Unlike 2014-2015 days right now it's very difficult getting any free bitcoins due to its large value. Even 2017 was easier because there were more faucets in casinos then and you could join more campaign and were paid in decent tokens which had value, these days there are none of those.

I think it's the 1% of scammers who abused the faucets which ruined it for 99% of us. It's pretty sad because the first Bitcoin faucet ever was giving like 1 BTC a day and all you had to do was just reset your router, get a new IP and you could get another BTC that way for doing nothing. Was it worth it? No because BTC had no value then, these days it's too valuable and nobody is giving it away.

I remember back in 2014-2015 many casinos and dice sites gave like 2000 sats faucets that you could claim all day and it was easy reaching the min withdraw back then. If you held all those faucet coins you could of made a lot of money today however most were mostly gambled back to the site.

Most of the RX series don't come with dual bios's. I think the Sapphire one was the only RX series that came with dual bios. Most of mine with various manufactures never came with it. Actually even many of my old R9 280X also didn't come with the dual bios.

I think its a cost cutting measure and these are low priced tier GPUs and they don't want to put too many components on the PCB which are mostly never used. I think these days manufacteurs don't want people modding their bios anymore like in the old days. Back then you would check for new BIOS's every 6 months for your GPUs like you would for your MOBO's but these days that's rare. Its not really needed.

If you brick the GPU, you just need to short 2 pins on the PCB and it enters the GPU in a testing mode and then you can use DOS and do a manual flash that way to recover your BIOS. But honestly as long as you don't do multiple flashes to GPUs at once you shouldn't run into any issues.

Just dump your current bios, open up a software to mod the straps and save the bios and flash that exact bios. Worst case is you get crashes during mining and you can always re-flash your backup bios.

Right now the only alts which are showing some movement are the large cap alts and mostly the ones found on the Bitmex futures or the alts with USDT pairs on Binance. Many of the medium or small cap alt coins are still at all time lows.

The reason why these alts are showing activity is mostly due to speculations where everybody wants a repeat of January 2018 where the altcoin market went crazy when bitcoin was pulling back.

This week we are getting large moves on the main alts like TRON, BCH and ETH. It looks like people are selling their BTC and buying these alts or selling their USDT/USD and buying the alts. It all points to the start of a bull-run.

Manipulation not only happens in Crypto. I've been trading various stocks, futures, forex, options and pretty much whenever there is a crash of some sort everybody blames it on the manipulators.

Its very difficult to prove manipulation and that's probably why many get away with it. With crypto its even worse since the markets are unregulated. Bitmex is the largest exchange out there and you can see huge spoof orders appear and then get cancelled right away, this is manipulation also because many see these orders and try and front run them. And what usually happens is that the order is pulled and the price starts to reverse. This happens probably a dozen or so times in Crypto.

Can you trade this? Not really because sometimes the order is not pulled, you won't know this until afterwards. Some of the orders are genuine actually, but even then the price can still head the opposite direction. So its best to just rely on technical analysis.

No this is not called double spending , this is called a 51% attack and that's not possible these days. And if it actually was possible then the hackers wouldn't target casinos but exchanges instead. There would be a lot more money at stake then. They would just do a chain reorg and they would short the futures market and watch the price plunge.

What he is talking about is simply sending a transaction and sending another one right after with a much larger fee and to a different address. So they would make a deposit, and if it's 0 confirms they would bet the entire balance very fast and if they won they would do nothing. And if they lost they would double spend that input to their own address. I don't know if it works these days even because most nodes reject those transactions but casinos were attacked this way in the past.

The 0 confirmation is basically a marketing tactic so if a gambler loses all their BTC and they are on the tilt to revenge gamble then chances are they will if the deposit is confirmed fast, if it takes a few hours to confirm they might get bored and stop gambling and stop losing money. If it comes right away they will gamble it instantly and might lose it also.

Bitcoin doesn't need institutional money flowing in but everybody that owns Bitcoin wants the money to come in because their holdings would increase in value.

