Anyone doing any staking? I'm staking XTZ on Coinbase at 4.63% and DOT at 12% on Kraken.

I hold some SNX, which I know you can use to mint sUSD, but I'm confused at how it works and what I'd actually do with the sUSD. Anyone staking SNX around here?

https://synthetix.community/docs/staking-strategies

I especially like the Hyper-Aggressive strategy at the bottom. Stake SNX, mint sUSD and use the minted sUSD to buy more SNX. Use the SNX you just purchased to mint more sUSD.

Talk about leverage. I'd be scared out of my brain doing something like that with mine!

One I like is GRT. There is a really well done video if you're interested in how it works and / or what function it serves.

As for ETH 2.0 staking, I think you have to have 32ETH to become a full validator. You can do less, but your ETH is locked until new protocols are deployed, which could be tomorrow or never.

That's not for me.

I use a Trezor for most of mine. I also have some steel plates with my 24 word mnemonic phrase on them in case of fire or something.

With that said, I’ve been slacking off lately and have more than I’m comfortable with sitting on Coinbase, Kraken and Coinbase Pro. I’ve been wanting to make some moves off exchange but gas fees are through the roof right now.

ADA is interesting and I’ve been following it for awhile. It’s really come under the spotlight lately because ETH is just so clogged with all the DeFi transactions that people are starting to look elsewhere.

I’m not sure how many DApps are running on ADA compared to Etherium, but it’s probably not even a comparison. There are also 45 Billion tokens which is a lot.

If you look at the Coinbase Custody list, ADA isn’t even supported there, so it makes me think they lack the infrastructure currently. So it might not be as easy for them to “flip a switch” and support trading and staking.

It’s doubled in the last week or so, so I’ll probably sit that one out for now. I’d also need to move assets to either Binance or Kraken to grab some.

I really wished I owned more than a fraction of one.

My understanding is that Tesla purchased BTC back in January and his DOGE tweets coincided with or were after the SEC filing.

EDIT -> Yup, here it is;

https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459021004599/tsla-10k_20201231.htm

"In January 2021, we updated our investment policy to provide us with more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on our cash that is not required to maintain adequate operating liquidity. As part of the policy, we may invest a portion of such cash in certain specified alternative reserve assets. Thereafter, we invested an aggregate $1.50 billion in bitcoin under this policy. Moreover, we expect to begin accepting bitcoin as a form of payment for our products in the near future, subject to applicable laws and initially on a limited basis, which we may or may not liquidate upon receipt. Digital assets are considered indefinite-lived intangible assets under applicable accounting rules. Accordingly, any decrease in their fair values below our carrying values for such assets at any time subsequent to their acquisition will require us to recognize impairment charges, whereas we may make no upward revisions for any market price increases until a sale. As we currently intend to hold these assets long-term, these charges may negatively impact our profitability in the periods in which such impairments occur even if the overall market values of these assets increase."

Has anyone else verified themselves on Binance.US? I wanted to deposit some fiat, but they want all that KYC / AML crap.

I did it on Coinbase, but I'm always hesitant to hand out that kind of information.

Are you mining LTC I assume?

I was eyeing SUSHI and MATIC, neither of which are on Coinbase. So I'd need to buy ETH and pay fees. Send the ETH to Binance and pay fees. Have Binance transfer it from my wallet to their wallet and pay fees and then finally be able to make my trade.

I'd seriously be paying fees 3 different times.

What GPU?

I'm mining RVN. I was mining ETH until the DAG went over 4GB and I couldn't mine anymore.

I'd mine ETH with that card assuming it's not a 4GB card. I don't think the 1070's came in 4GB, but wanted to throw that out there. Should be able to get about 26Mh/s from it. Estimated payout would be between 0.0022 and 0.0033ETH/day. Assuming $0.12kWh for electric, you should be able to pull in between $3.36 and $3.77 per day.

Looks like you can't trade fiat - crypto pairs without a cash verification? Wonder what that's all about.

