I'm pretty convinced at this point that the SEC is not going to approve a Bitcoin spot ETF until the mtgox coins are ready to hit the market.  Maybe even then, waiting until the market damage has been done.  Having 200,000+ Bitcoin worth over 7 billion dollars hanging over the market might be a deterrent for them with regards to protecting investor funds.  I think they probably underestimate that there is likely 5x that much sitting on the sidelines waiting to get in if a spot ETF were to be approved, but maybe they want to see if the market will buckle under the weight of 200K BTC hitting the auction block before giving the all clear sign.  That's the only thing that makes sense to me while trying to view the situation from their perspective.  I don't think the SEC is evil.  I think they're doing their best to try and protect people.  I just don't think they really understand crypto as a whole as much as they think they do.

I was worried in the first half. Anthony Davis was dominating. The Lakers just didn’t have enough and Anthony Davis was still hurting from his injury. Glad I got some action on this one. They did manage to keep Joel Embid from getting 30 and extending his streak. I think that was probably the Lakers secondary goal so they can consider that a small victory. Great first half though. Crazy that it got out of hand towards the end.

After reading Elon’s tweet storm about Joe Biden’s idiocy and brainwashed citizens demanding removal of their freedoms out of fear, I can say that right now I feel like I would never buy a car from any company other than Tesla ever again. If you haven’t read Elon’s tweets yet today, do it immediately. The richest man in the world who many give the title of genius has the opinion that our president is an idiot sock puppet. He’s right about it also. Thank god for Elon Musk. He’s got fuck you money and is saying all the right things. He’s the billionaire we deserve and I’m here to cheer him on.

C'mon now, no gaslighting...  I was just saying I have experience with miners and should be competent enough to run them.  I feel your pain though.  I once spent 90 BTC on a bag of honey roasted almonds.  (guessing our escrow interaction happened prior to the trust system so I went ahead and left you some positive feedback for this transaction)

As a promised update on my personal experience with these miners...  I did move them from nicehash where they were only getting 900 sats a day to slush where they now appear to be showing the full 6th/s hashrate (I'm running them in turbo mode) and are getting approximately 1450 sats each.  This is with over 100% luck on slush so while they are still a little below expectations, they are now mining at a profit of around $0.05/day each which I think is actually acceptable for home miners given the exchange rate situation currently.  

So by switching from nicehash to slush, I went from unhappy with my purchase to satisfied, but I would be downright happy if I managed to get them up to 2k sats each.  I'll give them some more time and try playing with them a bit more during my free time to see what I can accomplish.  Any tips are always welcome.  My temps are showing as 0 / 33 / 67.  I assume that's in line with expectations?

No LeBron tonight makes that a pretty good move. I’m still trying to decide if I want to bet against the Lakers or not. Surely seems like the right move. Might have to take a quick look at the odds before the game starts here in a few minutes. I honestly don’t think the Lakers can beat them without LeBron or AD, especially if Howard isn’t going to be getting minutes. Seems like a no brainer, but after yesterday’s no brainer worked out, I feel like this might be a gamblers trap. LOL, if there is such a thing. Still, Sixers got this… Maybe I will toss a few sats at them.

The price doesn't matter until you sell.  I'm assuming people who mine at a loss are expecting higher prices in the future to compensate for their effort.  In the past, this has been a winning strategy.  After going through the effort to purchase GPUs and set up mining rigs, it isn't like you'd switch them on and off depending on what the price is doing that hour.  You go through all that effort and make the investment, you might as well follow through and see what happens.  The market is so volatile, if you're patient it's hard to lose doing anything.  I've seen people offer to give away miners by the hundreds if you pay shipping, and then 2 years later people are selling them for hundreds of dollars each for the same miners when they're profitable again.  Crypto is very much a long game.  Those who try to get in and out with the daily movements almost always end in tears.  A story as old as time.

Maybe you’re not familiar of my situation with a member Vod? He spent years attacking me with lies and posting false information all because he misread a PM and made assumptions that when he discovered his idiocy he chose to lie and attack instead of admit his mistake. No administrator or moderator was any help in bringing the truth to light and chose to blame the victim and urge forgiveness of the liar. Being able to show that I was posting real quotes and Vod was lying might have saved this community a massive drama that ultimately led to Vod not being able to post here anymore and a lasting suspicion around me for being attacked with lies by a crazy person.

So if critical reading skills could have helped avoid that situation then users with critical reading skills here are in short supply.

My dude!  Mitchell and Gobert were both out.  I was just posting about how this should be an easy spread clearing win for the Suns.  They've been playing great lately as you indicated above, while the Jazz have been struggling.  That's a bad combination for a winning pick.  I'm never one to bet against a contrarian but this one seemed like an easy dub. 

The Jazz did make a nice little run with about 4 minutes left, but dumb offensive fouls and poor defense sealed their fate.  Booker and Paul are a hell of a combination out there these days.  I'm surprised Chris Paul is still playing at such a high level, but he is...  If Ayton can come back from injury strong I think they might be in for another deep playoff run.

I just hope I can upgrade to the 4-motor version and keep my 2-year old preorder spot in line. They’ve been adding so much awesome tech to the cybertruck since being announced. It’s almost hard to believe that such an amazing vehicle could ever exist outside of a video game. If it can live up to expectations and I can live long enough to own one, the adventures that will be had…

Elon has been enjoying driving around in Texas this week in the latest prototype. I’m so jealous. I guess being the richest man in the world has it’s perks.

