Got it! Pictures help and I understand the importance of validating the blockchain now - it's necessary in peer-to-peer decentralized banking so we all know who has what and that those amounts are correct.

What is the "complex mathematical problem" that miners must solve to validate the chain? Where does that come from?

Edit: Reading about Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. Good thing I was always so good at maf. Wow, had no idea some of these concepts behind bitcoin!

Not at all, pretty complicated stuff, and you are not stepping in blindly.
Always good to know some fundamentals

excellent...except for dogecoin...dogecoin has no possible future; pure "pump & dump" meme coin. It was literally created as a joke.

Just to make sure everyone else understands Dogecoin, it was a joke someone came up with in 2 hours. He stepped away from the project years ago and even today can't believe it is still alive. It's perfectly fine to trade it, and it may stay around a while, but it's a vastly different animal than the other 3 which have intended utility. Bitcoin, Eth, Ada all have utilities that would explode their value on on mass adoption, but Dogecoin has no such utility.

It's actually possible Dogecoin could be morphed into something more than it is, due to its popularity, but I'm not aware of any vision for it. The other important consideration is this: 27% of all Dogecoin is owned by a single address, and over half of Dogecoin is owned by just 20 addresses. That gives substantial risk to its forward volatility if any of them decide to sell. Feel free trade it and make money off of those who don't know better, but it's hard to see any investment value in it.

Some good stuff in here today.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/price-analysis-2-24-btc-eth-bnb-dot-ada-xrp-ltc-link-bch-xlm

I thought with MicroStrategy buying $1 billion more worth of bitcoin, and with Square buying another $170 million in bitcoin, that bitcoin would've had a bit better of a day today. But I'm also green to this so maybe crypto doesn't immediately react the same way that stocks do to news.

They don’t buy through retail channels so you don’t see the price swings with huge orders.

How do they buy? Direct transfer from someone who has the bitcoin they want to buy?

They call it an OTC Trade (Over The Counter). Genesis Trading is a name I’ve seen before. You can also go directly to some of the larger exchanges depending on the size of the order.

If I remember correctly it was discovered that the recent Tesla purchase was facilitated by Coinbase.

Going OTC with a large purchase ensures liquidity and a stable price for the transaction.

I've also heard that very large purchases can be negotiated directly with minors.

Got it, thanks!

Got the last random purchase of Ada done today. I’m now switching over to regular biweekly buys. I’m excited to see what March 1st brings, should be an exciting month.

I'm running out of spending money! It figures too, right when there is a pull back, I've spent all my play money. Somehow the market knows! /puts on aluminum foil hat

Grabbed another 516 ALGO @ $1.15 Tuesday night while I was drinking.

I like it because it's a native blockchain, PoS, can handle 1 million transactions a day and has extremely low transaction fees. It has a max supply of 10 million tokens set to be released over the next 9 years.

I don't know if it's going to take off, but I'm confident that there will be another native blockchain that reaches mass adoption. Unless ETH can find a way to increase their transaction times and lower the fees. I know there is a lot of work going on to consolidate transactions off chain before bringing them on chain, but I'm not sure how that's going to pan out.

Anyway, that's just my $0.02.

What the "complex mathematical problem" really is, is trying to generate a hash that is less than or equal to the hash of the current block.

A hash is a series of bytes that comes from a set of data plus something called a nonce. It's basically a lottery since you can't reverse a hash to it's original value. The miners guess hashes over and over until one satisfies the block.

You can play with making a SHA-256 hash on this website: https://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/sha256.html

Now imagine a bitcoin miner is creating these hashes trillions upon trillions of times a second and seeing if they satisfy the block they are working on. The first person to find one that works gets the reward from the block, something like 6.5 BTC.

When you mine in a pool, everyone mining in the pool is treated as one entity so you massively increase your chances of getting something (like a bunch of coworkers pooling their money to buy a large number of lottery tickets, then splitting the prize). Different pools use different calculations to determine how much of the bitcoin reward you personally get.

Looking to buy into DOT, or add to my ADA (been in ADA since .42 cents) during possible dips today. It's feeling like we already bottomed out on this latest pullback but can't say for certain.

I'm hoping for a BTC dip to $10k so I could actually get "1" but...

Cardano/Ada is going on a nice climb this morning. 1.17 at the time of posting this.

I doubled up on my Cardano yesterday morning.

We will never see 30k again, let alone 10. No need to buy a whole coin...just keep stacking Sats!

Crap I missed the ADA boat. I'll wait for another pull back to add to my position I guess lol.

