Been a while since I've actually seen a POW coin introduced with no premine and no ICO. These days most coins are purely ICOs or they got some massive dev premine. Looks promising and hopefully stays CPU mineable only.

Only issue I see is with the short block times and the timestamp cheats. With a very small block reward time of 5 seconds I can see some miners just moving their computers up to 69 seconds and if they got enough hashpower they will find most of the blocks since any block found at the correct time (not t+69 seconds) will get rejected since its not possible for an older block to have a newer block time than a newer block.

Hopefully this is timestamp hack proof.

The bitcoin dominance at around April or so started to advance but not as fast as a couple of weeks ago. Back in April, people were mostly selling their alts for Bitcoin and hence the given rise of BTC price and lower alt prices, especially the ratio.

However at the beginning of Aug, it had a steep rise and I am to believe it was mostly people who were trying to catch the falling knives back in June/July 2019 there were getting burnt and stopped out. Especially with Bitfinex, Bitmex, Binance offering margin trading and most likely its why the drops were so severe due to liquidations.

I've sold tons of Bitcoin at around $200 and also sold even more ETH at around $5-$10 a coin. I sold because at the time it looked like a fair price and I needed to money to pay for electricity and buy more GPUs.

Yes if I've held till now I would definately get much more for it but you can't predict the future. At the time BTC when it traded around $200 it looked like it would break $200 support and head into the $100 area and maybe even double digits. And ETH at the time of the DAO hack was not looking good either, and it could of went back to $1 ETH a coin.

Sure if I knew what the future would bring I've obviously would of held but I didn't. Same with you selling at $3000. You said you knew it was going to go up but how sure were you? Not very. It could of went to $2000 then $1000 and you wouldn't be able to buy food like you've meantioned.

I read it out of boredom, and I think who ever wrote this spent a great deal of time on writing it and trying to connect many events and so forth. Here is what I don't understand?

Most programmers know that hard drives have a very high failure rate, why in the world wouldn't he have a backup? He stated that he didn't want to use any cloud backups because his wallet.dat wouldn't be secure, why not just put it on an old hard drive and put that drive in storage. Or a USB drive or burn it on a CD/DVD or even put it on an old floppy drive?

Also right after he lost his wallet.dat, why didn't he say anything about losing all those bitcoins in the forum?

Some people already analyzed this article and concluded that its false.

This coin wasn't listed first on Bittrex, it was without an exchange for a month or so and later on the very first exchange was actually Cryptopia. Then I remember when it was actually listed on Bittrex, the price spiked up like crazy and I think it eventually hit 1000 Sats or so.

At the time, from what I can recall there was no indication that it was going to get listed anywhere. The devs paid for a Cryptopia listing and the price gained a little but people wanted more exchanges anyways. People wanted it listed on Poloniex also and it wasn't succesful and out of nowhere it got listed on Bittrex.

I don't think it was some insider trading scam, since they list new coins from time to time anyways for no charge. These days its completely different.

Well its basically both good and bad. Its bad when you have won, because you have won so little. And its good when you lost, because you have lost so little. I generally have a set limit of say $100 per session and maybe $5 per bet and if I lose 20 times and I am out $100, I stay out for the day.

You can't do this with most gambling games but with dice you can have a strategy where if you know you are likely to lose the next bet, just bet less and lose less, and if you think you are more than likely to win the next bet then bet more.

Say you are on 50/50 and you won 5 times in a row betting $5, it would be wise to bet like $1 on the next roll since its most likely going to be a loser. Same with doing it vice versa.

There are many coins to mine with less than 4GB of ram but keep in mind their profitability is much lower than ETH and ETH already is not that profitable.

Go to
https://whattomine.com/

Put in your hashrates and see what is out there.

There are many Daggerhashimoto coins which you can still mine with 2-3GB GPUs, but keep in mind they are very unprofitable. Almost to the point where you are better off just buying an RX 470 4GB second hand since they are dirt cheap these days at $75 each.

Primedice actually recently removed the faucet entirely. It actually upset a few people according to their thread. But if you want some type of faucet if you go to their forum they got some give a ways from time to time.

I am not surprised they removed it because the Primedice faucet was probably the most abused out of all the faucets out there. I remember 2015 they use to give around 2000-3000 sats with the faucet and your rank didn't have to be that high to get to claim it.

Then when 2017 came around and there was massive crypto adoption so was there massive faucet farming. And from what the admin said, about 1% of people were abusing about 99% of all the faucet funds. I think everyday they lost like 20 BTC to faucet abusers and this is when BTC was trading around $15000 or so. So its a significant portion. So hence the reason they had to remove it.

I think the reason why we got this IRS mess is because there were too many people who were involved in crypto who had no idea that crypto was actually taxable.

There are so many people on Bitcointalk or miners who either have no idea they are obligated to pay taxes or they just right out refuse. And there are those who had crazy crypto capital gains in 2017 and owed more than their holdings in 2018 at tax time.

Hence the reason why the IRS is cracking down. I think if you always filed your taxes and you make a small mistake then you shouldn't worry. Correct the mistake, pay the small penality and interest if there is a balance owing and move on. I think the people that should worry are the ones who have been making 5 plus figures and haven't filed anything in the past couple of years. I think IRS is after those people.

Whichever social medium I browse like this forum, twitter, Reddit, news sites I am seeing these crazy $50K or $100K predictions and it leads me to be very cautious. Because too many people are bullish and it's never a good thing.

This is more or less the same situation as in Dec 2018 when it looked like BTC would break $3K and looked like it would hit the 3 figure range. And look what happened, it reversed when people least expected it too.

