Hello H and Roobet.

I have only just logged in after 4 days as I have been down with symptoms of fever and sore throat. Some of you may have heard about the situation of lack of tests and medical facilities in India, right now. So just based on symptoms, I am taking abundant precaution with home isolation, O2 monitoring and prescribed medicines for fever.

I need some time to get over this and thus won't be able to post for the coming week. This is a request to consider me on leave. I'll be back for forum duties soon as I start feeling better. It was a pleasant surprise to be on the receiving end of merit topup spree from @ThePharamcist. Lifted me up.

Be safe everyone out there, especially if you are in India right now. Take care.

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UPDATE: Thank you for waiting on me Hhampuz and Roobet. I went through 6 days of fever, loss of smell, the classical dry cough, headaches and to be honest, lot of anxiety due to watching all the youtube videos. I am slowly getting back to normalcy now,  thanks to constant care from the wife. Here is hoping that everyone can get the best care for their bodies to fight this virus. Take utmost care as soon as symptoms appear. Regular gargles, steam inhalation, good food, rest is in our hands to do. Keep healthy everyone.

We all get anxious on these things. Some of us lesser mortals get drunk, LOL. Others call this feeling of anxiety as "existential crisis" and start thinking of doing something to contribute towards solving these issues. Elon Musk is probably the most famous example of this who literally started SpaceX, Tesla, BORING company and all out of his existential crisis about the human species.

When you are in your 20s, all these issues drive you towards imagining solutions. People who are able to put that energy towards solving these issues generally tend to have great careers and I guess, don't waste their 30s contemplating about these. Rather, they are out in the battlefield getting their hands dirty and solving these problems. I, for one, envy these people and wish that more of us had the luck/ opportunity to spend our lives actually changing things rather than having to face anxiety due to them.

Over the last century, we have been able to control diseases a lot. Average life expectancy went up due to antibiotics and other medical advances. Yet, it seems like nature is in an arms race with human race. We are running out of new antibiotics as microbes are developing resistances. Nothing needs to be said about the SARS-CoV2. The efficacy with which it is killing off some of the victims has left medical experts bewildered. Now, it seems like it is mutating.

Getting rid of diseases and disability would be such a boon for human existence. It'd be literally heaven on earth if somehow every human was assured of a disease-free existence. It'd probably be too costly for everyone to afford but if such technology could ever exist (The kind they featured in the movie Elysium), it'll be a time of celebration. I doubt we are anywhere near that or can even ever reach there. For every answer that delving into the micro-world provides, it throws up another question.

Things that humans do. We refuse to act collectively on climate change but agree on reports that flag these concerns on top. I can see there are quite a few deniers in the forum itself but their opinions don't matter. What is surprising is that although the most powerful people are judging fossil-fuel related climate change as catastrophic, there is very little that actually happens on the ground. A lot keeps getting said about renewables but biggest consumers like China continue to burn coal. Hence, imo, this risk analysis really has no utility except being an academic curiosity.

It isn't even that well thought of. For example, the impact of "mental health deterioration" is lower than that of "price instability" or "industrial collapse". If every person on earth was to suffer from mental health issues, lose their efficiency and become a bit sadder in general, these people judge that it wouldn't have the same impact as industry collapse. I feel that it is a reflection of values that we now hold dear as a consumerist, capitalist society.

Consumption, Industry and economics is more important that human happiness and mental stability. Such times.

I had been watching BSC tokens and did buy a few of them. All of these projects are beyond pointless and the only selling point is that people from all over the world are willing to risk there share of 100 Dollars or 1000 Dollars to earn a 10 dollar or 100 dollar from them within 2-3 days. A lot of projects there have a daily return of 4-8%.

Right now when the market is buoyant, everybody is ready to put money in and this keeps the valuation up. While it is great for those short term profits, whenever a downturn starts, the exodus will be as quick. One thing about BSC being centralized is that the transaction and miner fees never increases too much. This ensures that the little guy can play with his investment as much as he wants. Shifting from one shitcoin to another within a week. Right now, it is easy money.

