Seems like the reasoning is that the club is private to me according to the first sentence in the OP, and the OP also claims that there’s limited slots in this private gambling club. The telegram’s probably related to the fact that you have an extremely limited quota for PMs as a new member, and this can’t be bypassed with a copper membership on this forum. Still, be careful with external messaging as the mods and admins on this forum have no jurisdiction outside Bitcointalk.

Have you tried looking at Nicehash yet? I see that the rate per 1TH/s of Quark hashing on the site is currently 0.0417BTC/TH, seems more viable to rent hash that way and you’ll likely be able to start mining quicker than renting from someone on this forum. Just a suggestion.

You could always try to use slightly quieter miners for heating like the Avalon 741 that aren’t profitable for most people but still make heat and are very affordable right now, but I would generally agree that it’s much more effective to buy coins outright. You won’t have to deal with the heat and noise from the miners you’re running and any possible new 220V circuits you may need to install for higher-powered miners. Not a bad time to buy in right now, but make sure you dollar cost average if you plan on purchasing BTC.

Some people do mine with alternative energy like solar, but setting up such systems still takes time and money for the components like solar panels and batteries that you'll be using, and mining is currently extremely risky with difficulty continuing to go upwards on most chains despite the prices of coins violently jarring around up and down. It may be profitable to mine in certain scenarios where you're getting 'free' electricity with lower-powered miners, but such situations are rare and mining's not profitable for most people with the exception of a few ASICs like the Obelisk SC1 that cost thousands of dollars for a single unit.

Still, can't hurt to check your electrical rates and calculate your electrical costs after all applicable fees like transmission cost are factored in. You might have cheap electricty, maybe not, but you don't know until you find out for sure.

The recent sharp drop in price is yet another reason why dollar cost averaging's so effective if you're trying to get into BTC. Divide the amount you're planning to invest into Bitcoin and invest a fraction every week or two weeks, etc, so you don't enter at one single price point and you're less affected by sharp price movements that we're having a lot of in this current market with the bart patterns all over the board. There's really not anything that beats DCAing in this sort of market.

I typically don't give out my identity related information for a very small amount of money either, as I value security very highly in crypto and $25's nothing compared to the costs you could pay if your information is somehow stolen from Blockchain, however unlikely the odds may be. I've already heard of people cheating the giveaways by photoshopping images for free XLM and such, and I expect that's going to be a problem for Blockchain and the Stellar Foundation.

Definitely seems like Blockchain's trying to verify as many of their users as possible considering they have a bias for the oldest confirmed accounts in this giveaway; I do wonder if they're going to begin to require verification in the future for their service.

If you do choose to store coins on Blockchain.com or any other web wallet, make sure you're using 2FA and all security measures available so your account doesn't get bruteforced or hacked into. Blockchain.com provides a nice instructional guide on how to do so in this article (click here). I've had an account broken into on Blockchain and its funds emptied last year, and though I moved the majority of my funds to the hardware wallets I now own, that was still a sizeable loss for me. Don't be complacent with security.

Make sure that even if you’re investing in the bankroll of a casino you’re only putting in a small much as you can afford to lose, as there’s always the chance you could lose part or all of your investment from a whale on the site you invested in or from the site you invested in being hacked. Both of these scenarios are rather unlikely, but planning for the worst is a good idea.

eBay's a decent place to buy bitcoin quickly if you're not trying to go through the verification that most exchanges ask for, but some sellers also do ask for some forms of ID and you're going to pay a pretty hefty premium for the convenience and the risk the seller's taking by selling a digital product on eBay as the seller has virtually no protection from fraudulent buyers with a digital product. Paxful and LocalBitcoins are two other P2P trading platforms that can also be used for buying Bitcoin through various different payment methods; I personally use Paxful very often and I've had nearly no issues on the site.

For fee estimation, I typically use the site Earn.com's fee estimator (click here) as well. The site provides you a pretty good idea of what the mempool is currently looking like for transactions, and right down under the charts should be a spot titled "Which fee should I use?", with an estimation of the most efficient fee to use for a transaction and an estimation of how much the fee might be for an average-sized transaction right under that. Right now that number is right around 20 satoshis/byte.

The cost of the transaction depends on how many inputs and outputs are in the transaction you're trying to send. I'd expect the fee to be under about $0.3 or $0.5 USD, nothing significant, though I don't know the exact size of the transaction you're trying to send so I have no exact way of knowing how much the fee might be.

