Been watching the entire tournament so far, C9 went out before the quarterfinals as I expected, as did Vitality. I was honestly pretty surprised Vitality went as far as going 2-3 considering the team as a whole looked pretty shaky on multiple occasions, but we're past that now.

As for a few of the New Champions stage matches, I'm picking Liquid and Renegades over Ence and MIBR respectively. Liquid's been running through every team they've been going up against recently and nearly every player on the team's had at least one match popping off; I don't see why things would be different this time around. Odds seem pretty good for a medium-to-low bet (still a bit risky) on Renegades over MIBR, even though MIBR's looking a bit stronger than RNG IMO. Definitely isn't out of the question that Renegades wins maybe 2-1 over MIBR.

Pretty average exchange IMO, but it’s a good exchange just for the fact that you don’t need KYC or any form of verification for normal use (though you’re only allowed to withdraw 2 BTC per day without verification). Nothing out of the ordinary for a DEX from what I've seen. Hopefully this raises more awareness about decentralized exchanges, since most DEXes to this date haven't had very high volume.

Mostly physical electronics like computer components or the occasional ASIC/mining rig, though I've mostly stopped buying mining parts recently due to the sharp drop in mining profitability. The go-to for my electronics purchases was mostly Newegg.com as they've had BTC payments implemented for quite some time so I don't have to sell my BTC for an Amazon Giftcard or any other gift card. The rest of my spendings go towards converting BTC to fiat for when I need it, although I've been holding and accumulating coins for the last few months so I've been spending less than usual.

You could always try ways to mitigate the amount of fraud-related GCs you buy with things like ID verification, requiring pictures of a physical card with corresponding details, and purchase receipts for the GCs you're buying, but in the end you're still occasionally going to have people fake the details and you'll end up with cards obtained through fraud, though less so than if you were to not require some sort of verification. Most cards obtained through fraud in my (short) experience of being a Paxful vendor were digital and the people selling the cards to me didn't have any sort of physical proof of ownership.

AVs also have plenty of false positives with intentionally installed programs that are legitimate like various software altcoin miners like BFGminer and such (though these are detected as malware as coin miners are sometimes embedded as malware into certain programs). I personally do not use antivirus on my main computer, though I also don't download any ol' link I see on the internet.

As for keeping your account safe, do not access your account on an untrusted or unsecured computer or network. There's a number of people on this forum that have multiple accounts for posting and viewing the forums on unsecured computers. Nothing wrong with that at all.

There's a number of potential pathways these vendors use to convert the GCs to BTC again, but one of the more obvious potential ones to me is that these cards are being sold on fiat GC marketplaces or other sites where GCs are being sold for fiat (usually at a slight discount), and the funds from these sales go to the vendor's PayPal or bank account and are exchanged for BTC on an exchange. Not completely sure, though, and as AdolfinWolf mentioned, nobody's going to give up this information for free.

Paxful most likely wouldn't tell you how the vendors make money with this sort of exchange. It's up to someone with preexisting knowledge to tell you how to make a profit selling and buying the GCs for a profit, and you'll likely need to pay for this info or discover it yourself.

This might've been suggested before in this thread, but if you're doing things like TA or observing trends, things usually work out much nicer on a longer timeframe (4Hrs +) compared to a shorter timeframe (1m, 5m, etc) on charts. I used to conduct TA and analyze things at much shorter timeframes when I started out trading and I was much less successful than when I began to analyze things on 4H and 1D charts. Many people get tunnelvisioned easily (myself included), but sometimes you just have to zoom out.

I'll probably end up leaving the information to my parents as I'm still pretty young and perhaps with my brother(s) and other relatives as well. I've been screwed over by some of my relatives in the past before, but I won't show any one of them all the places where I'm stashing my BTC away. You're right though, I was definitely overthinking this. Thanks for the tip.

I personally keep my BTC in different wallets that are stored in different places, including but not limited to bank deposit boxes and also a bit in my house as well. There's really no perfect way to store BTC in the end, but you should always be keeping coins in a wallet where you fully control the private keys. Only keep as much as you're actively trading on an exchange, and deposit and withdraw as needed. Fees are still a bit high on exchanges, though, so withdrawing in chunks is a good idea if you're trying to minimize fees. I'm still working out how my coins would be handled in the unfortunate event that I die, though, as there's only a very limited number of people I would trust with knowing the location of my stored BTC and how to use the keys.

I typically risk around 2-5% of the money I have allotted for gambling per bet on eSports betting, as it's always been the most enjoyable form of gambling for me and I'm pretty good with my prediction rates with eSports matches, especially with CS:GO. I enjoy making league strats as well, so I watch lots of major tournament matches already for inspiration; might as well put in a bit of money in the meantime. I never go all-in on any one bet, and I typically bet on teams in lower divisions of CS:GO where there's a higher chance of upset.

