This rally is very strange however. It’s different from the other rallies. Most of the other rallies into ATH lead to high funding rates. Funding is completely flat right now which is strange.

So it seems most of this rally is with spot buying instead of derivatives which is a good sign. Means there is some huge buyer on coin base and with earnings coming up might lead to a similar rally like we had a few months back.

The only coin that is a large cap that hasn’t rallied too much is LTC however it’s with the BTC pair and not USD. Looking at most of the top 10 alts there is really not much out there.

I think it’s a good trade if your goal is to stack sats instead of just making fiat. I have a feeling we might be near a top sooner than later and buying ETH at $3K seems risky. If it undergoes another 90% loss we might see $150 ETH which would be a huge loss.

If you buy LTCBTC if BTC tops you can at least regain some sats if there is a pump into the top. Similar to 2017.

The only coin which I think might give a good run that is left is Litecoin. The LTCBTC pair looks like it can easily break and head higher. Right now pretty much every alt coin already rallied there is nothing left except LTC.

I think the whales are slowly accumulating some LTC while selling ETH and we will see that on the LTCETH chart. Doge, XRP, ETH everything pretty much pumped already. I would be surprised if LTC didn't. There really isnt much out there to buy.

One thing you need to consider is this. Back when BTC was at $5K or so. If you had 0.50 BTC on an exchange it was only worth $2500. Now half a coin is still worth over $26K. So you need to understand that many people probably decided to get hardware wallets or some sort of cold storage setup since it was very risky leaving huge amount of BTC on a centralized exchange.

I think when people read about these sim swap attacks they all decided to protect themselves and invested in a hardware wallet. They are very easy to setup and use. Much better than using a paper wallet from 5 years ago. So one reason could be that institutions are putting it on cold storage and another is that people are just keeping less coins on exchanges for security.

Its not only crypto where people call it "manipulation". Back in the old days I used to frequent the Yahoo discussion for certain stocks like AAPL, GOOG, etc. And its no different there.

When the stock was going up, everybody was happy. When the stock had a down day or week. Everybody called it "Blatant Manipulation" and kept blaming wall street suits for their losses. I guess in crypto its no different.

The markets are really starting to trade sideways lately, ETH is rallying but BTC is stalling. So you need to becareful trading in these markets.

Providing an update because I see some divergence in the funding and price. Looking at,
https://www.bybt.com/BitcoinOpenInterest

It seems that price is going up, while open interest is going down. Also the funding is flat and sometimes negative.

What will soon happen is those that are short perps, will not want to lose money and they will either close their short perps by buying back the short and selling spot. Or they will just move into the futures months. However right now the June 2021 futures is only 3.5% so if people move from perps to futures, eventually the premium will disappear.

If the premium disappears people who are short futures will eventually close and sell spot. And we might see a huge dump where people are closing high leverage short positions by buying on derivatives and selling spot.

In my experience, if your rig is mining problem free for like 2 weeks or so. Don't shut it off and turn it back on again, because in my experience and I have no idea why this happened but usually a few hours later it would stall and I would need to boot it up again.

No idea why this kept happening. It would run for weeks. I would need to do a power cycle, and then it would usually start to hang shortly after. Eventually it stayed stable and kept mining for weeks however for some reason shutting it off and on made something worse and lead to this random crashes.

When the bear market started back in 2018/2019 were the GPUs really that cheap. I don't think they went down by much. Even the cheapest GPU at the time the RX 570 4GB which retailed for like $175 or so you could still get around 50% of it during most of 2019. And the Nvidia 1080Ti stuff didn't really go down that much in price.

I just think the amount of willing gamers absorbed must of the GPUs that miners wanted to dump and after that wave the prices started to stabilise. The only way really to get ultra cheap GPUs is to buy them when they are sold as is usually due to broken fans.

The ones with broken fans are easy to fix and nobody wants to buy them and they go for very cheap on eBay.

Its possible however you probably won't make any decent profit doing this. Even if you use all the free solar power. For profitable XMR mining you need high end processors which are currently sold out. Those processors you are talking about aren't good for actual home mining, they are designed for low power cell phone use.

People for years have wanted to mine with cell phones because it would make the network more decentralized since many people have phones however the issue is that it would be very easy to cheat because someone with a GPU or FGPA can pretty much control maybe most of the network by doing so. You don't realise how slow cell phone computing power is relative to CPUs and GPUs.

Elon Musk is a billionaire why would he want to buy bitcoin, then announce Tesla bought some and then sell for double the price. That Dave Portnoy guy is always going to be negative when it comes to crypto because he is bad at investing in it.

I think when the stock market started to boom back in May 2020, people kept telling him to invest in crypto. He didn't listen until maybe 6 months later when he bought BTC and Chainlink at the top and sold for a huge 20% loss or so. He called it a scam and haven't looked back.

Then I think he bought back again when we hit $65K or so and most likely he is underwater again.

The news of Tesla selling some BTC seems to have been negative at first and then positive. Most people panicked at first but they only sold 10% of their holdings and their purpose of selling was mostly to test the liquidity of the bids.

