How about yes with a but or no with a however.

From the security and financial side yes they can be safe. But you have to put in a lot of time and effort and money to do it. Which then means that you have to make that money back, so your fees are going to have to be higher then the next place since they did a crap job, but it was cheap, so then can charge less.

The safe exchange has insurance and financial audits and a lot of other things. They cost money, so their fees go up.

And so on. At what point do you have a safe exchange, but your fees are so high to cover the costs you have no clients.

-Dave

LI Cares is well known here to be legit, Billy Joel is a major fundraiser for it. It's been on LI for years, according to charity navigator 93% percent of program expenses goes towards food

Foodbank NYC is at 94% to food and feedingamerica is about the same.
With LI Cares & Food Bank NYC there are a lot of eyes on them around here so I would think they better then most.



Not really a food porn kind of guy, except for the holidays I tend to eat whatever. Was going for medium-rare, but overshot it a bit not as much red as there should have been. I have never been good cooking thick cuts of meat.

-Dave

Yes, you should get a 1099-B which you would put in your schedule D.

Each situation is going to be different which is why I always start and end things like this when I discuss it here with 'talk to a tax advisor'. The rules are the same for everyone, but how it applies to you and your situation are probably going to be different then mine. The IRS classifies cryptocurrency as property so I don't know how that changes things for anything else you are doing.

Also shameless referral link for gemini if you decide to open an account with them: https://www.gemini.com/share/sqa3a9

-Dave

Made you look :-)  

Proof of Steak:




Proof of (lack of) Work:




But seriously, below are a couple of links for donating crypto for food for people & families in need. Send them some if you can.

https://www.licares.org/donatecryptocurrency/
https://www.foodbanknyc.org/donate/cryptocurrency/
https://www.feedingamerica.org/ways-to-give/bitcoin-cryptocurrency


There are others, but since I am in NY these are the ones I support.


Happy Thanksgiving.

-Dave

Side thought, but not knowing the amounts involved, your financial situation, the amount of stress you feel waiting for things to happen.....

If you have the $, open an account at an exchange that will allow full transactions for NY people.
DYOR as to which to use, but I will say if you don't mind the full KYC thing that you already went though Gemini is NY based and they do actually have decent support.

But, if you have the funds move the funds to the new exchange while waiting for the cash withdraw from RH. It can take a couple of days for the funds to get to you and then another day or so for a new exchange to credit the funds to your account. All the while the market can be bouncing up and down.

This way you don't have to worry about the price of the coins as much. Since you stated you are already down, and with this next statement contact a tax advisor, you might be able to write some of the loss off on your taxes if you buy new coins before you sell the old ones. On that same note when you sell them your gain will be higher leading to more taxes. But, saying it again, contact a tax advisor.

-Dave

AFAIK since you signed up for RobinHood as a NY resident and gave them all your info they know you are a NY resident (hello NY neighbor Dave I'm one too) at this point there is no way to move your funds out to a cold wallet unless you change your address with them.

However, since they are a regulated brokerage and such they do 'real' KYC verification like checking drivers license numbers against a database and your credit report addresses and such. If it's a 'real' amount of money it may be worth it to you to 'move' by borrowing a friend / relatives address out of state taking up residence there. But, you are talking about a lot of time to change your address to change it back to NY and the possible tax implications and so on.

If it's a smaller amount I would not loose that much sleep over it. Once the crypto markets bounce back, sell it and transfer the funds to someplace that does allow withdraw from NY.

Unlike a lot of places RH does have a fair amount of government oversight, so I would not worry about coins vanishing like other places.

-Dave

Part of the issue now, and it's all IMO is what existed before the 2008 banking implosion. And to be 100% up font if you bother to do ANY research you can see it was evident that things were going sideways by mid 2007 when interest rates did fall off a cliff. But anyway, back before then you could ALWAYS find a SAFE investment in the 6% range, A+ bonds, some CDs, and so on. To the point that people didn't even bother to move money for an extra 1% here and there.

Then 2008 happened. And you could *not* GET that 1% in a SAFE investment. You could get more but there was risk.

Now people put out these numbers like 8%, other people remember what it used to be like, so 8% does not seem that out of hand since you used to be able to get 6%.
Then greed takes over. And we know how this all ends up.

-Dave

With Umbrel BTCPay should just install from the app store. IIRC with MyNode it's in the pro / paid version.
What issues were you having. Both also have active discussion and support.

Keep in mind, at the end of the day running them on a RPi is fine, but make sure you do backups and such since there is no RAID or anything else.
I admit I don't backup as much as I should, but I don't have life altering amounts of BTC in open channels.

-Dave

I am also thinking that some screen protectors also cause issues. I peeled the one off my old pixel 4 and EVERY code scanned. Some took a bit of getting a good shot but in the end they all did scan.
Put on a new screen protector, and I could not read the bitrefill one or the bluewallet QR. Took it off and they all scanned. That was just with 1 wallet scanning. Will do more over the weekend. But I think the issue does come down a bunch of things:

1) Camera
2) Screen
3) Code itself

Some phones / cameras are probably more forgiving then others, and what looks fine to our eyes, or at least mine in terms of screens and screen protectors may be giving some cameras more stress then they can deal with.

-Dave

If you take a look at the OPs other thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5420302
It's not running in a location that can sell power back. I agree with you in the fact that running the miner is loosing time and money, but I can also see it as a I am going to do this because I can, not because its going to generate any money.

