The cost right now to start mining is extremely high. Back when I started in 2014 it was very cheap, this was a few months prior to the GPU shortages.

I bought everything on Craigslist, motherboard plus CPU for $50, PSU for $30, GPUs for $100 or so. I spent $750-900 per rig. And if I recall correctly each rig made about $15 a day.

So now the entry price is extremely high for the profits.

No mining is definitely not for everyone. I met many miners throughout the years and many call it quits usually after a few months.

For most they usually pack up their stuff and sell it if they are making less than $1/day per GPU. Most say it’s not worth the hassle and space for such little money. They make an ad and usually someone buys all their equipment at a decent price and they move on.

Balance from exchanges has been decreasing for a long time now and we had many price declines. So this is not always an accurate indicator.

There are many reasons why bitcoins leave exchanges, one can be security. Many hear about hacking attempts and  get a hardware wallet. Another reason can be that bitcoins value increased so people’s exposure is much higher than before. When Bitcoin was in the 4 digits many weren’t worried because it wasn’t worth as much.

Most people now are still bearish. Look at the funding rates it’s mostly in the negative territory for a long time. Many are thinking it’s going to dip and head into the $30K area or lower.

The crypto influencers aren’t good traders, they are just good at marketing. So they will say whatever needs to be said as long as they have an audience. They are usually bearish at the bottom and bullish at the top pretty much.

Tomorrow many traders will be watching the CPI print. However judging how the stock market performed today I think it was already leaked.

If the stock market can make a new ATH in the next few weeks then obviously Bitcoin can make another attempt into the $60K range and maybe head to $70K this time.

Currently we are at resistance and there might be a short term pullback from here.

No need to bump this thread anymore. It’s been years since Claymore was active here and his disappears is almost as questionable as Satoshis.

He was making amazing income on his software but stopped doing updates. The updates were all simple but he just let the miner be incompatible up to a certain block and lost his market share for being the largest ETH software.

No one knows what happened to him. Some people followed his mined ETH fees and there was some movement a year ago or a so, so maybe he is on some island somewhere enjoying his profits.

In the long run it won’t make a difference. So you can do either or. Especially for a coin like Ethereum which has very short block times. For BTC it might have an impact if you get on a pool with bad luck on a particular day and doesn’t find any blocks.

I used to mine also not 24 hours. Basically in the Summer it got very hot during certain hours that I had to turn off rigs because they were getting too hot and needed the power for an air conditioner. And the profitability wasn’t really all that different.

The reason why stocks like Netflix, Snap, Facebook, Amazon are trading like altcoins these days where they have 20-30% days which is unheard of in the stock market world is due to the VIX and liquidity.

VIX is just the volatility index. When stocks go down, they go down faster than they go up. So this is related to liquidity. When VIX is up the liquidity is down. Which is not ideal. Because there are less bids and more offers and we got these crazy 25% down days.

Years ago you could make decent money by arbitrage trading with various exchanges. Back then they were less market makers and less liquidity.

I had many alerts and took advantage of 0.5-1% spreads on certain alt coins. These days however most bots are pretty high tech that they will beat you too it. You need to have some fast bot that quickly can add an order to the market to arbitrate it with another exchange. This is similar to how when there is a flash crash on one exchange but not others, usually within seconds that gap is filed by arbitrage bots. Not humans.

These days your chances of finding a Bitcoin ATM which doesn’t require a copy of your passport/drivers license is slim. And same with meeting face to face with someone.

The Bitcoin ATM varies by countries however many these days only let you use them if your KYC in some way or another. If you are going to KYC you might as well just use an exchange like Coinbase.

Face to face now is not popular due to all the exchanges out there. It’s more safer and convenient. Many stopped doing P2P trades after they heard on the news of someone getting hurt while doing a Bitcoin transactions in person.

If we are in a true strong bull market then an indicator usually is that it rarely dips enough for many to enter. Usually bitcoins stronger rallies provided little to no dips.

This rally is a perfect example, it didn’t retrace enough for many people to enter, only way to get in was to chase the price pretty much.

So keep that in mind, sometimes you just need to enter and set a tight stop instead of waiting for a dip that will never arrive.

Unlike Bitcoin mining. A lot of ETH miner revenue is actually from the transaction fees. And since they have smart contacts the fees are enormous.

Usually in a strong bull market , people are paying $20 for ETH transfers and like $50 for ERC20 transfer and more for Defi. So if you go on etherscan you can check the average fees and when they are higher they are generating more income for you.

This is one reason why it’s difficult to predict mining profitability on ETH since these fees are hard to predict when they go up or down.

If you find a block on a pool then you get the entire block reward divided by all the shares you and other miners sent to that pool. Hence why it’s called pool mining.

Also don’t fall for any scam miner software which says that if you are mining at a pool and find a block it will send it directly to the network instead of the pool and you get full block reward. This is not possible. Because there is a header that is marked to the pool and if you send a winning nonce directly to the network the pool will still get credit for it.

Yes there is a chip shortage which leads me to believe there won’t be too many of these produced in the first place. For all we know they might be just doing this to get their name out there and stick it into AMD and Nvidia face and profit won’t be the main goal.

From a business point of view, it seems risky choosing to produce ASIC chip when they can make CPU and GPU chips instead which will for sure give them a profit. If Bitcoin prices go down then they will have issues selling these ASICS to begin with.

Pinterest and Snap, good look at the weekly chart. Those two companies were in a bubble pretty much. So I am not surprised they are losing so much value. I think they are getting the correction they need.

Facebook was overvalued for years and it’s value pretty much doubled from the 2019 highs very quickly and their valuation is more inline with the price that it’s trading at now. This iOS update only will hurt them temporarily and it’s still a great company and people will keep using it anyways.

What country are you in?

In my area it’s business as usual. Gas stations are just as busy with record high price of gasoline. Malls and restaurants also busy.

The stock market however? I frequent wallstreetbets and it looks like the last 6 months cleaned out many traders. The activity there is slower than usual. Pointing to retail market getting wiped out with all these bad earnings .

Today was an interesting day. This entire week Bitcoin was correlated with stocks. There were many bad earnings such as Netflix and Facebook and Bitcoin tanked at the same time as the stock markets. And yesterday when Amazon’s earnings came out it also went up with the stock markets.

However this morning the stock market was going down but Bitcoin was going up, it was actually decoupled before later on the stock market caught a bid and went up also.

So it seems many are selling certain stocks and going into bitcoin. So this month looks much more bullish than the last.

You can do this but like everybody here has commented. It will cost your more to rent the hash than if you just mined it yourself.

If you want to solo mine then you will need to make your own pool first. And when you rent the hash you point to that pool. So sure you save 1% from pool fees but you are paying a premium and fees for that hashpower. It’s lose lose situation unless you get lucky and find a block.

Intel will also start to build GPUs to compete with AMD and Nvidia however this isn’t about GPUs. They are making an actual sha256d algo ASIC chip, not a GPU.

Their competition right now is Bitmain pretty much. And it will be interesting to see how much more efficient they can make their ASICS compared to Bitmain.

I wonder if they will build an entire ASIC or if they will just sell the chips for other companies to put it inside a PCB and build an ASIC like the Antminer.

What a privilege it must be for one of the largest chip producers to finally start making an Bitcoin mining ASIC. When I got into mining years ago never would I assumed the Bitmains competitor will actually be Intel.

So obviously it won’t be cheap. However given Bitmain build quality at least it will be reliable. Wonder if it will actually be for the masses or if it’s some small batch sold to a select few large farms.

Should be interesting seeing what is announced in a couple of weeks.