This is true but it doesn't only attract day traders, there are many people that treat Bitcoin as a long term investment and the issue is that these types of people only seems to buy when the price is going up. And they generally sell when there is massive selling pressure and leads to huge price declines kind of what we saw in Nov 2018.

People assumed that $6000 would break and the lowest will be $5500 but in reality look how low it ended up going. So basically any long term investor that bought above +$10000 ended up with huge losses when they sold at around $3000.

This is why Bitcoin has very fast pumps and the dumps are usually more slow bleeding but eventually there is a capitaluaton event and it reverses.

In Venuzuela the situation is different because there is hyper inflation there. In western countries the inflation is never that high.

The issue with selling fiat and buying Bitcoin is that bitcoins value might decrease more than the actual inflation and it wouldn't help most people in that situation.

Most people get wage increases for the inflation maybe and things might get a little more expensive by a percentage or 2, but if someone puts all their money in Bitcoin to hedge against inflation and ends up losing 50% of it due to a BTC crash then it won't help them.

It's mostly either some kids who had nothing better to do or some people living in 3rd world countries where it was
Actually considered a steady income.

Right now I am pretty sure the demand is down for captcha solvers but during the 2017 days there was tons of work. It actually was dependent on time of day and there were multiple services which held these Captcha solvers. These were primarily used to do faucet abuse on any gambling site that had a decent faucet which in 2017 was plenty and also there were coins like Raiblocks which had a "Proof of human" algo and had tons of abuse also from these Captcha solvers.

So like the above poster said, in many 3rd world countries it's very difficult so if someone can make like $1 USD and it takes a few hours to do so they probably will. Since standard of living there is much lower than places like USA and Europe.

Gambling sites are usually the easiest targets in this because they know they got tons of money and losing a few bucks a day is nothing to them but it adds up in the end.

This is the first technical analysis I have seen that takes into account the full moons. And looking at the chart you posted it doesn't seem like it's any pattern at all just completely random.

The full moon actually reminds me of the old Byteball airdrops back in 2017, where every full moon there was an airdrop and price usually tanked and then rallied shortly after. It dropped due to the people dumping their free
Coins for BTC so it had a more accurate pattern then, but now I don't think these full moons mean much.

If there is a reversal then I think it's nothing more than a coincidence.

Fire detectors or fire alarms use pretty much no electricity at all. I don't know why you are saying that it's expensive to run a smoke detector because it uses so much electricity that it's better to just not have them. Doesn't make sense.

At Home Depot you can get some cheap smoke detectors for like $10 each with a bulk pak. And they usually require a 9V battery which can last like 3-5 years. So pretty much they use no power at all.

The loud noise when there is a fire might actually use up the most power but it's worth it since it's alerting you off danger and worth the cost of a new battery.

The prices are obviously for used units. And in my area it's all over Craiglists and eBay. The 8GB variants go for maybe $10 over the 4GB variants. Basically even the people with 8GB GPUs don't want to mine any more since the profitability is so low.

Currently I am just waiting to see what will happen to ProgPOW, only reason why I didn't eBay my GPUs just yet. If we can get a decent price increase followed by an ProgPOW change in the new year then mining might be worth while again but right now I am getting like a dime a day and just keeping them turned off.

Yes but usually miners are in it for the profits. And since they would be folding at a loss since they need to pay for the electricity most miners wouldn't use their GPUs for Folding. Even if the power was free, pretty sure most miners wouldn't Fold.

I think they have some incentive but its not material things, I think its more for internet karma and that's it.

There was some coin if I recall which instead of hashing POW it did some type of "Folding" but I forget what it was called. However since the value of the coin was low, nobody wanted to mine it. It was a good idea though.

I've been involved with bitcoin and crypto since the 2013 days. I basically had many many different exchange accounts, bitcoin wallets, pool accounts and such. If you were around in 2014 or so, back then there were no bitcoin backlogs and you never had to pay $50 just to get a single transaction confirmed. You just needed to use the default fee of 10,000 sats and it would get confirmed within the next block, even if you were cheap you could probably get it confirmed for 1 sat/byte which might of been a fraction of a penny.

