Agreed that the age of a post shouldn't matter if the topic is still relevant, which I think in this case it is very relevant. There are 100's of fresh topics daily that are pure garbage, like; "Is Bitcoin Cabbage?" That's probably not a real topic, but it very well could be.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I do think that the circulating supply should be used when establishing a Market Cap as that is truly what matters. If somehow some of those estimated 2 million Bitcoins assumed lost were suddenly dumped on the market, the price would crash like nothing we have seen so far. Just look at all the hype and blame for the Mt Gox bankruptcy trustee dumping a few of the 200,000 coins onto the market, so image the impact of 10x that.

Another negative to the whole basic "marktetcap is based on the total supply" argument is that every time the market does go up or down, headlines scream "Bitcoin Loses 10 Billion in One Day" due to a $500 price decline, when in actuality the relatively small number of coins traded make the impact far less than that. Most coins are locked up in one form or another, whether that be they are lost, or just being held in storage for the long game, and the few that are traded day-to-day probably only represent a very small percentage of the total supply.

While I am not the biggest fan of BCH, I agree that you cannot really compare this to the Biconnect drama. As BillCoin has stated, Bitconnect was a ponzi from day one and the token was just used to facilitate the ponzi scheme.

Clearing off low demand tokens should be viewed as just that, you do not need to make more out of the situation that it actually is. Also I do not think Kucoin is the be-all end-all of whether a coin succeeds or not.

My significant other also has doubts about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general and would rather have me pursue my career then spend all my time fussing about cryptos. I just say, it's my hobby and sometimes hobby's turn out to be profitable.

OP, what many haven't told you is that you are at the threshold where you should seriously look into server PSUs. While EVGA and Corsair are good brands, the fact remains they are consumer PSUs not meant for 24/7 operation at or near 100% capacity.

Now this is not to say that they cannot perform this function, as many miners certainly utilize them in this manner and they are both quality units manufactured to last, it is just that wasn't their design purpose. Most of the specs are for peak loads and the actual assumption is they would normally be running closer to 50%.

Server PSUs on the other hand are definitely designed to be installed in equipment that is going to run 24/7 and probably running closer to its max rating. They will use more robust components, but they will require 240V and are very loud since they are designed for data-center usage.

There are several companies selling these (used ones are significantly cheaper than new) along with various breakout boards and even pico units to plug feed your motherboard 24-pin ATX connector. The cost of the breakout boards, cables, pico unit, and used PSU are roughly that of a new consumer PSU, sometimes even less. Also, one benefit is if the actual server PSU dies, the rest of your investment is still safe as you can simply pickup another $25 PSU as your breakout boards, etc. are still good.

One company that sells these is Parallel Miner, but there are others with a quick google search.

You probably don't want anything too fancy to begin with if you are going to leave it setup in a hotel room. The maid might come in and see all your gear and report you, thinking you are up to something, lol. That and the risk of it being stolen would have me worried. You may be able to get by with a smaller quiet ASIC as you said, but probably not any big open air GPU rigs.

I don't really think anyone is claiming that the USD is not volatile when they talk about BTC's volatility, it is just that BTC's volatility is much more pronounced on a day-to-day level, versus the USD with its long-term volatility.

Using your 2-liter bottle of soda example, I am fairly confident that the price in USD had remained pretty constant at $2/bottle over the last 3 months. Where I live it is actually only about $1.59, but in any event the basic premise still holds, that with the exception of temporary sales, the price of soda remains pretty constant relative to USD on a day-to-day basis.

Now if we priced that 2-liter bottle of soda in BTC, we would have:

November 1, 2017 - BTC ~$6750, bottle soda = 0.00029629 BTC
December 1, 2017 - BTC ~$10,500, bottle soda = 0.00019047 BTC
December 17, 2017 - BTC ~ $20,000, bottle soda = 0.0001000 BTC
January 1, 2018 - BTC ~$13,700, bottle soda = 0.00014598 BTC
February 6, 2018 - BTC ~$6,400, bottle soda = 0.0003125 BTC* Used instead of 1st because it represents low point
March 1, 2018 - BTC ~$11,000, bottle soda - 0.00018181 BTC

So that is what is I call volatile!