I don't remember any type of cash verification with Coinbase. I had to do the AML / KYC stuff with my ID and linking it to my bank account, but I'm not sure what Binance means by "cash verification". Unless they are going to do the small deposit thing in my account for verification.

The wallet is just that, a wallet. Somewhere to store your crypto. My Trezor interfaces with MyEhterWallet (MEW), so that's what I use.

https://www.myetherwallet.com/

Once you create your wallet, you'll need to join a mining pool. I mined with Ethermine when I was mining ETH. Once you have all that setup, you'll need to actually setup the miner. A few things you'll want to be aware of when setting it up.

Make sure you change the wallet address in the .BAT file before you start mining to your own address. That way you aren't mining for someone else. Also, almost all antivirus software these days flags miners as malicious, so you'll need to add an exception for the software. There are a bunch to choose from so you'll need to do a little reading. From what I've seen lately, most people are running T-Rex or Phoenix. You'll want to research the associated dev fees and how well they work with your card.

I'm just having problems wrapping my head around buying more BTC or ETH. The prices are really up there and we haven't seen much of a pull back since December. Every time I think it's going to pull back, it just keeps going up.

I agree 100%, but the entire thing that scares me about this is the government coming in and doing what they do best......fu*&ing it all up.

I realize they can't ban it, but they can make it really, really difficult to use or convert to fiat.

I'm a hardcore crypto / blockchain advocate. I think some of the stuff in the works is going to turn out to be incredibly useful and I've been piling money into as much as I can. But there is always that lingering thought in the back of my head that Uncle Sam is going to swoop in and try to kill it.

I have been sleeping a little better at night now that companies like Tesla, Microstrategy, Overstock, Paypal, Visa, etc have been jumping on the wagon. They have a lot more firepower than we do if the government does decide to try and pull something stupid.

I hope! I'm in for 3002 XLM @ $0.154.

I'm not familiar with that pool, but you want a pool with a high total hashrate. The higher the hashrate, the more likely it is that someone finds a block. The more blocks the pool finds, the more you get paid.

What pool did you choose?c

As for hashrate, that looks right for a 1070. It will take a day or so for it to stabilize.

You can use it to buy things. Overstock, Microsoft, NewEgg, Twitch, sports teams like the Dallas Mavericks and Miami Dolphins, Tesla and the list goes on. For vendors that don't directly accept BTC, ETH, BCH, etc, you can go through a 3rd party to make your purchases.

The dollars in your pocket have no real backing either. It's only peoples' belief that someone will accept them as payment for goods and services that make them valuable. It could be dollar bills, red sea shells, paper airplanes, etc. Anything can have value if two people agree it has value.

I'm not gambling that the world currency will crash. It might, but that's not why I'm pouring cash into all types of crypto. I'm gambling that blockchain tech, DApps and DeFi are going to become adopted by the masses and I want to get in on the ground floor. Hell, to be honest, BTC makes a terrible currency. If you want to use crypto as currency, you'll want to look at something else like EOS, XLM, ATOM, etc. You want something with near-instant transaction times. I don't want to stand at the register trying to buy my coffee for 10 minutes while the BTC transaction settles.

I've been a fan of LINK for years. I also recently started dumping money into GRT. If ETH can get their transaction times down, I think DeFi is going to kill it. LINK is an integral part of DeFi. I think GRT is going to be extremely useful as well.

I think I posted more about what function they serve somewhere around here.

You might also want to take a look at SNX, UNI, DOT and SUSHI. I've been eyeing ATOM and MATIC, but haven't pulled the trigger on either yet.

Looks like that card will do about $11.78/day when mining BTC and about $12.30/day when mining ETH. I'm not sure about BTC miners, but with ETH, you can typically dual mine coins without stepping on the ETH hash rate too much. Typically the secondary coin is not worth much, but it always has the potential to rise in value.

Anyone pick up any GRT? It had a really nice pop overnight and is up 49%.