Others seem to be following suit with El Salvador and exploring their Bitcoin options.  Max Keiser stated that the next country to accept Bitcoin is known by him and that it is in South America.  They'd better hurry because the news today is that Turkey is exploring cryptocurrencies and is now widely expected to recognize Bitcoin as a currency also.  The dominoes are beginning to fall.  I can say that I'm genuinely concerned with so many people being onboarded onto Bitcoin's layer-2 with development of that layer being so extremely centralized to a handful of companies and almost no community support from developers (this website doesn't even have a Lightning section).  I just cross my fingers and hope that one company's mission to take over control of Bitcoin's governance doesn't lead to the failure of our global finance vision.

I would agree that without Gobert and Mitchell while the Suns still have Booker and Paul it seems that Phoenix might have a higher chance at winning than the odds are giving them.  They should be able to clear the 3.5 easily and get this W for gamblers.  Plus, the game is televised on ESPN tonight, so it's a great opportunity to grab some take out or sit at a bar (without mask mandates) and enjoy a free meal paid for by the Phoenix Suns.  Not sure if I'll actually put a bet down or not, as usually when these "opportunities" come up there's a little surprise involved.  I agree that it's probably a good bet though.  We'll see in a few hours.

Shipped out a few sets of coins today of weekend orders from the NastyShop.  Orders sure heat up whenever the Bitcoin price drops (human behavior is fascinating).  Hope to see some pics when they start arriving at their new homes.  If you were on the fence during the dip, these should look more attractive now.    The supply on these 1oz rounds is finally beginning to dwindle as well.  There will come a point when they're sold out and I don't think you'll find that this product is easily duplicated due to the infrastructure and real life hashrate and services backing it, not to mention the innovations from 10 years ago are still ahead of the curve and the decade long distribution history cannot be replicated.  Enjoy!

Think of Bitcoin mining not so much verifying transactions and more like trying to crack a code.  Once the code is cracked, you get a block reward and can add transactions to the blockchain.  You don't HAVE to add transactions to the blockchain, you can just take the block reward and leave the mempool (unprocessed transactions) for the next guy who cracks the code to worry about.

So the amount of transactions included in the block have nothing to do with solving the block "code" and getting the reward.  However, if you want to increase your reward, you will include transactions and receive those transaction fees as well.  No transactions to include?  No sweat.  Lots of transactions to include?  Include whatever you want or nothing at all. 

He'd just sell it all for $30 in 2011 anyway. 

I vote time traveler.  It's more interesting.  No forum bug, just good old fashioned 88 mph in a DeLorean with 1.21 jigawatts taking you where you don't need roads.

I went ahead and switched them over to Slush from Nicehash.  The difference was noticeable immediately.  I'll give another update once the hashrate has had a chance to settle down, but I think they will do much better hashing there.  They just don't seem to play nice with Nicehash, which is a bit ironic.    On the plus side, I fired up my old Slush account that hasn't been used in half a decade and was surprised to find $167 sitting in my wallet.  I'm guessing that wasn't worth worrying about when I left it there.  Pretty cool Slush Pool hung onto it for me.  That will also be a nice boost towards getting to the free payout threshold which makes this change much more bearable.

Nice to see Anthony Davis back on the floor. He only got 8 points but did manage a highlight alley oop play. LeBron was the story of the game though. Without Durant on the floor it was clear that LeBron was the best on the court all night long as he put up 33 points. Westbrook managed to shoot 50% from the floor also. When he’s not missing everything the Lakers aren’t bad. Lots of John Wall for Westbrook trade rumors out there anyway… Now for the Warriors game…

Indeed. There are plenty of scammers who have had to ditch their accounts and come back as a newbie to start over. That’s why users with old accounts that haven’t been destroyed by attacks and controversy are viewed as pretty amazingly trustworthy people by this point. I know after the 2013 bubble deflated in 2014, suddenly a lot of users did questionable things and came back as newbies with 2015-now registration dates. I have so much respect for the guys that came in from 2010-2013 and are still here doing positive things because I know how difficult that is.

Jake Paul being involved in buying a majority stake of the UFC’s parent company so that they can fire Dana White is some next level shit… Dana about to be a full time Nelk Boy while Jake Paul is going to effectively end his career. This might be one of the hardest flexes I’ve ever seen. Maybe surpassing what happened to Topps as a company. Jake Paul is a legend if he pulls this off. “I’ll buy your company just to fire you.” Boss move. Respect.

Ya, he seems to be at an all time high in clout, which seems to be part of his motivation.  Who knows, maybe the IMF will bribe him enough that life changing wealth means more to him then being a King of Clout.  I doubt it though.  He's riding high at the moment.

Interesting that the IMF has resorted to this though...  Maybe because they know that a second country is about to go on the Bitcoin standard and are now actively trying to stop this from eroding their influence on global finance.  The ball is rolling already though.  I expect we'll have an announcement on the second country to make Bitcoin a legal currency sometime in the next 3-6 months and that will undoubtably bring a new batch of coiners our way. 

I guess if you're going to ride the wave down and you don't want to mess with selling high and buying low, you could take the DeFi route and stack some altcoins.  I think that's probably a better alternative to continuing to buy them, because gross...

Bitcoin is still the market leader, so obviously the tiny projects built to pump are going to have times of outperformance.  While this may be enticing to some, it's also good to look at how far shitcoins have fallen from their peaks...  Bitcoin being larger and more stable isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Especially at this point in the cycle.  Sure, when you could buy MATIC for a penny, it was a much better opportunity than Bitcoin, but the people paying $3 for it probably wished they'd just held their corns.