Remember that even with hardware wallets, you should always keep one or multiple backups in case your hardware wallet gets lost or damaged and you're unable to remove funds from whatever device you're using. A hardware wallet may be a great way to store coins for extended periods of time in cold storage, but it's easier than you think to lose a hardware wallet, especially when such devices are as small as a thumb drive in the case of a device like the Ledger Nano S.

Also consider having multiple methods of cold storage like multiple hardware wallets in different locations in case one is compromised. Hardware wallets may cost you more than opening up a free online wallet or a client like Bitcoin Core, but hardware wallets also provide a great level of protection for your coins at the same time. Well worth the cost IMO, and pricing for hardware wallets has also fallen in this bear market. Just make sure you're not buying imitation or non-authentic devices and from an authorized retailer whenever possible, and always reset your device upon receiving it.

If you haven't been profitable in trading for two years, chances are you either didn't learn from your mistakes or you were exceptionally unlucky (likely the first). I have known people in a similar situation in things outside trading but in esports like CS:GO where people I knew thought they had plateaued in skill but in reality never analyzed what they did wrong. Daytrading might just not be for you as well, and in that case you can try holding coins as a longer-term investment. Another suggestion I have is to read up on strategies other successful traders use, note how they trade, and incorporate some aspects of their trading style into your own trading. You don't and shouldn't become an absolute clone of someone else, but try to create your own trading strategies.

BitPay's card definitely seems to work, though there's some rather mixed reviews about it online from what I can tell. I was able to locate this Bitcointalk thread about the BitPay card from January of last year if you'd like to see what other people think about it. I do not personally own the card, but it seems to work alright.

Wirex (click to go to BCT thread) also offers a Bitcoin debit card, and you'll have to verify yourself to use it just like all other BTC debit card services. Here's a direct link to the Wirex site; seems like Wirex also has minor issues from what I can see in their thread on this forum, but the issues don't seem to be anything major.

Some people do choose to gamble with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like Monero for the sake of anonymity, though, and for some people the risk of losing fiat value through price volatility is offset by this anonymity that's difficult to find elsewhere in online gambling. Transactions through crypto may also be quicker and more convenient compared to fiat casinos, and convenience is something else some people are willing to pay for. It's true that fiat gambling may be a better option for some, but there are also reasons for gambling with cryptocurrency even in this crypto bear market we're in right now too.

A signature from the address that you claim to be in control of would be even better than a simple transfer of coins for proving that you own the funds that you say you have. It's much more difficult for someone that doesn't hold the funds he/she claims to sign a message from the wallet in question. I understand it may be a bit difficult and might take some time to sign a message, but there shouldn't be any further question of proof of funds after this.

Interesting observations. Patterns aren't the best indicator for future pricing as they can change at any moment without warning, but it is very well possible that prices may fall back down towards the middle or lower $3000s in January as it appears to me we've been pushing up against some pretty solid resistance for the past few days with not much more upwards movement, but anything can happen in the end.

It might just be me, but I find no enjoyment from operating a dice bot trying to make a profit against the house, and as noted earlier in this thread, it's statistically impossible to make a profit due to house edge being in play in the long run in dice or any other casino game. There's really no 'best' strategy in dice as the game is purely luck-based and no amount of skill can tilt odds towards you, which is another reason why I seldom play dice and I usually try betting on eSports matches or other games.

Here are the supposed specs for the card (taken from this source):

60CUs
3840 Stream Processors @ up to 1.8GHz
16GB HBM2, 4096-Bit @ 1TB/s memory bandwidth
Retail Price $699, Shipping Feb 7th

Depends what the availability of this card is and how it performs in mining. I'm not going to place any orders for this card 'till I see what it's capable of in mining, and the pricing is a bit high. It may still be more cost-effective to use older-generation cards like Vegas and Polaris cards for newer builds.

I sure believe so. The fundamentals of bitcoin are still here even after the bear market we’ve been in for the past several months, and there’s still going to be software and project development even after some projects have been canceled or slowed partially due to the bear market. We could certainly be in for a 1,2, maybe even longer of 2015-esque price stagnation, but BTC’s definitely still got a very decent shot at breaking the previous ATH. I’m personally playing the longer term game and accumulating coins steadily right now with prices where they are now.

In the end, it doesn't really matter what specific coin you're trading as much as how you're trading and the strategies you use in an attempt to trade for a profit and to minimize losses, though I would suggest daytrading a slightly higher volume. I typically daytrade BTC, ETH and LTC with up to 10x leverage, as I've always traded primarily in those three markets with good results, and I've mostly stuck to these pairs with few exceptions throughout the last few months.