Institutions which are primarily speculators only want profits and if they see that Bitcoin has enough liquidity and potential then they will get involved.

This is basically two fold, it might provide a price increase however look what happened with the Bitcoin futures? It basically was the top and the start of the long bear market. This is why many people back in 2017 were worried and they were correct that they would short the market and cause a crash.

Deserves a merit because pretty much on point. They are years away from public use and even if there is a hint of trouble due to private use in Google labs then it's not only bitcoin which would need to increase their security it's also most websites and especially banks.

Right now I wouldn't worry and this was discussed last week when we got the crash all the way down to $7200. People were saying that Bitcoin is crashing because of Googles quantum computer and its not longer secure and hence the sell-off. It was nothing but a coincidence and we rallied about $2000 since then so obviously nobody who is buying Bitcoin thinks it's an issue.

I think people are getting overly bullish again because it's November again which in the past (except 2018) was proved to always be a bullish month. And the fact that the Xi comments have sent us from 7300 to 10600 in a few hours people are already expecting new ATH to form.

If you want to see what the general market thinks just go look at the Deribit options for the year end expiry. Currently there is a premium of about $55 and the Bitmex futures for Dec expiry only has a $125 premium currently from the spot market, hence very low probability.

There is a large premium for the $10000 and $11000 options however which implies that sometime before the end of the year we might reach at least $12K or maybe $12.5K but $20k is way too far fetched in my opinion.

I didn't check the log but most likely he didn't spend only 0.33 BTC for these bets. These are very low odd wins and its very rare to get them twice in a row. Honestly if the player only made those 2 bets and won just like that the site admins would probably be suspicous like they were with that HufflePuff guy back in 2014. Because there is luck and there is "extreme luck" which sometimes might imply that the player is cheating somehow.

I am assuming that this gambler most likely made like 1000 rolls or so with smaller base bets and odds were on his side that the next few rolls ahead would of resulted in winners than losers. Basically every 100 rolls, there should be 2 wins and every 1000 rolls there should be 20 wins. So he might of gotten really unlucky with the first 1000 rolls which were all losses and up'd his base bet since the chances of rolling >98 were much higher in the next 1000 rolls.

This is another reason why you should switch away from Windows 10 in any of your mining rigs. Currently many people in the Claymore thread have issues mining ETH with 4GB GPUs. The solution for that is to use Ubuntu instead. And another benefit of using Ubuntu is you don't need to worry about these pesky windows updates.

I've also had issues blocking the updates, for some reason you try one method, it works, but in a few months out of the blue your system has halted and when you plug a monitor into it, its some windows update that got halted. And windows updates should of been disabled.

With Ubuntu you won't get this issue, updates will pop-up but will always ask for your permission before installing and most of the time they are non-invasive and don't even require a restart to complete.

Seems lately many people are getting issues with 4GB mining ETH.

If you look at the overall hashrate,
https://etherscan.io/chart/hashrate

It looks like the difficulty is dropping a little while price rose in the last few days, since the opposite should happen it means that some miners can't mine ETH anymore.

My advice is to use a different OS other than Win10 to mine, Ubuntu is not that hard to set up there are Youtube videos and tutorials that tell you each step of the way. Once you get that running it should be much more stable and you will have a few more months to mine.

In the meantime the 8GB GPUs are still pretty cheap second hand so many buy a few of those and sell your 4GB on Craigslist or eBay. You can probably almost sell them at the same price, maybe at a $20-30 loss, because most gamers don't really need the full 8GB for most games.

The real true inflation isn't only 2%, its more like 5%. There was a guy who kept a Burrito index which shows the true inflation and how expensive some common household items like food have gotten, just google it when you have time.

Basically the inflation index since 2000 was about 50% but the true inflation according to the burrito is more like 200%. Some stuff like cars, electronics, gasoline might be less inflation but basic goods like food or electricity or gas to heat your home is crazy expensive these days.

In my opinion the inflation index really needs to be changed to be more accurate.

Years ago I actually met someone younger than 18 years old who was "almost" a millionaire. This was in the $200 bitcoin range and there were no bitcoin ATMs in my area so people used peer to peer to buy and sell bitcoins.

