New product coming 'soon' from coldcard

https://coldcard.com/docs/coldcard-q1
https://twitter.com/COLDCARDwallet/status/1623698350481760259




Looks to be interesting. Lets see how it really turns out.
Basically a MK4 cold card with a larger screen and real keyboard and a few other features but the underlying hardware is the same.
And where the price really winds up in the end. It's $200 pre-order. Who knows if it will actually stay that way.

-Dave

There will always be more people to scam.
Even now, people are posting that this is a win for him because well I tried to understand it, but the word salad made my brain hurt.

It's just a numbers game the more he talks, the more people hear it, the more people hear it the more likely he is going to find more people to get money from.

<shrug> You can't fix stupid </shrug>

But at least the more places he looses the easier it is for the next people he goes after to show the losses as precedent.

-Dave

Also, I think a lot of people now found regular trading partners and they started to loose their commissions.
I know I did this YEARS ago when they took the F2F cash out of the options. I knew how to contact the people I had done deals with so I picked up the phone and called them.
Probably should have done that before then to save the % that LBC charged.

After that they stopped offering service where I am so I really stopped caring, but if someone sent you Zelle or cashapp or any of many of the other services that they offered if you trust the other party you really did not need them anymore.

-Dave

Does not mean that it can reach those nodes.

OP, can you check https://bitnodes.io to see if it sees your node.
Bitnodes is NOT A PERFECT test. But if it sees it and you are not updating it's probably on your side since it can be seen.
If bitnodes does not see it, then it could be it just does not see it. Other nodes might.

And, since you were experimenting with the OS, when did you notice that it stopped working vs what were some of the last changes you made?

-Dave

Surprised it's not on Twitter or any other social media.
But, in the end I can see them having the same issues as other small exchanges. The cost of operations is going up and the larger places are putting a squeeze on profits.

In a peer to peer environment like they have, I can see profits shrinking to the point that it's not worth doing it.

They are not doing a cut and run but an orderly shutdown, so it shows they are at least a serious operation. Gives them credibility if they want to start something similar at a later date.

-Dave

Just a bit more info, core will rescan the ENTIRE blockchain from the beginning to the end when you do this. On a slower PC or one with a slower drive / other limited resources with it can take a REALLY long time. As in HOURS. Do not stop the process, it will just have be started again. There are ways to shorten it a bit but for the most part just do it and go to bed. When you wake up in the morning it will be done.

If you are running a fast newer machine with a lot of RAM and an m.2 nvme it's a different story, but don't get frustiated while it's rescanning.

-Dave

Quoting another post I made 2 YEARS ago below but yeah, someone or a couple of someones could really make a mess of this very quickly.
At this point I'm not loosing any sleep over it, but will fully admit my buying and selling habits on certain things have changed.

Everyone has their own level of risk they are willing to take. Mine has dropped a lot.

-Dave

A simple test is CAREFULLY pull the cable from the controller that goes to board 3.
What does the GUI say? It should mine even with 1 bad board just show a bunch of  xxxxx for the chips.
If you post the log there might be something that people here can see.

USE the code tags (# above) when posting so it's easy to see and scroll, just don't copy past it in the post.

Also move this post to the hardware section. Will get more eyes on it there.

-Dave

Eliminating everything else that has to be expanded to ANYONE WHO HAD IT IN THEIR POSSESSION FOR A PERIOD OF TIME CAN RUG YOU.

Sorry but it's true. I posted this a while ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5401502

And without being an ass to everyone who made coins with holograms. Do you really think it would be impossible to find a maker of holograms that would duplicate the ones made by you? Lets get real, with the amounts involved with some of the coins spending a bunch of money to duplicate some of the more popular makers would not be that big an expense considering the rest would be buying the coins and reselling them after making copies of the private key.

THEN you wait. THEN you cash in. And all evidence would point to the maker even more so if you bought and sold under various alt accounts. No one person to tie it back to.
Yes it could probably be figured out eventually but good luck proving that in any definitive way.

Just my view.

-Dave

And fewer pools. Think back to when there were dozens and dozens of pools as those numbers shrank a couple of block reorg seems to have become a thing of the past.

NOT wanting to put words in NotATether's mouth but what I think he was getting at is that is the way a pool will handle a block they see coming in at the same time they find a block.

I would also think that as BTC went up in value the existing pools improved their back ends to keep up better instead of using the method of just hoping nothing went wrong.

-Dave

And....it's also a bit of a paper loss.
Some things could have been amortized over a long period, but they took the hit here and now.
Sometimes it works sometimes it does not. A lot of the warehouse build costs were fully written down in 2022 along with some other things.

The cloud expansion has slowed down a bit too, and those data centers are not cheap. But the costs 'incurred' in 2022 were for a large chunk of some builds that they could have written off over years.