If you were selling a used car for 1 BTC, on December 15th, 2017 you would have gotten $20k for it, assuming you cashed out that same day, and not even 2 months later on February 6, 2018 you would have only got $6,400 for the same car. Now if you paid me in cash instead, the $20,000 I got in December would be pretty much still be worth $20,000 today.

For some reason while reading your comment I thought about wouldn't it be ironic for someone who bought a bunch of bitcoin 5 years ago sub $100, then got sent to prison for 5 years. They would definitely be able to hold and will have a quite different life now, assuming they still had access to the private keys of course.

Not to worry, last I heard Satoshi was holding on for $1 million dollar bitcoin, making him the wealthiest man, well anywhere. Hard to even do the math's, that would be something like a trillionaire.

I think you have it reversed. Bitcoin's price has not lowered because of low trading volume, as much as low volume is occurring because of Bitcoin's lower price.

When it was skyrocketing up it created its own self sustaining pile-one effect where the more it rose the more people piled into it for a quick buck, thus the high volumes. Now that the price has dropped and is trading somewhat sideways, volume has obviously trailed off.

There may be some day trader types who make a few bucks off these smaller moves, but most people aren't going to risk buying/selling the coins they hold for a $100 profit when they could lose a lot more shoudl the market go against them.

I am sure there will be a lot of headlines like this one coming up for other big companies or people who currently use Facebook as they need to make their statement.

The question is, will they stay gone? Most of the supposed outrage over this is fake as basically all companies use and abuse the user information they acquire.

I suspect many of the Facebook defections will quietly re-enable their accounts some months down the road after the news cycle has completed.

While I have not done any world famous feats, yet, such as the pizza event, bitcoin sign guy, etc., I have talked a lot about Bitcoin to my friends and even a couple of local smaller shops that I frequent. This was even before the recent run-up last year, so it was still not mainstream at the time. Some friends who had pushed me off early on, came running back late last year asking how they could get into this Bitcoin, lol.

Other than that, just the usual stuff I suppose, I mine coins, alts mainly now, but convert a good few back to Bitcoin for long term holding. I spend a lot of time here on the forum and other related sites. Oh, and this last Christmas I did handout some paper wallets to close family members to try and spread the word.

We definitely need more information about your system than you have provided, and also what troubleshooting steps have you tried so far, in order that we can try and help you. Please detail your rig specs along with the OS, mining software, and any batch file configuration.

Not knowing anything else about your situation, have your tried to run with say 5 GPUs, 4, 2, 1? Also, is your PSU capable of running 7 1080's? If Windows is restarting it could be power, drivers, mis-configured or too aggressive settings.

Again, please give us as much information as possible if you want useful answers.

Yes, Bitcoin could see $2,600 again, but if it would reach that low I think it would be short lived. You would need to have your buys in place ahead of time to catch that type of dip, but it may just be what the market needs to reset and start to make a meaningful climb up again.

I can see this happening as I think people are too quick to dismiss the market activity in 2013/2014 as not happening again. If you compare the charts the pattern almost looks like a exact repeat of 2014 where the market crashed, briefly recovered to about 50% of the previous high which held for maybe two months and then it crashed down again even further. That time it took the remainder of 2014 and all of 2015 before the market started to slowly rise again in 2016, and taking nearly to 2017 to return to the 2013 highs.
 
Point of all this is it has only been two months since the ATH's and it takes much longer than a few weeks to fully correct and recover. Hopefully the process does not draw out as long as it did last time, and maybe not go as deep, but getting back to the OPs point, I can fully see BTC dipping to 3k yet, albeit briefly, before taking off. I can also see this drawing out all through the summer and fall and maybe not starting a earnest recovery until sometime in 2019.

I forecast at least 2-6 months as there is always a lag on these type of things. Too many people right now expect the market to turn around in the next few weeks and be back to making big profits mining. They will snatch up any GPUs that are even discounted slightly from the past highs, so we need to wait for that cycle to burn itself out as well. Also, people getting in late that paid $1,200 for a GTX1000Ti, even if they now have figured out that they are likely to never pay off the card by mining, are not going to sell it at a huge loss, so they will still be expecting at least $1,000 for that now used card.

