Still have some of my XRP position opened since the 2500 area or so. Only XRP trade of this year that ended up in profit. Already took partials. Was going to close however it looks like we can probably reach 5000 sats since ETHBTC and LTCBTC look like they are ready for a break out.

Another indicator is that the BTC dominance is slowly going down and during some moves it seems that whales are dumping BTC for alts. A few weeks ago there was a massive dump on BTC because some whale bought tons of ETH by selling his BTC.

Looks like we might finally get the alt season, however no idea how large it will be. Probably nothing like 2017.

Actually you don't need to keep stablecoins on exchanges. Keep in mind that Tether is on the OMNI network which is basically the bitcoin blockchain and the ETH network which runs under the ERC20 network. So you can actually keep it in your wallet on your computer.

This is important because you can actually keep your stablecoins on cold storage. For ETH ERC20 stablecoins you can use a Trezor and for Bitcoin OMNI network Tether you can use the Armory cold storage option and you won't need to worry about them getting stolen like your crypto.

Another good thing about Tether is that you can lend it out on Bitfinex or Binanace and get like 10% interest per year. There is no bank that will ever give you an interest rate that high so its another pro of stablecoins.

In general its not good when an asset increases way too fast and it can quickly lead to the projects death in doing so.

You need to understand that its not normal for an asset to go from $1000 to $20000 in less than a year. Let alone $10 to $1400 (ETH) or XRP which was even more parabolic?

Why? Because people will see that BTC is going up 20% everyday and think "Oh my, I need to get in on this". And you will always get late FOMOs and basically there will be massive demand on a very thin supply which is what happened back in Q4 2017. There were exchanges and Bitcoin ATMs which ran out of BTC to sell pretty much.

So these people pay these inflated prices and then it stops rising and stops dropping, losing 5% in a day, then another 5%, then another 5% and the panic of the late FOMOs starts and they start to sell. It makes no sense but its common psychology in investing and it might lead to the asset going from $20000 to $3000 or from $1400 to $80 which is what happened in about a years time.

Hence in my opinion its better if it slowly rises than parabolically because the bear markets will be brutal for most.

Reason why they accept Bitcoin but do KYC which most likely nobody will want to go thru in the crypto-community is simply because they want to get traffic off the bitcoin and blockchain hype that many companies these days are trying to profit off.

Remember during the 2017-2018 Crypto hype when people were buying bitcoin and cryptos like crazy. Basically there was a company called "Long Island Ice Tea" and they decided to rebrand to "Long Island Ice Tea Blockchain" or something similar. And what happened? They're stock went crazy right before a huge crash and they are getting sued right now by the SEC because the ice tea had nothing to do with blockchain at all.

This is why Pornhub casino didn't work out and why this website won't work out either.

Like Darkstar_ has mentioned before, I guess Google checks your IP and if you IP is "clean" then you most likely will get an easy form of Captcha or maybe it will let you bypass the captcha since its the same IP used on the same website before.

However the captcha solvers are either somewhere in 3rd world countries or they use some form of VPN and they get the more sophisticated captcha's. If you are ever bored go and find those "Captcha solver jobs" that pay like $0.50/hour and you will see that the captcha's you are given there to solve will be much more complex, basically I did it out of boredom once and it took almost 30 seconds to solve those captcha's compared to the regular capcha's we see everyday which takes like 5 seconds to solve.

So the captcha's for the bots are sophisticated but there is still abuse on casinos and faucets. This is why many sites rather just have some promos because that way more of the "faucet funds" is redirected to the loyal members of the website and not to someone who joins the site, never makes a deposit and just tries to profit off the faucet.

Even if the Bitcoin logo was indeed copyrighted, would you need permission if its only for personal use? I think if you are only going to wear this t-shirt and not sell it for a profit then I don't think you need the permission from the author.

Like the above poster has mentioned. The @Bitcoin twitter is not actually promoting Bitcoin but Bitcoin Cash instead. It was bought out by Roger Ver. The logos there might be the BCH logos which might be copyrighted instead of the BTC which shouldn't.

I've seen people wear these T-shirts everywhere pretty much and I am pretty sure they aren't infringing copyright, its actually good because it promotes cryptocurrencies and a good conversation starter.


EDIT: Did some research after this thread and it turns out that its illegal to print anything that is copyrighted even if its for personal use. Never knew this. However I am pretty sure the BTC logo is not copyrighted.

What kind of power failure was it? Was it just an outage or was it some voltage browning? Basically instead of 120V you were supplied like 60-90V and it fried most of your equipment due to the capacitors compensating for the loss of voltage with more current and frying themselves? If not ...

Then try and reset the unit first and see if you can login to the default IP. If that doesn't work then try and SSH into the unit. You can use software called PuTTY to do this.

Basically if you are able to flash it then it doesn't seem like its completely dead. Maybe just the settings were deleted.

Actually captcha these days is nearly full proof. Bots can't select street lights or click on buses in the captcha photos. The captcha of 2005 was easy to defeat which was just a simple 4-6 letter captcha but these days it's full proof.

How does the casino faucet abuse happen? It's because it's actually humans that solve the captcha for the bots.

Due to low wages in certain countries there are people who are solving captcha's for $0.50-$1.00/hr and the solved captcha is sent to the bots which abuse the faucet in the casino.

Hence this is why so many casino operators just removed the faucet all together or decreased it to a very small amount like 10 sats which wouldn't be worth the hassle to abuse.

If someone has some dedicated mining rigs they will obviously just switch the OS. Shouldn't be too difficult given that there are tons of tutorials out there.