As for the oddball power consumption, take the miner back to where you can plug it in and run it on power company power and see what it says in terms on consumption. I have seen some solar, and other inverters, cause some power meters to give really odd results. As in, running a 100W bulb would pull 50 watts or 500 watts according to the meter and the inverter. Had an electronics guy try to explain it to me but never really understood it.

-Dave

It's down for me in the US, its giving a CloudFlare access denied which usually means that someone @ FTX or someone requested it to be taken down.
OR, they skipped out on a bill or 2 and since they have imploded someone at CloudFlare fifgured they were never getting paid so they pulled it.

The other thought is a massive hack and instead of throwing up a "back soon" page the IT staff, also knowing their jobs may or may not exist tomorrow just walked away.

In the end probably does not mater, it's not like you could pull your money out, all people could do was stare at numbers on a screen that we all now know are not real.

-Dave

Just about every gambling site out there has SOME for of referral link. It's tagged to your account anyway. This just takes it and instead of just putting http://youwillnever.win/?ref=Dave someplace it makes it a nice pretty signature. There are no posting requirements or anything else so I don't see this as a real signature campaign just a nice looking referral campaign that happens to be in your signature.

Not that big a deal IMO. With that.

However, I can see this being open to a bit of abuse unless sujonali1819 keeps a tight control over posts. No min characters no max posts. Can spiral out of control quickly. Remember yobit.....

-Dave

I could not find it in a search but IMO a not your keys not your coins page either needs to be added to tweaked in a way that it can be found in a search.
If it is there ignore that.

Along that a nice piece on the dangers of custodial exchanges and such.

-Dave

For miners:
Looking at what people are paying others *NOW* on NH it looks like they are offering a nice premium above what most PPS+ pools are paying, even if take out the 3% you are still way above what you can get at PPS+

BUT that is NOW, if over Thanksgiving weekend a bunch of people stop putting in offers that rate can drop a lot. So a good PPS+ would be better.

The best answer you can give is it depends, if you are willing to keep an eye on it and switch when needed it is a viable option. For 'fire and forget' I have no idea.

They also have lightning withdrawals for very low amounts with is nice, allowing for small miners to get their small amount funds out for very little vs just about every other pool that has a higher minimum.

For people buying hash, depending on your needs there are better places, but since I think most of the SHA buyers are either lottery mining or mining some alt that they think will go way up in value or testing something it's probably a different mind set then most of us here.

-Dave

Yes, but the point I was making is a lot of people out there [looks in mirror] who setup 500GB nodes a while ago and have had them running on autopilot so to speak and hit the wall.

However, NEW 2TB spinning drives are now well under $50 here in the US and 1TB SSD and NVMe are at the $50 level.

So upgrading to a NEW larger drive is not that big a deal.

USED drives with low hours and good smart info are about 1/2 those prices.

It's no longer an expense.

And unless you want to trust a download you still have to download and verify the entire blockchain so no real bandwidth savings there if you are going to do it the proper way.
After that your daily download is the same for pruned or not.

Would also like to say that if you are US based it looks like for Black Friday there are going to be some 1TB 2.5" external drives on sale for $29.99 so if you want to run a node on a RPi you can keep a look out for that.

-Dave

There is still a lot of inexpensive power out there where you can host. But it's pure industrial mega space mega use locations.
Also, allowing for all costs and everything else in the end there is still and will probably continue to be a large market for used miners.

Even allowing for today's drop in price there is still the potential for profit, if you are running a lean operation.

As for the geolocation. Yeah well it will get you close, but sometimes it's not even within 50 miles close (80km)

https://www.iplocation.net/ip-lookup
And use as an example any of these IPs:
75.99.58.200
47.21.23.200
68.193.181.40
NONE of those listed are the correct city / town of where the equipment is.....

-Dave

If my old man memory is correct they used to give you a bit more. Not a lot more but a bit. Could have been fold, really not sure but I do remember getting a better discount someplace when using lightning for giftcards.

What they COULD do is keep smaller lightning channels open to them. I have opened a few and they auto close them after a while even while being balanced with a decent amount. Don't know why, and finally gave up caring sometime over the summer. Just stopped trying.

Back OT, did spend some time reading since my last post. I still think we should wait, but I do see the other sides view a bit more.
<shrug>
Beating a dead horse, it's going to happen.....

-Dave

I might be a bit thick here, but.....Kraken is not small it's not like going after 1 person who either had to choose to remain anonymous OR had to have a massive fundraising campaign to help out.
This is not a business that is going to roll over and take it. Not to mention they will probably get both legal and financial support from other exchanges.

Eliminating everything else, the tech, the BS, everything. Am I missing something in why he picked this fight?

-Dave

I don't see the big deal with Bitrefill. I use them on almost a daily basis now that they have bill payments too. Waiting for a confirm for a GC is not a big deal, and payments seem to go out overnight anyway.
RBF / no RBF I don't see why they would be caring that much either way anyway. Have to go read what they have said.

I understand what they are trying to do and why they are trying to do it, I just think as do some others that we would be better off drawing a line in the sand and saying as of THIS DATE (or block number) it is happening. That one last warning so to speak.

-Dave

Yep, post has not been updated in a while since it's still being worked on and there really is not much to report beyond that but:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5391131.0
Should probably poke him for a real update after Thanksgiving.

In that same thought process, just in general, more and more I see places / people using cheap wireless keyboards on machines that they are typing in sensitive information in a public environment.

-Dave