I'm not sure if everyone has seen this, but I saw it a few years ago and thought it was hilarious.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=288600998335966

What in the hell is going on this morning? I tried to send some BTC from Coinbase to Binance and it's been stuck at Unconfirmed for the last hour.

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/13FwjZ1NyCvZC6mp5o87fNmip6S63tGN8z

For all you new guys, this is why BTC sucks as a payment medium.

Nice to see you here @DBLM! We seem to have a lot in common. I keep running into you in the threads I frequent.

I'm leaning towards the SEC investigation either fizzling out or being dropped, but that's just my opinion. The legislators that started that entire thing are gone from my understanding and the people that have take their place are considered more crypto friendly. One of the first things they did was to increase and then again extend the comment period.

With that said, even though I own XRP, I hate it. There are 100 billion total coins. From what I've read, the founder received 9 billion of them for his role as founder. He left Ripple Labs back in 2013, but still continues to receive huge chunks of coins everytime they come out of escrow. In January, he received 477 million more coins. In December he received 157.9 million XRP.

The entire thing seems like a huge scam to me, but that's just my opinion. Do I think the coin is going to shoot up if the SEC investigation is dropped, absolutely. Do I believe in the project, no way.

What do you guys say over in the stock market thread........This isn't investing advice.

I'm striking out this morning. Bought a little bit of BTC to send to Binance since I'm not yet verified for USD deposits yet. The transaction cleared after about 2 hours and now I find out that there isn't a BTC / MATIC pair. So I guess I'm going to have to sell my BTC and then buy MATIC. Ugh. What a pain the ass.

I'm going to be out of money once I'm done with all the fees!

There is an ADA/BTC pair though. Hummm.....I haven't done much research on ADA. I like the premise of MATIC, but it scares me a little that they are based in India and with the recent news surrounding a potential ban in India, I'm a little concerned. On the ADA side, I don't like the entire 45 billion coin number. That's a lot of coins!

You're staking your ATOM, right? Free money!

Not that anyone cares, but I ended up buying ALGO with the BTC I transferred today. I should have just bought it on Coinbase, but the entire MATIC being based in India and the 45 Billion ADA turned me off a little. ALGO was on my watch list for awhile and I'm getting 6% in staking rewards.

So I bought BTC on Coinbase, sent it to Binance, bought ALGO (which I could have just bought on Coinbase) and then sent the ALGO back to Coinbase. I would have staked it on Binance, but their export of transaction history is absolutely terrible. The Coinbase export is much easier to import into my tracking software which is why I sent it back.

On a side note, the ALGO transfer took about 30s and cost me a whooping 0.01 ALGO, or $0.0123. That's what the all crypto needs!

Like I said though, not that anyone cares.

You're looking at it the right way, but there is a caveat. Currently the issuance rate is fixed and guaranteed not to increase. In fact it will most likely decrease in the future once the network moves from PoW to PoS. Costs for consensus with PoS is much lower than with PoW, so most people expect the issuance rate to drop significantly.

You make a good point and something I've considered in the past, however, it was overshadowed by the sheer volume of development being done on the EVM. It's insane how many applications run on it. I'm all about functionality, so the fact that almost everything runs on Etherium means more to me than total supply.

Alright, you guys talked me into it. I'll grab some ADA next week when I have a little bit more play money. Then again, the price is liable to be 5x higher than it is now.

Mine clocks in at 39.4% and I'm 43. The big thing is that if I look at what I actually invested to get that 39.4%, that percentage drops to 8%.

I'd be fine with a 50% drop. My 401K is up 31.92% in the last year. My crypto is up 667% in the same period. So even with a 50% drop from where it's an now, I'd still be way ahead.

I rode the roller coaster through the last bear market. That was a hell of a ride. A lot of people ran for the hills. It was hard for about 2 years watching it sink lower and lower. I watched mine drop by 80.4% between January 2018 and December 2018.