I added about 250 more ada yesterday evening, before I transferred them off the exchange and into a staking pool. I have about 6030 ada now. I bought about half of those in the .70-.80 range. So while I didn't get in too early, I'm just happy I eventually did jump in. I did keep $2000 cash for now, to use for smaller biweekly buys, or if things dip hard again I can average the price down a bit.

If you got in at .42 cents, I think you did better than most of us did.
I think March 1st will be a big day for Ada, but if there's a dip over the weekend you might be able to buy at a nice price before then.

If I start to learn the game, in the long haul it doesn't really matter if you buy at 0.6 or 0.9 or whatever if 1 ADA can become 10.

HODL right?

Awesome, thank you for the recommendations and I will!

Thanks also for the mining explanation @wolfmarsh!

This stuff is fascinating and high level. But that's what seems to lend it legitimacy. We've got our... top men working on it.

This is also a great read! - https://www.lynalden.com/misconceptions-about-bitcoin/

I was able to snag more ADA at $1.10. All of the signs point to ADA popping up again soon I think.

50426CC2-C4BB-4196-9517-84248393FA11 (resized).png

This news might be helping prop Ada up today.

Also, I’m very excited about Ada/cardano, but if I’m posting about it to the point it’s annoying, feel free to say haha. I’ll try to calm my posting down.

You're allowed to be excited.

I think we are all excited about the emergence and adoption of a new asset class.

A lot of us here I think are in ADA so I don't see anyone hating you posting good news about it.

Pamp It!! $ADA

On twitter I always see a ton of comments from people tagging coinbase to get ada listed to the exchange. I think when it eventually does get listed it will see a nice bump in price and ownership. I'm guessing Ada will get listed after it becomes 100% decentralized. But that's just a guess.

I know you don’t want another account. But....Crypto.com is simple. Buy USDC on Coinbase transfer to Crypto.com then buy ADA with the USDC. It will take 5 minutes to set it up without setting up a deposit line. That’s how I do it. Just an idea.

Oh...wow, cool option. I just used Binance.us.

Do not be surprised if crypto is on sale in March. March is a notoriously bad month for BTC. Only 2 out of the last 12 did the price rise in March...the other 10 all dropped.

By July things should be pretty awesome. So buy while it's on sale. My 2 cents.

Excellent...and fascinating. Looks like Sept is the 2nd worst month. Or, second best for buying!

How many of you are mining?
I have just begun looking into it, and I know that video cards are commanding a premium these days, but it looks like I can still get a legit AlienWare rig with a top of the line card for about $2700.
I know I have a lot more reading to do, but that's not really that serious of an entry fee for something that I could set up an potentially make some money off of.

Anyone have any good links they can share for getting started? I'm definitely computer savy enough to make it happen. Seems like it's worth looking into.

I'd love to get more information on that too. Thanks in advance!

A bigger question before you start mining is, what do you want to mine?

Different crypto uses different algorithms.

https://whattomine.com/

Start there Enter a quantity for your video card, click on the video card, and then click calculate.

When you want to buy the dip, but your favorite crypto didn't get the dip memo like the rest:

crypto (resized).JPG

I was mining ETH for about 2 years with 3 RX470 cards I bought back in 2017. I did product reviews for NewEgg so I already had a motherboard, memory and a CPU laying around. Grabbed an old spindle disk I had sitting on my desk, screwed everything into a piece of MDF (seriously) and away I went.

I mined 4.86 ETH with that rig until the DAG exceeded 4GB and then the cards were worthless for mining ETH. I re-allocated them to RVN. The hash rate is pretty low, but I'm getting about 100 RVN every 3 days or so.

I was dual mining ETH and SAI towards the end and mined about 3,000 of them, but they aren't worth anything.

For hardware I had laying around, I'm not complaining.

What cards?

As for getting started, it's really a piece of cake. The hardest part is getting the cards dialed in, should you choose to do that with them.

1. Choose a coin
2. Choose a miner
3. Choose a pool
4. Create a wallet
5. Paste the wallet address into the miner .bat file
6. Profit.

The hardest part right now is trying to get any newer GTX cards.

NVIDIA came out the other day and said that starting with the release of the 3060 they are going to configure the card to recognize when it's mining and Nerf the hash rate. They are supposed to be releasing a CMP card just for mining that has no display outputs and denser chips.

I guess all the gamers were whining that they can't get cards.

Can you elaborate on how the setup works?

With obligated covid remote work I have like 20 desktops with RTX2070 in the office doing nothing. What is needed to start mining?

https://www.betterhash.net/faq/ ?

Wow seriously? Not sure how I feel about that - it kinda devalues their own market. Hard to justify buying a video card that you want for gaming but mining in your spare time.