However for the gamer or the hobby miner it's a different story. There are gamers who just mine when they are sleeping or when their computer is on idle. So they mine maybe 12 hours a day and given the dime profit per 24 hour period most won't bother with switching to a different OS when they go to sleep. So I wonder how this will affect the overall difficult in the near term.

Bitcoin mining doesn't have a large carbon footprint as some other industries. Did you know that by eating burgers you are increasing the carbon footprint due to cows?

What about NASCAR or Indy or other car racing where the cars don't go from A to B but instead from A to A and basically waste all that gas going nowhere.

What about all these people in America driving huge SUVs and trucks just with 1 or 2 passengers? Could easily have an economy car that is more fuel efficient.

These are some of the examples but there are tons more I can think of. Bitcoins carbon footprint is very small and for the security is needed to keep the network decentralized.

Satoshi's email was either hacked or he didn't login in a while and it expired and somebody else reregistered it. He Satoshi genuinely won't be sending anything from that email account.

It was a few years back but some person wanted to claim he is Satoshi by sending an email from there and it was quickly debunked. Hence why his username on Bitcointalk is frozen because anyone with access to this email can easily reset the password and login as Satoshi and cause a lot of panic.

But I don't think we will be hearing from him ever. If he was going to make a statement he would of years ago or actually would of tried and sell his coins.

Reason why they require KYC is very similar to that Pornhub casino which also required KYC, its because they accept various payment methods like credit cards.

Credit cards and payment processors like Skrill usually have high levels of fraud and it would be easy for someone to make a deposit with a stolen CC and gamble and withdraw in crypto which is not reversible.

Regarding the utility bills as KYC, some places don't accept cell phone bills as utility bills. Reason why is because many places don't confirm the actual address of the cell phone holder and it's easy to just use some bodies address. For a bank bill or power bill, it's not possible.

No it doesn't work that way. Usually it's the other way around. The hashrate is determined by the price and not the other way around. 

I think this poster has it confused with some other formula, and that formula takes into account the amount of transactions and active addresses if I recall. And from what I remember we are way above that figure, it was somewhere in the $4500-$5000 range.

Didn't some of Hal's family members sell some of his coins last year? I don't remember the details but an address that was used in the first few BTC transactions ever ( sometime in 2009) made a transaction to an exchange sometime in 2018.

I don't have time now to do the analysis but from what I remember it was a small sum. Will try and search for the thread, it was posted somewhere in this section.

At first people were freaking out that he is alive but then we realized that it must be some of his family members.

It is certainly possible but highly unlikely. But like a bankrupt company can make a stock go to be worth a fraction of a penny so can Bitcoin and other cryptos.

Shortly after Bitcoin was launched, there was a bug where somebody mined like 1 billion coins, basically way higher than the entire supply available. It was quickly discovered and a emergency hard fork was issued. Since BTC didn't have much of a market then, the damages were minimal.

If that happened today however, it would be catastrophic. Because an emergency hard fork is not easy to perform. All the Bitcoin exchanges and services would have to update in sync and same with the miners. Like the segwit upgrade from 2017, it's something that can make months and never in an emergency.

So there would be massive panic and if the billion BTC ever hit an exchange then it might cause a crash.

I don't think the outcome will be as huge as everyone expects. Reason why is because like a few posts above someone mentioned you can actually trade BTC on the Robinhood platform and there hasn't been a price surge ever since it became available.

Robinhood is fairly big and usually has younger investors which are more interested in crypto rather than some old senior trader who only invests in blue chip stocks.

Maybe if this news came out in beginning of 2017 or end of 2016 when BTC was under $1000 it would have a bigger impact but right now it doesn't seem to make a difference.

We got various futures and you can use regulated brokers like Coinbase and Gemini, so if someone really wants to invest in Bitcoin. They can already.

Keep in mind that revenue from masternodes is not considered passive income. Also you need to be good with security to run a master node because since you need the coins in your possession you might always get hacked if your security isn't up to date.

The reason why it's not passive income is because you are not paid in BTC or fiat. You are paid in the underlying coin and looking at the alt coin index for the past year it has been pretty horrible.

So you would make a profit with your alt coin but if the value of that coin dropped with respect to BTC or fiat then you are losing money anyways .

The reason why most people don't trade options is because it's very difficult to make money on. And the reason why is the same as people who lose money trading options on the stock market. It's because of the time factor.

It's already difficult predicting at what price will there be a movement and that's why most traders struggle to make any money in the spot markets. While the options market you need to be correct on what price there will be a significant movement and also "when" and that is what makes it difficult.

There is a decay factor and every day the option loses a premium even if the price stays the same. This is why it's difficult trading the front month options on the stock markets because usually the implied volatility is so high that after a few days the option can easily become worth less even if the price stays the same.

With crypto it's no different.

The banks don't report it to the IRS they usually report it to the Money Laundering Prevention team i think it's called something like FinCEN.

I had a friend who sold a car this way, the price was something like $11000 and the guy actually brought cash. They met up at a bank and the buyer had to fill out some form where the money came from and what-not and he never had any issues.

Most likely if this became a law then the buyer would just need to buy a money order first and then pay my friend. While he buys the money order most likely he will need to submit something to FinCEN so I don't see what purpose lowering the cash limit would do.

Very rare to buy a car for 5 figures with cash these days however so I don't see this being a big issue. Most stuff you buy with cash from like Craiglists will be way below the limit anyways.

The card is fairly old already and if it had some potential then it would of been addressed already. Kind of like that "pill" tweak that sped up those Nvidia GPUs like the 1080Ti.

Right now unless there is some profitability in mining I don't think there will be much developement. Especially since it seems that lots of ETH hashrate is by ASICs these days and most miners just power off their rigs.

We will know in 2020 if we get the ProgPOW algo switch and hopefully there will be profitable GPUs then.