Here is what I used to do. If I had like 1.00015000 BTC in some wallet.dat or some pool, due to laziness I would just withdraw the 1 BTC and leave the dust in there. At $150 a coin it was only like 2 pennies. And the way the old wallets worked, you had to manually subtract the fee or else it would fail, so due to my laziness I didn't want to load the calculator and I just withdrew 1 BTC. I probably had like 5-6 wallets like this.

When Q4 2017 came around, each dust payment was worth something. So instead of being worth 2 pennies it was worth ~$2-3 or so. So I would reload those all wallets, sync them up and send them to an exchange and sell them.

The best in my opinion was my old ETH pool accounts. I had something like 0.09 ETH and usually the min ETH withdraw was 0.10 ETH so I just left it there and switched to a different pool and when it hit $1400 that 0.09 ETH was worth over ~$100. Luckily the pool kept my old balance and didn't clear it after inactivity.

Yes it's still possible to have a few unethical people who will abuse the promos but it's very difficult and more human interaction is required so most faucet abusers will just quit.

The reason why the faucet abuse went on for so long is due to the extremely cheap prices for solving captcha's. Most casinos assumed that Googles captcha is pretty difficult to cheat, especially when you need to select buses or street signs instead of just typing letters. What they didn't realize is that there are services where there are people who are paid like $1/hr to solve captcha's non stop. They use this service along with some API bot and take a bet on 99x and eventually they will reach the min withdraw and repeat the process.

I think PD was losing like 20BTC a day in the past due to the abuse as far as I can recall. Hence this strategy is more bullet proof.

What I think will happen is we might reach the $10K area once again but it might end up being another bull trap like in May 2018.

Looking at the weekly charts the $9100 area is the price we need to clear. However I am expecting $9100 to get tested within the next few weeks and also we might touch the $10K area again briefly. However if we manage to close below the $9100 area on the weekly charts then it spells trouble for BTC probably at least until the next halving.

Reason why is because right after every Bitcoin rally there is a support level formed which gets tested many times and eventually breaks that level and what follows is a rejection of that level. The rejection level is the $9000 area.

So basically not a good idea to long or short, need confirmation first.

I had this annoying thing happen in the past. It was annoying because I actually disabled Windows updates but it installed them anyways and it also installed new AMD drivers.

So I had to reinstall the old ones, re enable compute mode, reinstall afterburner and manually set the core clock and memory clock rates.

Your issue is that your memory clock is probably at the standard 1600mhz instead of the 2000mhz. Just over lock your memory and you should get your speed back.

And disable the windows updates permantely because it will install the drivers again next week.

Most of the people here probably aren't married and they actually don't realize that mining rigs actually upsets most girlfriends or wives.

First issue is the noise. Even if you got GPUs the noise from all of them plus the box fans is going to get really loud, especially when you are trying to sleep next door.

Another issue is the appearance of the rigs and how it makes your place look like something out of the movie Hackers and overall makes the room look like a mess.

The 7 points you guys have mentioned is probably it. The only other one I can think of is that the GPU usually has copper heatsinks and those might fetch a little at the scrap yards (no idea what the scrap rate for copper is at the moment however) and the fans that are attached might be used for other GPUs.

I had a few GPUs die on me which were aftermarket GPUs which had great heatsinks+fans and I just retrofitted those to my loud reference type of GPUs and they ran cooler.

We are actually lucky because if an ASIC becomes obsolete its basically a door-stop. Maybe the fans and PSU enclosed have some value but everything else is pretty much useless.

The promos and challanges are like a "Faucet 2.0". Basically it serves its purpose like a faucet however it filters out most of the people who will abuse the service.

The issue with the faucet was that there were too many people who weren't really gamblers, they never made a single deposit to the site and were just in it for the free money by risk-free gambling.

