before it's back to being respectable.  Right now, some of the most included members of DT are repeated liars and trust network manipulators who have chased much of the talent from these forums as a result of their quest for power.  It's gotten a little better recently with the departure of trolls like Lauda, Vod, TMAN, Last of the V8s, and a few others (owlcatz hopefully being next), but they still need to be cleansed from the DT network.  However, their supporters in the DT network are hell bent on keeping these trolls there as they put a lot of work into supporting their trolling to punish those that they have petty disagreements with via manipulation of the network.  It is nice to see things moving in the right direction though.  Most of the heavy lifting seems to have carried itself out.

I don't think the miners are acting as the biggest whale and instead are reacting to market conditions.  I'm sure they didn't want to sell massive amounts at the low, but were forced to in order to ensure they could keep the lights on going forward.  Seems reactionary to me.  If they were acting as the biggest whale, you wouldn't have seen them selling the bottom and they would have instead been buying it.  The actual whale is the guy who was selling at $65K and buying at $17K, which I believe was just about the opposite of what miners have been doing.

It is somewhat being billed as the first real fight between Jake Paul and an actual boxer.  Being honest, I have no idea what to expect.  Jake has surprised everyone with every fight, so maybe he'll keep that momentum going.  All the pros seem to think he doesn't have a chance, but we're used to hearing that by now.  I am surprised Jake is willing to put up so much money on a bet with Tommy's brother, but maybe that's just talk.  This fight has been in discussion for a long time and it seems like Tommy is over his rib injury and ready to go at it.  I'm sort of hoping we see another Jake Paul KO so the legend can continue.

People will always break the law and take risks.  I don't think this "we need to make it safe for them to break the law" argument is valid.  It's the same argument that liberals use to hand out clean needles to drug addicts to make sure they aren't spreading disease.  Instead, you walk the streets of San Fransisco and have to dodge needles and piles of shit on the sidewalk.  Rules exist for a reason.  It isn't up to anybody to make sure the rulebreakers are safe if that means putting in place policies like handing out clean needles to drug addicts.  If there's one thing I could get across to liberals, it's that natural selection is a thing that has propelled our species to the dominant position on this planet and ignoring it will lead to our peril.

ETH 2.0 has been delayed so long now, I don't think the new entrants to the space realize that empty promises over it's launch have been an ongoing joke for several years now. 

I am fascinated by such a large move taking place.  There's a good chance it will be a massive failure, as many in this thread have speculated.  There's also a chance it will be a huge success and major players in traditional finance take a huge stake in it's future.

I am more curious about what happens if it is a failure personally.  I wonder if it would cause a profitable to mine coin like Ravencoin to shoot up in value, or what would happen to the Polygon network. 

It does make me happy that some excitement is coming back to crypto.  It's super cringeworthy how all the news lately is about which big players got greedy and tried to overleverage their way to billions.

All of the NastyFans 1g rounds and plastic airtites have been sold.  I kept a couple for my personal collection (as always) but am unlikely to sell them.

There are still a couple dozen NastyPool 1g silver rounds left.  Contact me if you're interested in grabbing a few before they're gone.  I may even be willing to trade for something cool if you have something you want to offer.  Feel free to drop me a line and go from there. 

I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not to sell to Facebook.  It would certainly go a long way towards bringing new users into the Polygon ecosystem and would probably pump SAND's price quite a bit, but might push out some of the anti-facebook crowd away.  I think the pros would outweigh the cons, but it would as you say put one more cool internet property under big tech's control.  Remember a decade ago before the metaverse when video game streaming was going to be the next big thing?  Then Amazon scooped up Twitch, got Microsoft to kill Mixer, and now game streaming is centralized leading to a few big name streamers with huge contracts or half naked girls.  I'd hate to see the metaverse momentum killed in the same way, but I do think it would be good for the industry in this case, because a new metaverse can pop up anytime if the Sandbox goes to hell.  Just look at what yuga labs is doing.  They're trying to surpass 10 years of Sandbox development in 6 months with their Otherside metaverse...

I've always found it pretty easy to spot the bottom in the past.  There's usually an unmistakable moment where capitulation is obvious and clear.  This cycle was a little different because the nature of the crash wasn't retail panic, and instead was orchestrated by big players squeezing out overleveraged entities.  So we had a capitulation moment, but it was sloppier than what we've typically seen in the past.  While I would have preferred a massive volume spike and huge drop instead of the slow bouncing around for a couple days, it does seem like FTX has stepped in to be the lender of last resort and put a bottom on the market to limit further selling.  While the ultimate bottom may be lower than what we saw recently, the downside vs upside has me thinking that now isn't a bad time to be buying and even if we fall from here, you're looking at a possible 50% loss in a near worst case scenario, while the best case scenario which has been playing out for years has upside closer to x10.  Worth it in my opinion.

From what I'm reading, the only team that's shown any interest at all is the Lakers.  I think they like the narrative of LeBron and Kyrie teaming up again and they see this as a possible opportunity to dump Westbrook.  No way is a Westbrook for Kyrie trade happening though.  Maybe if Anthony Davis and Ben Simmons trade places also...  You never know with the Lakers.  They seem to like making crazy roster moves the last several years.  Picking up both Kyrie and Ben Simmons at one though...  That will a locker room filled with more drama than anyone has ever seen.  Which I guess makes Los Angeles the perfect spot for it.

Activating the blue light filter on your gadgets after a certain time of day is something that everyone should do. I also wear blue light blocking glasses if I know I’m going to be working on the computer for a long time at night. It makes a noticeable difference with how your eyes feel. I think those two things have to help, but of course the best solution would be to make sure you’re looking at some real life light from time to time.

It seems that rumors which began in March of this year are really heating up now.  There are lots of people on social media discussing a supposedly pending buyout offer of the Sandbox by Facebook (now Meta) for the price of 4 billion dollars.  I'm not sure how that would effect their SAND currency, or if the rumors are based in reality, but the total SAND market cap right now sits at around 1.5 billion dollars.  While I don't expect this offer to directly translate to a 4 billion dollar market cap for SAND, the popularity of Facebook/Meta would certainly have a positive effect on the development and value of things connected to the Sandbox. 

Anyone have any more details on these rumors or incite on what will happen to SAND as a result of a deal (if true) with Facebook/Meta?