It is still surprising that UNI now has less TVL than Pancakeswap. I am yet to see a single project on Pancakeswap that does anything novel or even tries to be something different. They are all shameless copies of similar projects on Ethereum. (which was already over-crowded with copies). It is all so blinding and it is hard to fathom that how long can the show go on.

It does take obsessively throwing money at every new thing that seems even a wee-bit legitimate. If these projects end up having even a website and these people catch them early, they are sure to multiply initial investments many times by the time they become used widely. A lot of these crypto influencers and youtubers are being paid by the projects themselves to create hype and ensure a "return" for the seed-round investors. It is an easy cycle of returns for them where there proclamation of returns become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This has become the easiest way to make money currently known to man. By the time normies enter, these projects tend to get plateaued but still retain users because everyone is waiting for their own exit.

To be honest, having  tens of million dollars; making youtube videos about it while marvelling at your own genius about how you made it in life and feeling all fulfilled about helping others do it too, doesn't sound so bad.

That depends on how surely you can predict the next high or the next low. It is not really predictable but the swings are much more than other trading places like the stock market.

Many people who have been doing this for a long time would also tell you that it is better to just HODL. What some of us do is to keep a part exclusively in BTC. That stash is only meant to be added to and not fiddled with. So we buy the dips and don't touch it. The other part can be your play money to have "fun" with and compound that portfolio by buying low and selling high. Mighty hard to do for even the best traders. Those who do it consistently, tend to keep the secret.

India is one of the most space-constrained countries with a hot tropical climate, unreliable electricity supplies (wherever it is cheap), and bad internet quotas compared to the needs of a mining setup. On top of that, unhealthy regulation ensures that it is almost criminal to have "mining hardware" cleared through the customs.

Hence, I hereby, officially revoke the nomination for India.

The best replacement is to do-away with all these industrial farms, democratize the prices and supplies of latest miners and let a million home miners around the world use their individual home electricity to mine it the way it was meant to be. One can dream.

That mine flooding incident in Xinjiang was unfortunate and one of the several industrial accidents that happen in such facilities. It is a "coal" mine by the way. The supply of coal to power plants in Xinjiang region would have stopped resulting in the Bitcoin miners being left without electricity.

While, Coal usage and consumption of power is a big issue, you really need some perspective. The annual consumption of Bitcoin network is roughly estimated currently at about 107 TWh. Assuming China has 65% of the hashing power, the electricity consumption of Chinese Bitcoin miners comes to 67.6TWh.

Compare that to the total power consumption within China in 2018.. That is  7225.5 TWh in 2018. The current consumption of Bitcoin miners is not even 1% of the total coal/ fuel burnt in China in 2018. You can't just quote an unfortunate industrial accident and blame the drying up of rivers and coal pollution on something that uses 0.93% of total power estimate from 2018.

You were talking about the affect of hashrate on price and spreading FUD. So, i am reminding you that if all the miners were to stop today, Bitcoin network will still continue to function with smaller home miners, GPUs or even CPUs if hashrate completely collapses. The hashrate rise and production of ASICs are results of free market and not a necessity for Bitcoin.

Bitmain is the Chinese company which has been in an arms race with the Chinese miners hodling most of the Bitcoin. The whole concept of mega farms connected to Hydro plants or Captive plants was started by the Chinese. That is the typical Chinese greed at work. They want to build the biggest dams, the biggest coal powered plants, employ people at the cheapest rates and keep them in some of the most dangerous working conditions of the world. That is something that the non-democratic Chinese govt and its people have to answer for themselves. While the people seem pretty happy singing paeans about the Chinese dominance when they go around toting firepower at neighbors, they shouldn't cry when that single-party monster comes back to haunt them. If you are opposing the Chinese Govt for this mad run of polluting industrialization, i agree with you. But if you are trying to pin this somehow on Bitcoin, then that is just stupid.

Ahh..Finally the Red Dawn I've been waiting for. Too much money always causes me headaches and over-thinking. Now that I am poor again, I am surprisingly relieved..LOL..