By having these promos it lets people who are actually interested in gambling and loyal to the website to get some type of "faucet" funds they can gamble with. So this filters out many of the people who would abuse the faucet without actually making a deposit.

I actually also started to hear about BTC back in 2012 but shrugged it off as some scam. But I used to trade forex and stocks in those days and from time to time they actually did some bitcoin charts and I was puzzled why they would do that since to me it seems like some scam.

It wasn't until I started mining back in 2014 and learning about blockchain technology and difficulty and how security works where I actually got interested. And the rest is history and since that time I've invested more and more time to learning about BTC and ETH and taught a few people locally how it works and many people like the idea.

I think bitcoin got a lot of bad publicitiy in the past and that is why many people stay away from it. It started with the Silk Road bust, then with the massive price crashes, MtGox issues, and people just got a bad taste in their mouth when they hear about cryptos in general.

When we hit the $8800 yesterday the rejection was pretty dramatic and very bearish. The outlook is not looking good. I am expecting a run to the $8500 area and from there the bears will appear and try and short it down to the $8000 area again.

The $8800 is significant because it was the high on Sept 25 2019 which was the day after the $9000 support broke. I was expecting at least $9000 area to get tested however looks like the whales front-ran many traders who were either going to use $9000 to get out at break-even or use it to enter a short. If we get more daily higher lows forming then I will be bullish again but now its too early to tell the outcome.

Its very rare for a mining rig to burn a house down, especially end up killing someone while they sleep. You need to be reasonable.

I had tons and tons of rigs in the past, the most common type of fire failure was usually a melting PCIe connector, usually with modular PSUs. I checked the connectors from time to time, then got lazy and never checked and one day a GPU just kept crashing, after hours and hours of testing I discovered that a PCIe melted and it caused a bad connection which lead to the crashes. Another time a GPU fried and immediately the PSU shut off the rig since it detected a short. To my fault  I powered the rig back up and heard a loud BANG followed by a big cloud of smoke.

So as you can see, usually the rig will power off when there is an issue. And most people if not everybody due to fire codes needs a smoke detector in their place. So if a mining rig actually starts a fire, the smoke detector will wake you up and you can either put the  fire off yourself or just run outside.

But I agree with you, for little profit sometimes its best to just sell the GPU rather than deal with the headaches of when they crash in the middle of the night and you have to reboot them.

Is this your own personal VPS or are you just renting out or got some promo and got it free or cheap? Reason why is because mining in general uses 100% CPU usage and usually if you are just renting the VPS, they don't allow constant load like that. They usually rent the same rig to multiple people at the same time and if you are constantely hogging all the CPU usage then other people will complain to the admin and you will most likely get booted off.

Either way even if you are allowed the profitability will still be very little. Even for the RandomX algo there will be tons of other people who will mine it and the profitability will be very small since the overall daily miner block reward is little. There is just too much competition right now. You basically need GPUs to make some small profit like $0.20/day/gpu. CPU is very difficult these days.

His investment is not good. The smart people are basically doing the complete opposite, they bought BTC and alts back in 2016-2017 and they sold... to buy a house. This guy is doing the complete opposite and selling his house to buy BTC and alts.

You can't just say to "monitor the state of the coins and hold to avoid loss". Unless he bought some put options which is not possible for any coins except BTC and ETH. If one day the alts have a 20% red day, what will he do? Sell when it goes up 20%? What if it never goes up 20% ?

Sure its easy investing when your investment either stays at break-even or goes up. However what do you do if it starts to go against you?

Hiding your winnings is also for security reasons. Basically if you are using the name username with all your bitcoin services, casinos, exchanges with the same email and passwords you can easily become a target.

Many people re-use the same username for different casinos and probably the same password. One small site can get hacked and the hacker can hope you used the same password and try to hack in thinking you are some big whale.

Hence you can show-off your big winnings but do it with a unique username, don't use the same username as on Bitcointalk.

Sure you might think your "unhackable" but why even risk it a little. Don't give yourself too much attention.