This is important because since they own over $2B worth, because if they try and sell say 5% and it crashes the market by 5% then obviously their investment is not secure because they won't be able to liquidate in the future when they need to cash to open new factories or hire more workers. Since it pasted the liquidity test then its pretty bullish. Way too many people panicked however price is still holding up well.

I think $40K will be the line in the sand whether we break ATH again or did we top out at $65K. If you look at the daily chart, $40K looks like important support because its where the prior ATH was and it was close to getting tested a few months back but never did, it rallied away from there front-running many people.

So if we break $40K, by break I mean we close under $40K at like $38-39K on the weekly, then I would say there is a 90% chance $65K was the top and you should look to get out. Going from $65K to $40K will be a ~40% drop which is similar to 2017 where we went from $20K to $11K and then bounced to like $16K and never went higher. I think if this does happen, we might go to $54K or so and that might be the failed high and we go lower.

However its too early too tell, the $47K might of been the local bottom and we might hit ATH by middle of May.

Yes that $41K area is very strong support. I remember people were wanting to buy BTC at the prior ATH but it never touched and basically everybody got front-run. So if the price actually does go back to that area it should defaintely hold and be a great place to start a long. The problem will be if that area doesn't hold. Because it looks like $50K support might of been broken which was created last month and if $40-41K doesn't hold then its safe to say that $65K was the top. At least the local top.

This is similar to what happened back in 2018. People kept buying all these old support levels, and none of them held and it wasn't until later we realized, that $20K was the top and to stop buying at these dips because they weren't dips. So if this keeps happening to BTC in the next coming weeks then its safe to say the bear market has started.

Are you talking about that tweet posted by FirstSquak? Its a false tweet. Lately that account is either hacked or they are taking $ to post false info. They have been doing this a few times for the past few weeks.

It seems that some bear whale is paying them like $100K to post false info and cause a market crash. They were a reliable source of info because it was up to date and instant and free however lately alot of their tweets are without actual refences. I tried searching for some of their tweets on google and came up with nothing. So right now I would unfollow them until they stop posting fake news.

When you install the AMD software you as pretty much installing 2 different things. One is the control panel and the other is the driver. You don't need to install the control panel, its what has the overclock software and all that other crap you never use. It also takes up memory because its always in the taskbar and takes up some HD space also. This you don't need to install. You can actually uninstall it without removing the graphic drivers.

The other is the actual drivers that are needed to get your Windows to load at the correct resolution on your monitor. Without them you can't do anything, you will be stuck at like 640x480 resolution and make it impossible to use or mine. This you will definately need if you want to mine. Won't work without it.

Well its like a repeat of 2018 again I guess. Hashrate back in late 2017 started to go up like crazy. Basically I looked at the numbers of chips that AMD and Nvidia produced per quarter and it didn't add up to the amount of hashpower that entered the market back in 2017. Something was up.

Then months later it was revealed that Bitmain has somehow managed to make an ETH ASIC miner called the E3. When they released it the prices were already tanking and they sold it for top dollar pretty much, no idea if you could even ROI if you paid the $2K price tag.

Seems like deja vu again.

Without a medium end >4GB GPU there really isn’t anything worth mining. With a CPU the only thing you can mine is XMR however for it to be worth it you need a high end Ryzen processor or some i7 which most PC don’t really have unless you got a gaming setup.

Only time when you could really mine with a start up build PC and make decent money was when BTC was launched. You could mine with a laptop back then and you would find a few BTC blocks. Problem is who knew BTC would be a success so nobody mined back then because it had no value.

Back in late 2015, people were talking about not stocking up on GPUs because in the Summer of 2016 the protocol is going to shift to POS and it’s risky buying GPUs.

So 5 years later and no POS. I think you are better off just buying the gear and if an EIP comes out which points to POS being completely launched then you can sell off the GPUs.

What is coming up is a hybrid type of setup. So most likely for 2 years you can mine ETH.

There is no negative news. The news of the capital gains tax increases was brushed off by the SP500 and it doesn't seem like the crypto market would be affected much either. It only applies to people who make over $1M a year anyways which doesn't affect most people only institutional investors.

This drop was mostly due to the high open interest and leverage we have in the BTC and ETH futures markets. Remember when we had a crazy 5-6% futures premium about 3 weeks ago? That works out to be almost 100% APR or so. This was due to massive amount of people going long on leverage and hence why we got like $10B in liquidations a few days ago and yesterday about $4B worth of liquidations.

Doge hitting almost 50 cents was another indicator that we are over-leveraged. First the shorts got liquidated and then the bulls went full leverage on Doge and they got liquidated. Way too many people made way too much money fast and this is what generally happens.

Basically when the stock market drops 20% from highs its considered a bear market, however this clearly doesn't apply to other assets. Many stocks can drop 20% from highs and it doesn't mean its a bearish stock. I think a couple months ago it was CNBC which started this trend, where if BTC drops >20% it means its a bear market. Completely untrue.

Even if the SP500 drops 20% it doesn't mean its a bear market, its either sideways trading or neutral in my opinion. I think if it drops 33% or so then maybe its considered a bear market.  Look at all the dips we had in 2017 before it finally topped out at $20K. If you sold at the first 20% you would of missed out on huge gains.