Anyone trade with Gemini? I can get $20 in BTC for free for signing up and trading with $100.

Ever throw a superball really hard in the house? That's pretty much what it looks like. If you have a weak stomach, you should probably find another investment vehicle.

If you're a gambler and play craps, you'll know exactly what I mean.

Nice! You have a lot more BTC than I do based on my rough math.

I only have 0.71. I should have added along the way, but during that down turn I just wasn't able to risk it.

I'll let Leeb18509 take over this one. But if anyone needs a referral link for tracking software, let me know. The tax man is going to come knocking sooner or later and this stuff is an absolute nightmare to try and track with a spreadsheet.

Everyday I wake up thinking, "I really should liquidate 1/2 my portfolio" and I never do. I'm just wondering how long the pedal can be on the floor before shit goes off the rails.

I really haven't taken anything off the table and I have a nice amount in there right now. Nothing like what some people have, but it's a good bit to me. Hell, I'm up 349.73% on GRT since January 21st when I bought my first tokens. Normal people would probably sell some, but the damn stuff just keeps going up. But I guess it keeps going up until....well.....until it doesn't.

These decisions suck.

I'm not saying that mine doubles everyday. But I'm saying that I wake up and think I should take some off the table. I wish it doubled everyday! I'd be retired by next week.

I'm just going to copy / paste here what I sent to someone that asked about it via PM with a few additions.

I tried a few of them and settled on this one. You get 10% off on this link and they give me a few bucks in BTC for the referral. It seems to have the best tax tracking and export options. You can also suck everything in using either exports from Coinbase / Binanace / Kraken / etc, or you can connect to the API and have it automatically pull it in. It will also monitor wallets for you, so if you have something on a hardware device, it can watch the blockchain for deposits or withdraws and automatically add them to your portfolio.

They have a ton of ways to dump the tax reports including files you send to your account for their software, ones for automatic import into something like TurboTax or just the straight IRS form. There are also a lot of configurable options like FIFO, LIFO, HIFO, etc, etc.

The only thing I'm not 100% a fan of is their price feeds. It seems like they don't update the price of the currency as fast as something like Blockfolio does, but I really needed the tracking part.

It took me a few hours to load everything since I was starting from scratch, but it's been working great since then. Make sure you make use of the backup feature while you're doing your initial load in case you run into an issue. You can always restore the backup. I went with the Pro for a year.

https://cointracking.info?ref=S372870

Report (resized).JPG

https://cryptobriefing.com/apple-pay-taps-bitpay-adds-bitcoin-payments/

It's growing.....

914ea7c02c5150da3c8aeec9b35e0608_w200.gif

It took me about 1/2 day to get it setup correctly. I had to manually adjust some of the transactions. The nice thing is that if you've ever traded crypto pairs, it calculates the cost basis back to USD based on the date and time of the transaction which is nice.

I just imported things a little at a time and made sure that the number of coins at the end matched what I really had in my accounts. I basically audited my holdings at the same time. I'm not sure how you're tracking things, but I was just throwing it into Blockfolio so I could watch it.

I thought you could just buy it with PayPal? I don’t think you can send it yet, but you can buy and sell. I don’t know anything about their fees though.

I’m sure they will add send soon enough.

I also saw that one of the tracking apps I use started allowing purchases in app. It’s called Blockfolio.

Do your due diligence on that one. I’ve never used their app for buying or selling.

EDIT-> Looks like PayPal charges based on a spread of about 0.50%.

Blockfolio was purchased by FTX and appears to let you buy and sell for free. Well no shit I might have to look into that one.

https://www.coindesk.com/porfolio-app-blockfolio-crypto-stock-trading

I did some reading on ADA and decided to buy a little today. I only grabbed ~900 ADA, but that's all my bank account would allow.

BTC transaction times are way down today from earlier this week. My transfer from Coinbase to Binance only took about 10 minutes.