To be honest through, I have been here since the last ATH and have already experienced much of this FUD, Flash crashes and fear of losing my mind over putting too much at stake. I've learnt to not put too much at stake and try to earn, rather than invest. If this is your first crash and you've invested at the ATH, I hope you listened to the "Don't put what you can't afford to lose" advice.

If you didn't, well then just take heart from the experience of the 2017 people who waited for almost 2 years to regain the ATH. I don't think it'll take so long this time. Just HODL and spend this time understanding fundamentals rather than fretting over your losses. The Bear market is when the next season's champs are minted.

Calm down dude. Seriously, What have you been going on about since the morning?

Just because Bitmain named their miners "Ant"-miner doesn't mean they are owned by Jack Ma. That semiconductor business is a complete other beast. Try to be more creative with your conspiracy theories.

If China shuts down coal plants to stop miners, all it does is that the hashrate comes down, difficulty readjusts in 2016 blocks and the world keeps spinning.

There is nothing in the Bitcoin code or Bitcoin ethos that needs hash-rate to continue being relevant. So calm the fuck down and let us know what exactly you want to discuss. Do you hate Bitcoin's price? Why? Didn't get enough? Its cheap now, buy?? You like some other Alt-coin?? Tell us which one. Lets see if you've got more than just these conspiracy theories. 

Haha...Always good fun watching the flips everyone does to accommodate Bitcoin price reality. Of course Pomp came up with the retort:
Schiff is one persistent old man with the gold-bug though. Never misses a chance. Anybody who bought the ATH with savings they cannot afford to lose would be a little worried. Though, if you can be patient with that money and wait enough, there is nothing like knowing that you bought "low" when the next ATH beckons.

Now, Spartans...What is your professionnnn??

That may very well be how things come to pass IF, and it is a BIG if, people, corporations and regulators realize Bitcoin's importance as the only trustworthy PoW currency of the new financial world. The way finance has functioned in the last few decades, there has been a lot of regulation but zero accountability for the people that move money across oceans and manage it in various ways to make the most out of retail investors and "markets", in general.

Again, for all the silly estimations of the Electricity consumed by Bitcoin, the detractors should know that the Bitcoin network will continue even if it is just a million home miners instead of concentrated operations. How many million households consume similar energy for their heating or cooling needs?

Bitcoin and the entrepreneurial initiatives it is unleashing are an urgent need. The increased usage of blockchain can make several current processes much more energy efficient. There can never be a comparison of Bitcoin's energy cost without calculating the social/ economic/ entrepreneurial and efficiency benefits that it is giving. If we start calculating the energy cost of every useful human activity then there are multiple of them that can be stopped without losing any benefits.

Good point. The free market allocating resources where they are most needed and the most productive.

The OP has many good points. What about the fact that Bitcoin has enabled a whole industry where investors are willing to buy a new class of asset in order to manage their financial risks in the long term?  When was the last time that a "commodity" launched a whole side industry with users and communities focussed towards better financial management?

Can the governments, central banks or private investment banks offer an alternative risk management system? What would it cost to keep it running?

This argument relies on the utility of Bitcoin and its importance as a financial innovation. Someone with better data should probably try to put a number on this.

Bitcoin and crypto has pervaded the normal discourse in a significant way. Corporations like Tesla and Financial institutions alike have taken an interest into Bitcoin. The craze of DeFi farming is adding more and more people to pools and farms in the Alt-coin space. Most of Crypto Twitter, TG groups and Discords have a consensus that Degen trading maybe the flavor of the time for now, but one must always have a safe stash of BTC.

BTC is the de-facto money standard of the crypto economy and unlike earlier, it does not take too long for newbies to realize this. In light of these changes, what do you guys think is the way forward for Bitcoiners? Should we now be content with the SoV use-case? Should we be looking forward towards future changes and future initiatives within the Bitcoin community meant for Bitcoin's improvement?

What are some of those things that we should think of? I looked for a few and here is what i found:

1. Special hardware capable of running full node and small miner.

2. Floating Societies with considerable political autonomy.

3. Have we all forgotten about the Lightning Network?

4. Effects of the Taproot upgrades.

What do you guys think should a Bitcoiner be doing in the coming years?