Dave's prediction. 2023 will be a meh year again for them as they write off more stuff and then an explosion of profit after that as they don't have the paper losses anymore.

Not to say 2022 was NOT a bad year for them, they defiantly did not do well but they made it look worse on paper then they had to.

-Dave

@gmaxwell and @achow101 since this and a few other issues keep coming up again and again for the same wallets / services do you think a sticky post would be good?
i.e. for conbase multisig vault look here for old multibit look there and so on.
I have the link to this post saved but 18 months from now and I'm sure others do to now. But 18 months from now we as a group may or may not remember it.

Just a thought.

OP glad to see you got your BTC.

-Dave

Charlie Munger & Warren Buffett have made a lot of people a lot of money and are USUALLY correct when it comes to markets.
They have also had some really impressive failures.

They are looking at BTC as investing in a stock / business which is what they do.

If you look at it as investing in a currency it's a different thing. Because in this day and age with most countries money no longer backed by gold or some other physical thing but rather just by that country promising that it's worth that much and people trading on that BTC looks a whole lot different.

It's also just his opinion. I think the entire Berkshire Hathaway thing is going to implode when Charlie and Warren do pass away. Most of the value they have built up is because of their passion and their drive. It's rare to find people like that who can drive a company that size for as long as they have and as well as they have. Once they are gone I don't see it staying up as high as it is.

-Dave

I guess the question is why they would want to. I could be looking at this a different way but more and more I see people / businesses want to initiate payments to people so if I do have a recurring payment to you I either have to go into my banks website and send a payment to you or go to your site and have you pull it from my account.

There are ways to do what you want as others have said, but I can see it leading to headaches as people change wallet addresses or want to pay in fiat since BTC is up or down or some other reason. It's probably easier / better IMO to just setup a regular payment gateway like BTC pay and have people pay you.

-Dave

Sent.

https://mempool.space/tx/5ed5c6b12154800cd5ed159307d6d3b943ed67af0e6812ba05bf0884be6dc0c8
Confirmed in block 775332
Pay 0.0156 on 18th Feb to bc1qgkh5vhcc5zjudkaf3uy2fylw9rq8nxzqanqgf3

-Dave

Given enough time and money and effort you can bury corporate ownership though blind trusts and the like. (At least here in the US)
But, on the other side given enough money and time and effort you can figure it out.

For the average person trying to do it, the task might be very difficult if not impossible. For a government to do it with their resources it's fairly easy.
BUT...if the government does find out if they share that information with you is a different story.

For all the amounts being thrown about in crypto, in terms of and decent sized financial institution they are very very tiny. So, it's easier to hide.

-Dave

They don't; they rely on the server they are talking to.
The client itself knows it's addresses and a few other things but for everything else it's querying a server that gives it the info it needs / wants.

That is point of a lite client, it needs very little itself to operate, all the heavy data storage work is done elsewhere.

-Dave

Boring, let me know when the interest rates get back to the mid 2000s or late 1990s. You know when the economy was doing well and people just could not borrow money because they felt like with with no plan.

There is no such thing as free money and every time you see someone who complains about the interest rate going up you should only think of 3 things.

1) Some fat looser sitting in their moms basement who now has to borrow a few more dollars from mom since they don't have and can't get a job.
2) Someone living in a trailer living off the government dime.
3) People who started a business without a plan and have no idea how to run a business if they actually have to pay money to get money to run it.

Money is not free, and if you think the government, the fed or anyone else should give it to you for free then you are just a leach on society.

Yes, during things like the pandemic or an economic implosion like 2007/8 then cheap or free money is fine to keep the economy going. Before and after that, nope. Otherwise you just have a bunch of people who don't understand how money works who then cry that the government is mean and not giving them free money anymore.

-Dave

There is a lot of wiggle room here.
Consumer grade biometric things are not secure think cell phone, cheap fingerprint scanner for door access.
There are better ones that you can get for securing physical access to things but they get expensive quick (read $1000s and $1000s)

But, as a 2nd form of security for small amounts of crypto they are fine. You should not store any life altering amounts of money with just that as security.
The amount will vary person to person. What I care a lot about and consider life altering amounts of money is what Bill Gates would not waste his time looking for if he did not remember where he left it YMWV on the amount. But it's all the same in the end for using fingerprint or face recognition for security.

-Dave

Kind of makes you wonder. If you really want to make something like this would you be better off designing something that used a standard size PC case and chips that were mounted on cards that were then hooked up to industry standard liquid coolers.

Eliminating all the other crap, something like what Butterfly Labs promised with their monarch cards but with more up to date hardware. And not run by a company that cuts and runs with the money.

-Dave