According to this link on StockX's site (click for link), fees start at 9.5% and there's also a 3.5% processing fee, so you'd be correct. Grailed has lower fees (click for link), and the platform's legit, but I haven't sold in a while there, but it wasn't a bad place to sell the last time I used the site. Had an overall decent experience.

Ebay's not that bad, but I find the site is sometimes lacking with seller support. I've had problems with that in the past, but I've been selling for a few months without issues on Ebay. Might be worth a shot, and I recall Ebay fees are lower than that of both StockX and Grailed.

Nitrogensports held the BTC he was going to send to me and deleted the account that was holding the BTC (more details here). Nothing other than that, PM me when you are ready and we can start.

Deal done with Loki888, $100 PP to BTC successfully. $30 remaining in my PayPal, MSG me for details.

Daily bump. Still available, PM for details.

My ideal exchange has the following features:

Multiple security options like 2FA available to combat hackers, block new IPs from logging in, etc. Plenty of sites email me when a login's been detected from a new IP, but a number of the ones I am registered on don't actually require you to authorize the login through a link on the email.

Must have a physical location. Most but not all exchanges that don't have physical locations are scams, especially newer ones.

Liquidity

Good support for whenever things go wrong like deposits, trades, etc.

Reasonable withdrawal fees and trading fees. I typically don't do lots of small withdrawals from exchanges so fees aren't usually a problem for me, but the fees add up over time. Some sites also have pretty high trade fees, which most people don't initially notice when signing up for an exchange.

2FA's definitely not perfect, but it does provide you security against a hacker that has your login username and password on a site like an exchange. There's really no way to completely eliminate the possibility of an account you own getting hacked, but 2FA's easy to set up once you get the hang of it and it provides a good deal of security at essentially no cost.

With Authy, you don't have to manually contact the exchange or service you're using if you were to lose the device that you have your 2FA accounts on, as Authy allows you to backup and view your 2FA backup codes, and you can also access your Authy accounts on multiple devices instead of just one. Both Authy and Google Auth are compatible with 2FA; it's your choice in the end, but I keep most of my 2FA accounts on Authy.

Bitmain provides a pretty basic guide about what sort of maintenance you should occasionally do on a miner in a subcategory on this page (click here for main page link, and here for Bitmain's provided maintenance page). To summarize what Bitmain says, they suggest to dust out the miners monthly, though I do this per two or three months. Helps to keep temps under control since dust can do a lot to raise temps. The guide shows a person using an air compressor to clean out the miner, but canned/compressed air for computers is good too and what I personally use. If the dust is heavy, you can always disassemble the machine and manually clean out the heatsinks for dust.

The link I meant to post was already linked by slow death, but it was supposed to be the following. (https://old.reddit.com/r/number26bank/comments/9qml3c/whats_n26_positions_on_sepa_wires_from_crypto/)

I specifically used the following Google search URL to find information on this: https://www.google.com/search?q=n26+wire+crypto&oq=n26+wire+crypto


No way to know from the word of a newbie alone. There's a number of HYIPs with English/UK business licenses out there so that really does not mean anything in the end without further digging. I've hardly found any information from anyone reputable on the site at least on these forums; I wouldn't try them out without more info.

The shoes pictured in the OP were actually released around September of 2018 and are available for $100 less on Stockx (a link here if you are interested in purchasing a pair), a more reputable sneaker trading site that I've used multiple times in the last few years. OPSkins is generally considered to be trusted except for the unfortunate circumstances they faced with Valve banning all their skin bots, but it really just doesn't make sense to buy the shoes for a massive premium when there are many other places to buy the exact same shoes in the same sizes for much less.

Been without access to a secure computer that I can access this site with, but the Vitality vs C9 match was much closer than I initially thought it would be, though Vitality still pulled through with a 16-14 victory. C9 was actually looking pretty solid through the entire match, might be the result of more practicing and scrimming or a combination of both. Not gonna lie, though I was going to lose on my bet many times during that match.

Also pretty surprised Liquid ran through Navi the way they did today, odds were nearly 50-50 on HLTV.org's skin match betting system with a slight edge towards Liquid. Zeus didn't do so well on the second map where Navi lost 6-19; according to the HLTV match page for the match (link here) the guy was 8-21 and had 33 ADR during Dust2. Didn't watch much of the other matches today, but NRG vs CoL is definitely going to be interesting as both teams are close on both maps played so far.

That 16-0 from Astralis was absolutely incredible to watch, I could never have predicted that Cloud9 would fall so hard on Nuke even though Astralis were clearly the favorited team on that map; pretty uncommon to see a 16-0 at all in any sort of tournament. Honestly a bit of a miracle C9 made it to the major at all considering the teams they had to beat and how lucky they were with their matches in the qualifier, but it'll be interesting to see how they fare later on in this tournament. I don't see them going too far considering how their past matches have gone personally. Personally putting a medium bet on Vitality to beat Cloud9 tomorrow.