If anyone else is using Blockfolio you might want to change your price feeds if you’re pulling from Coinbase or Coinbase Pro. I just found out it’s pulling bad data for some of the coins.

I was wondering why there was a big discrepancy between my two tracking apps.

Whoa. What in the hell just happened! A 9% drop in just under 60 seconds to my entire portfolio.

How exactly does that happen?

A lot of my Alts are down around 25%. That really stings!

My problem was that I was a few hours early with my Cardano purchase.

That tracking software I put a referral link to earlier in the thread would make it easy. You can just do a dump from your account. Or even setup an API call to do it automatically.

I do agree 100% about capital gains sucking up a lot of the proceeds which is really why I don’t do it. I watch some of these coins so much that I almost know exactly when they are going to move and in which direction. I could play $1-$2 swings all day long in some of the alts.

Do tell.

Any links? Have you done it?

It doesn't look like it's the most straight forward thing to do....

https://blog.synthetix.io/what-you-need-to-know-before-staking-snx-for-the-first-time/

Have you done it? I could be making a few hundred a month, but it looks like one of those "too good to be true" things. Someone's going to give me 13% for staking my crypto? I'm not a huge fan of it sitting in their wallet either.....

Looks like if I take CEL as a payout for my SNX staking, they give you 18.55%. If you take SNX, you get 13.99%.

I'm sure you can imagine someone being skeptical. That's just insanity.

Did you have any issues transferring your ERC-20 tokens with having to manually edit the gas fees? My SNX is sitting on Coinbase right now. It appears as though you're looking at $50+ in gas fees due to the complexity of their contract.

EDIT-> Can you send me a referral code? I'm not 100% onboard yet, but I'm getting close.

No definitely don't do that! That's the reason this thread exists. I would have never known that I could be getting paid for doing what I'm already doing, which is just sitting here watching the price of my crypto. Who knew!

Thanks. I sent 50 SNX just as a test. I'm a little confused by the fees though. Coinbase said it was 0.25 SNX (~$5.95 ), but if I look at the etherscan.io transaction, it says 0.01194 ETH ($21.67), so I'm not really sure.

Actually debited from my Coinbase account was 50.2528 SNX, so I'm not sure where the $21.67 comes from, but I'll deal with $6 to make 13%.

Do I need to do anything now that it's in my Celsius account? I don't see a stake or lend button anywhere.

Looks like you can't choose to be paid in CEL if you're in the US, so I'll be stuck with only getting the 13.99%.

I'm considering dumping my LINK in there too. It's only 4.51%, but it's my biggest holding so anything is better than nothing.

My only issue with this is that I don't hold the keys. That's scary to me and something I've always been against. There does seem to be a pile of transparency with Celsius along with independent audits, SEC filings, articles of incorporation, etc. That's the main reason I'm game. Well, 13.99% isn't too shabby either.

I have a whopping 2.2 COMP that I bought on a whim last year sometime.

I'm sticking to my guns on this one and staying away from it. It really has no utility at all and has no limit to its supply. I am not a fan of coins that don't provide utility (BTC excluded). I want something that has a finite supply and an actual use. Then hopefully one day, one of the projects will reach mass adoption because it solves some problem and I'll hit a home run.

Damnit f3honda4me ! I moved over about 13% of my holdings and now you're scaring me!

It says that it is in some circumstances, but not when being lent out, which I'm sure is exactly what happens to it once deposited. So I'd put money on a big fat "no".

I feel much better that they do collateralized loans at no more than 50%. According to some interviews, less than 1% of their loans are uncollateralized.

They have been around since 2017 and from my reading made it through the huge 2018 pullback with very few calls on loans. From what I saw, they weathered it much better than a lot of other places.

Still definitely a risk, so I think I'll just let what I put in there be and not add to it. Not that I can afford to lose 12% of my holdings, but that I don't see a ton of risk at this point.

Just found this tweet online from the guy that runs Celsius. So I guess the correct answer is "not yet, but soon"

Makes me want to find a way to buy CEL.