Since when have we started calling 60K to 54K a crash?? Those of you who are seeing this as a crash can only mean two things:

1. You are part of those silly pump and dump groups that try to systematically FUD the forum, reddit etc.

2. You are too new and got into BTC thinking of "instant riches" and are now shocked to see the price decrease.

The price of BTC goes down all the time. The crypto market goes into these flash crashes all the time. The reason being that the whole space is still maturing. At such times, always remember not to invest too much during a peak. BTC is not for trading, it is to be HODLed. Finally, 1 Satoshi is always equal to 1 Satoshi.

China is a One-party state so there is no "strongest" party. Its just one party and by default, every citizen is a member. The structure is hierarchial starting from the commoner at the village level. Above this, a person has his own place in the chain depending on his qualifications, work and output. The Civil services of the British were also derived from the Chinese system. Graduates above a certain age have to sit for examinations and depending on the performance, they are allotted posts at various village, provincial, state and national levels.

With the right connections, a person keeps rising in the party system. The richest families that form the topmost echelons of the state and national economies tend to own all the corporations. These corporations are in turn backed by the Chinese state too. It should come as no surprise that with this hierarchical structure, strict work rules and zero chances of unionization/ protest; China has the cheapest, most easily available and the most efficient labor force compared to anywhere else in the world.

The master stroke of opening its cheap labor and land to the global corporations brought all kind of industries to China. They learned, reverse-engineered, stole and hacked their way to a position where the Chinese are now leading in most technology. I guess everyone has heard of how Huawei became the leading telecommunication company in the world by hacking Nortel. They have also been very far-sighted in establishing diplomatic and economic links in Africa in other poor countries around the world. All of this means that they need English+Mandarin speaking Chinese Elite to act as emissaries and representatives of their corporations. Those are the billionaires that they keep minting.

Bitcoin can and has funded several real world businesses already. The concept of ICO was essentially designed to enable developers obtain funding in the form of crypto for their projects. It is another thing that it resulted in 4000+ Alt-coins on coinmarketcap. Despite the problems, several of the developers have gone ahead and delivered software and websites. Communities have sprung around these projects and increasing the usage and turnover.

There is also the Seastead project which utilized BTC funding from OGs to deploy a proof of concept for living spaces built in international waters. So its already being used in the way you are speculating about.

Nobody can be sure that "ALL" the data is real. Nobody can guarantee that their is no corruption in any institution devised by humans, let alone the stock market. Everybody knows that some have more access and influence than others. That is basic common sense that people learn to live with as they grow up.

Yet, if you are proposing that EVERYTHING is somehow "rigged" to entice investors, then you are just another conspiracy theorist spouting nonsense. It is not even very persuasive like conspiracy theorists are meant to be.

That is a very childish analogy . Businesses go under all the time. Like all the fucking time. "Ancient" businesses collapse and in order to stay on top; CEOs, Managements and employees work hard. By your logic, Xerox should have been the top company in all of tech. Kodak should have been the sole player in Imaging technology. So it is just plain ignorant to say that early entrants in businesses are somehow guaranteed permanent dominance just by the virtue of being early.

Where are you based out of? Any reason this is finding a place in the India sub or you are just sending the message everywhere? Lots of Mandarin on the website and zero information about the people behind this.

This is such a great idea and product. Very desirable for the community and overall BTC health too. As it is getting sold out, you could open up a waitlist to gauge future needs. The increasing cost and demand may well make this an easy target for copycats.

I am eager for reviews from the EU/US customers who will be the first ones to get their hands on this. I have a suggestion regarding accessibility of the Apollo node in countries having ambiguous custom rules regarding mining hardware. I understand this maybe a low priority for now but could this be "branded" as simply a Desktop computer with no outwardly discernible connection to "Bitcoin" or "Mining"?

This could be very helpful for people living in certain jurisdictions where custom officials often tend to only go by the branding on the product.