I am not saying it won't hit $100K sometime in the future but I am just saying to be cautious when everybody and their Grandma is investing in crypto due to massive amounts of greed in the markets.

In my opinion I think the price of Bitcoin plays an important factor to how the crypto gambling industry will do. You need to understand that a crypto bear market is not good for any industry. In 2018 look what happened. Many companies had to shut their doors or claim bankruptcy, many more had to lay off massive amounts of people. People began to call the crypto industry nothing more than a pump and dump scam or Ponzi scheme. People were leaving gambling sites and users were falling.  I remember how lowtraffic the gambling category had at the beginning of 2019 compared to now.

If BTC breaks $20K then I expect another rush of new adoption and more people being introduced to crypto gambling. When BTC broke $10K a few months ago, many celebrities who gamble like that guy Norm McDonald tweeted if it's possible to play Poker with crypto. That is called adoption and it only happened because BTC was rallying. When BTC was falling and falling, it would scare adoption away.

This doesn't only happen in Crypto markets. Traders make the same mistake in trading stocks, bonds, futures, options, ETFs, commodities, etc.

They basically watch a movie like "Wall Street", "The Big Short", or "The Wolf of Wall Street" and look at a few charts, open up a demo account and take a few demo trades and go from $100K to $1 million and decide for a career change.

Then when they got real money on the line they finally realise how much for difficult it is than it seems. Like discussed here. Most traders make good trades but they take profits too quickly and they let their losers run. And what happens is that even if they get 50% of their trades correct. One trade that goes down 80% of their account is usually what makes their account go bust. And then they have to send another deposit into the exchange because they ran out of money. And the cycle repeats.

I started with Cryptos pretty much at the start of the 2014 bear market so right now nothing really suprises me anymore. Back then I never assumed BTC would break $1000 let alone go under $200 briefly.

The 2018 bear market was also a nasty bear market that didn't surprise me really that we managed to go from $20K all the way down to $3K. I honestly was expecting it to go much lower.

The peak in late June 2019 at $13.8K is nothing. We had a small dip and this isn't a bear market. Its summer and there are less and less people trading. Once the volume comes back in Sept/Oct we will see where the markets are headed.

Anyone looking at the ETHBTC ratio on Binanace right now?

I just noticed and it looks like for the last few hours there was a large wall exactly at 0.018848. So far there are 10,000 ETH on the bid which is about 200 BTC worth so about $2,000,000 however this wall has been getting filled for a while so the total order might of been much larger.

I am assuming that the money is coming back into alts and that we hit the low for ETHBTC at least for the ratio. In the near term I don't think we will go much lower. The dominance peaked at 70% and will probably slowly start heading back.

Things should get more interesting when we start September.

From what I remember Vertcoin was released shortly before the 2014 bear-market started and I think it was like 20% more profitable than LTC/DOGE however many people had issues with stability on Vertcoin.

It used slightly more power and was more intense on the GPU. Most people who used the 280X in those days already had trouble keeping their 350Watts GPU power hogs stable and with Vertcoin it just made the matters worse.

However it still was profitable for the month or so when it was released. But shortly after all the alts including BTC started to decline when $900 support broke.

The reason why Bakkt is slightly different from the Bitcoin futures that launched on the CBOE and the CME in Q4 2017 is that they are physically settled. The CBOE/CME are only cash settled futures.

Why is this important? Its important because a physically delivered future actually takes away a bitcoin from the entire supply. So when there is less supply, more demand it causes price to go up.

Market makers will need to buy thousands of BTC if they want to market make for the BAKKT futures. This is bullish.

However does it mean the price will go up? Its hard to tell. Reason why is because BAKKT was delayed so many times in the past that people generally don't care when it launches.

There really isn't any solution to combat the faucet abuse. Basically if they re-add the faucet then they will have hundreds if not thousands of bots which are just going to be betting the faucet amount on 9900x just to be able to reach the min withdraw limit.

The support staff will basically spend all day having to block withdraws because people are trying to withdraw a balance that was created with no deposit and was purely from a faucet gain.

I think what they do now is pretty clever and a very good incentive for the site which will prevent any abuse from happening.

Even though Captcha easily can detect someone's IP and they can easily ban people who come from the same IP, they can't really do that since many people are on shared wifi these days.

Look at the amount of people who are going to a College or University and using their wifi, they all got the same IP. Same with people who go to a coffee shop, they got the same IP also.

The issue is that even if he didn't get banned, then it still wouldn't be worth the hassle to go on faucet just to get a few small 100 sat balance. Which would not be possible to withdraw until you had a large win. And even though most sites will just blacklist the withdraw since the user never made a deposit and tried to do a withdraw from a faucet.

Like others have said in this thread, its simply not worth it.

It's impossible to tell if GPU or ASIC mining will be completely unprofitable in the future.

Many people assumed that CPU mining was dead when there were GPU miners released for Bitcoin. Then other coins became CPU mineable.

Then it was assumed that GPU mining would be dead since ASICs came out and then Litecoin came out with Scrypt which was only possible to mine with GPUs.

Then Litecoin got ASICs and it was the entire cycle all over again with ETH.

So it's impossible to predict.

I think the market will react but most likely until the moment it actually launches and it's live.

We have been hearing about Bakt since the bear market started in 2018 and it kept getting delayed and delayed. And basically right now people are no longer interested.

Maybe if it actually launches with a bang then maybe there will be a reaction. However I think that Sept / Oct in general is an active month for Stocks and Cryptos so there is a chance that it might launch at a good moment and bring us to a new ATH.