Well you left out work, so the way you can make money is by working and use that to buy crypto.

Long time ago you could get free sats just by going to a few dice casinos. Some gave like 1000 sats and if you got lucky you could make the min withdraw of 0.001 sats. However due to abuse they shut this down.

You could also make money mining if you had a GPU. Ethereum was very profitable for years. However it went POS and now there is no money in GPU mining pretty much.

Hence why you should just work.

Yeah I was watching the market yesterday and it looked like we would break the $40K support and head down there as many stops get hit. However it actually reversed.

Today we had lots of positive news with the etfs and we rallied all the way to $43.5k. So completely unexpected turn off events. Would of assume we would touch $40K and reverse but looks like it was front run.

I think like 10 years ago or so I joined a prop firm. They had some crappy ad while driving one day and I decided to try it out.

Was a disaster. Basically when you were new, your losses were capped. So unless you knew what you were doing at the beginning you would never make any decent money.

Also the rest of the group had no idea what they were doing either. I don’t think anyone there was a successful trader.

A year later I think the place just shut down.

I remember in 2019 or 2020 or so when Ethereum NFTs were introduced. And we were getting some crappy jpeg sell for like $10K. Back then i assumed it has to be money laundering because it made no sense.

Then a year or so later, some of these jpegs were going for millions. Was it laundering? Maybe for some but it turned into speculation pretty much. People flipping NFTs left and right. And the same thing is happening here. They are buying it to sell it for a higher price in the future.

Yeah the amount you send has nothing to do with the fee.

You can send a million dollars using 1 input and your fee could be $10

Or you can send $100 using 100 inputs and your fee would be like $500 or so.

Right now it doesn’t make sense to send small amounts. Try and use a different alt if you need to send someone small amounts. The fees will eat you alive.

Checking the block explorer and I see people paying crazy amounts to mint their ordinals. Like one guy paid $500 and he minted 10000 amount of ORDI.

Right now ORDI is $50. So he got $500,000 worth of ORDI just for spending $500 in mining fees? It can’t be right.

I am completely new to this Bitmap, Ordinals thing. Can someone explain how it works?

So I understand the FBI but why the secret service? Don’t they just deal with protecting the president. Why are they involved in cyber crimes involving crypto currencies.

Yeah this is scary but it might be more of a move to move bad people off their stable coin when they know It’s being watched by federal agents.

Wonder how much of its market cap is involved in these illegal activies? It approaching almost $100B.

Yeah I noticed lately these 10 or so etf providers are all in the headlines and all over twitter which want to stand out and gain market share. So if the etf is approved people will invest in their etf instead of blackrocks.

Pretty crazy how in the past you have maybe 3-4 etf being applied for but now we got over 3 times the amount. The fact that they are applying for these, means that they think it has a very good chance of actually being approved.

Yes the government has a lot of debt and it paying large amounts of interests on that debt. I think a trillion a year or so. It’s a crazy amount. And it would be best if they lowered interest rates so they spend less and have less deficits. However they can’t do they because …

If they lower rates right then it can be a repeat of 1970s. Where inflation came back and was much worse. And instead of 5% interest we can get 10% interest. It’s cheaper for the government right now to keep rates where they are instead of lowering them to raise to even higher next year.

I think Bitcoin will just trade sideways and chop around until middle of January.

They are expecting all of the etfs to get approved at once on Jan 10th or something and this is the last week until Christmas and after that is going to be extremely choppy.

We might touch the $40K because it looks like a nice round number. And it was front run last time when we broke the $42K area and liquidated all those positions.

There are already a few bitcoin etfs out.

If you are in Canada there is a spot Bitcoin etf since 2021.

In Europe there was a bitcoin etf for a few years already.

In USA you can buy the bitcoin future etf called Bito which was also out since 2021. And prior to that we had the bitcoin futures which is a little harder for the retail market to access.

Yeah this is the worst fees I’ve seen since 2017 or so. Even earlier in the year when Ordinals were introduced, we had more transactions on the network but the fees were lower anyways. More transactions at lower rates than they are today.

Now for the past 2 days, I am getting asked if I want to send a transaction with a 500 sat/byte fee. This is nuts. What is even more nuts is that I waited until the weekend because I assumed fees would be lower on the weekend as usual but instead they are worse.

Even Ethereum looks cheaper to use.

There are billions that are being moved from time to time. What matters is where its being moved from. Many exchanges do internal transfers. The market doesn't care about these at all. Its just moving their cold storage around I guess.

The ones that matter are those held by MtGox, US Government, FTX, Satoshi, etc. If those move then it will be a significant event. Sometimes you got an old hodler from like 2010 moving his coins, those usually happening during strong bull markets. And as usual the market takes note but doesn't really care.

This happens all the time, it’s mostly due to derivatives. Instead of buying spot where you can’t get liquidated people buy using futures and have leverage as high as 100x and easily get liquidated with a small move.

Even those with only 10x leverage got liquidated because it they bought at $44K and used 10x leverage, they would be liquidate around $40K or so. And 10x leverage is not considered that large.

Yeah I remember that silver bubble.

Everyone was crazy for silver. On the street people would talk about silver going to $100 or so. So it quickly spiked to $50 and then started to crash.

There was articles about China buying unlimited amounts of silver and one month later this bubble popped.

All over Twitter people are filming themselves destroying their ledgers. This is numerous times that something like this has happened. Do you feel safe storing your crypto this way?

Ledger needs to be open sourced and the chances of this happening will be lower, however since they are for profit they obviously aren’t going to do that.

Best cold storage these days is anything that is open sourced.

From what I understand, for some reason you can’t spend any of the bitcoins in the genesis block. However I don’t know if it means you also can’t sign and verify a message.

If you can then obviously it would prove he is satoshi but it can be any of the early blocks pretty much that he can sign and verify. However that will never happen. He disappeared 13 years ago and I don’t think he will ever surface again.

Congrats on entering the world of crypto. Now for the important part, you need to protect this crypto because there are tons and tons of scams out there.

Your best bet is to use a hardware wallet but if you can’t find one in your area then just take an old laptop, remove the WiFi adapter and set up a electrum type of cold storage solution.

It’s free and you will never get your crypto stolen.

Just wondering if its safe to use Electrum and sign transactions. There is news everywhere that Ledger is compromised and some dApps and not to sign ANY tranasctions until further notice.

I know that Electrum is mostly BTC based but want to make sure I won't be affected. I read the reports on Twitter but Im not a dev and can't understand exactly what is going on.

Is Metamask also unsafe?

In the past the reason why they lowered rates is because there was a recession and they had no choice but to cut rates.

This time you can say it’s different. It appears there might be a soft landing instead of a crash and when they cut it , it will be because employment is still strong but inflation is under control.

Will this work? It’s hard to tell. Economy is pretty bad right now. All it would take it one bank failure and all hell would come loose.