This individual showed me his BTC wallet and at the time he had a net value of $400,000, keep in mind that this was in 2014-2015 or so, so if he held everything till now he would of been a multi-millionaire.

I told him not to show off his bitcoin holdings due to security reasons. I told him to send a small amount of BTC to a new address and sell his coins that way so the person buying them doesn't know his true balance.

Haven't heard from him since. He said he made most of his money by mining bitcoin and litecoin and I think dogecoin.

Right now I am getting a little bit bearish from yesterday primarily due to the futures premium. In general whenever there is a discount or premium on the futures, it usually means that the herd might get wiped out before a real move.

Right before this 40% pump there was actually a negative funding on the bitmex futures. And right now for the past day or so there is positive funding and the futures premium is growing, normal when this happens means there are too many retail traders which are buying this move, going long, usually on high leverage and there are massive crashes.

So if we don't break the $10K by the end of the day, I might look for a short term short because the ~8000 area might get revisited, especially the $8800 support.

If it was manipulation the price would of already started to head back towards the $7000 area and not just about to break the $10000 area in the last few hours.

There really aren't too many moments in bitcoin history with the dramatic rise from $7250 to $10600, hence it can't only be manipulation.

I think part of it was the Xi news, part was short covering and another part was people who had money on the side ended up buying back into BTC hoping to see it rise further past the $13800 price we got in June 2019.

The way that most casinos deal with this is they have some system which analyses the deposit and it can tell whether it can be a double spend attack or not.

For example if the deposit arrives with a fee so little that it would take forever to confirm it would automatically flag the deposit and wait until it confirms with the network. Same with deposits which have inputs which were previously linked to double spend attacks. It would assume a double spend is possible and would automatically flag the deposit until it has at least one confirmation.

I also think if a deposit is sent with a replace by fee then it would also get flagged since they know that it can get resent to a different address. If a transaction is resent without that enabled I think it would get flagged by most nodes and pools and not get processed however I am not sure, been a while since I've sent a transaction with RBF not enabled.

Yes I've listened to some of the dev call on the YouTube channel. It seems that this time they are taking preparation at least in case they run into some unexpected bugs right before the fork and they can postpone it another month like they had to do last year.

I remember that the fork was due in less than 2 days and some bug was found and they had to cancel the fork and lead to a lot of disappointment.

For those wondering this fork doesn't have ProgPOW algo change, that might be issued in the fork right after this one sometime in 2020.

The confusion between Bitcoin SV is at least not as bad as Bitcoin Cash. Most people will get curious what the SV means after Bitcoin and they will do their research.

Bitcoin cash sounds more like it's actually Bitcoin. There are certain debit or credit cards out there which have the term Cash after them and they are a different form of payment. Because of this is why many people assumed that Bitcoin cash is just a different form of the real Bitcoin itself. It's why at the beginning it was called BCash instead of Bitcoin Cash primarily with exchanges to prevent confusion.

There were also people who went to Bitcoin.com and ended up buying BCH instead of BTC because it was the primarily listed option.

That twitter post might seem like nothing more than a troll post to get followers, these days people post anything just to get enough likes and followers and shouldn't be taken seriously.

Before this 40% pump I was also bearish and expecting maybe $6000 to be hit sometime before the end of the year. However when we have these crazy gains in such short period over positive news like the China news it means that we are quite possibility entering a bull market again.

The fact that price retraced a little is normal. There are people taking profits and it's also a weekend. It will take a few days for wires to get sent into exchanges and buy more BTC.

I am waiting for the weekly and monthly candles to close first to decide what the price action will be for the next few months.

Xi talked about Blockchain technology and didn't mention Bitcoin however what is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear "Blockchain"? It's obviously Bitcoin.

According to a reporter overnight Universities added Blockchain courses in China so the impact is very huge already.

If it was whale manipulation it wouldn't of went this high without crashing down shortly after. It's not short covering either since most were liquidated when $8800 area was first hit not when it went to $10600.