IN another couple of months new cards may be out further putting downward price pressure on the GPU market. Right now the GPU markets is as hot as it ever was, as you might think you are getting a deal now that you can buy that GTX1000Ti for $1,000, that was selling for $1,200 a month ago, but in reality you are still paying about $250 above the original MSRP. Normally (meaning non hot-mining market) by this point in a card's life-cycle, they are being pushed off store shelves at a $100 or so discount from MSRP, so that same GTX1000TI would be going for around $650 if it hadn't been for the mining craze. Just some things to keep in mind.

Then this isn't the road you are looking for, as that is exactly the way it will need to be. It isn't so bad if you organize yourself properly. While there are multi-coin pools, none of them carry all coins, especially the new unknown ones.  So you will indeed need to use multiple pools, just start recording your pool details somewhere, maybe in a spreadsheet or something so you can keep better track of them. You also might think about setting up a dedicated machine for to host all your alt coin wallets.

You can pick up an used machine on ebay for this purpose, as the main requirement will be the hard-drive capacity, which I recommend you only use a new drive as any used drives could be filled with viruses and malware, even if you do wipe it. You can also use an external USB drive, as you can get capacities of 4 TB for just $150 or so dollars.

Also, I wouldn't share any main coin wallets on that machine for extra security, and keep Bitcoin, Eth or other really valuable coins somewhere else; hardware wallet, paper wallet, or another dedicate machine.

Again, if this sounds like too much hassle, it probably isn't for you. The nice thing is you have incredible multiplier power if any of the coins you mien become popular and skyrocket in price. Think if you had 1,000 eth stashed away back when it was only trading for 20-30 cents. It didn't take much mining power back then to mine the 1,000 eth, so your costs would be minimal. Even if you mined 10 other coins during the same period that went totally bust, your profits from that single winner would have more than offset the losses from the others. This is the strategy of picking and holding the new or relatively unknown coins.

It is a speculative bet, but then again so is all mining. The coins you are minign right now could crash and never recover, so no matter what it is a risk. However, the less risky coins, in terms of immediate profits, also are the least likely to return 1000x gains. Ethereum did one from $14 to $1,400, but the chances are now much slimmer for it to go to $500,000 from $500, than it is an unknown coin to go from 3 cents to $30.00.

Spot on. Simply looking to find the cheapest place to live is probably not a good way to go about it, as there are definitely reasons those places are so cheap, namely no one wants to live there.

Look at high cost cities in the US, sure the so called "cost of living" might be high, but then so are the wages and opportunities. I don't mind paying 50% of my income for living expenses if I am making $250k a year.

People put too much emphasis on housing costs where everything else I need is the same prices as it is in other locations. So while my housing expenses may be higher, since I also have a correspondingly higher salary than I can find elsewhere, my other costs are essentially a smaller portion of that salary.

For example, I want to buy 1 BTC it will cost me around $9k. With my $250k salary this represents only 3.6% of my salary, where as I lived somewhere with a cheaper cost of living and my salary was half, say $125k then the same Bitcoin would consume 7.2% of my income.

The whole Tether thing is starting to get ridiculous. I remember when people got worked up over them releasing 20 million every couple of months, now they just create 300 million in one day.

I am in the fence as to if they are legitimate or not, but I am leaning toward something is not quite the way they make it out to be as getting a proper audit done cannot be that hard.

There are plenty of companies several times there size with much more complicated inventory, equipment and IP to manage and audit than looking at Tethers bank balance sheet would take. Yet these companies manage to get quarterly audits done on a routine basis, while Tether still has to release an official certified audit. Considering their last accounting firm quit really adds to the questionable nature of their business.

If you were thinking of buying a new gaming PC anyway, and plan on mining with it while it would be otherwise idle, then yes that might be a great idea.

I would also agree you should choose a motherboard that has multiple PCIe slots, 6 or so would be ideal, but even 4-5 will work to start out with. I would advice to start with one GPU at first and see how prices react int he coming weeks, as I havea feeling they will come down some more.

I could see it maybe getting into the $11,000 to $14,000 range in three months time, but it really is anyone's guess. I do think it will take some time to reclaim $20,000, maybe toward the end of the year or even into early 2019.