Capture.JPG

So, one of my clients finally paid me what I was owed after waiting forever and I have some extra play money. I was thinking maybe some more ADA. Or maybe just some more BTC? BTC just seems so expensive right now.....

According to some recent analysis of Github commits appear to be slowing around the old "ETH killers" like TRON, EOS, Qtum, etc. The focus seems to be more on DeFi (obviously) and the good old NFTs.

Looks like ADA, AAVE, Balancer, MAKER and SNX are listed as the platforms with the most Github commits.

According to what I'm seeing the article says "Ethereum still remains the king overall though, with 14% more developer activity than its closest rival, Cardano, and almost double that of Bitcoin in terms of commits. "

What's on everyone's "If I only had more money, I'd buy X" list?

There doesn't seem to be a lot of information out there about the coin other than their main page and whitepaper. I did enjoy that their COO is a woman named George.

https://nano.org/foundation#team

Looks like it's just a currency designed to be less resource intensive than something like BTC with faster transaction times. It would have to actually catch and become adopted to go anywhere I would think?

So lets talk tax events and buying one currency to send to another exchange to buy a separate currency. Any accountants around here?

Lets say I own some BTC that I bought years ago at $3k/BTC. Today, I buy 0.05BTC with the intention of sending it to another exchange, selling it for USD (since there isn't a BTC trading pair for what I want to buy), and then buying another currency.

Standard reporting is FIFO, meaning that when I sell the BTC, I'm going to get taxed on the profit from the difference between the purchase at $3K and the sale at $52k. But in all actuality, I just wanted to make a purchase.

Anyone have a way to report that without triggering a tax event? I can't just change everything to LIFO because then I'm paying short term capital gains on everything.

Someone should tell him you don’t have to buy an entire Bitcoin.

I remember looking at it when it was $29 and thinking "it's centralized, it's not going anywhere". Boy, was I wrong.

Not a bad half million dollar payday for her.

Not that anyone cares, but I picked up ~2,400 ADA yesterday at $0.9193. The main reason was that the development for that blockchain in the way of DApps is 86% of what is put into Etherium. I think that's huge especially with the slower transaction times and crazy gas fees we're seeing with Etherium right now. DeFi is getting hammered with these high fees especially with the complexity of some of the contracts. It's not a wallet to wallet transfer so the fees are much higher.

It has the potential to take off as things move forward. The only thing I don't like is the crazy number of coins, but on the flip side, no one really talks about the fact that ETH is unlimited. Then again, right now, there are only 115 million ETH and 32 Billion ADA. That kind of puts a damper on how high the price can get for ADA even with mass adoption.

If it were to reach the same market cap as ETH (which I highly doubt), you're still only talking about a max price of $6.53. It's a 6x increase in price, but we all know that's nothing when it comes to crypto.

Anyone know how in the hell I can buy CEL? After finding out that you can earn interest on your crypto and that they will be self insuring in the next few months makes that very attractive. Seriously, with self insurance, there just isn't any risk that I can see. Add that to the fact that there isn't a "This crypto is easy to buy" premium and I think we might be on to something.

My problem is that I can't figure out how to buy any!

So I answered my own question about buying CEL. The answer is that you can't without paying crazy high fees. Apparently the only options are places like Uniswap. I found out that Uniswap is actually built right into the Coinbase Wallet App (not the regular app where you can buy and sell stuff).

I had a little ETH in my wallet app for some reason and thought I would just test it out for something to do. I had $25 in ETH, so I tried to buy a few CEL. Turns out that the miner fees to convert 0.013 ETH to 4.39 CEL is $162.30.

Let's just say that I don't own any CEL.

IMG_5360.PNG

Every time I think it's to expensive, it goes up.

The way I'm looking at it now is like this. Let's say I have $2500 to put towards something and I buy BTC. At this price, I'll get 0.04587BTC. If BTC goes to $100,000, I'll have $4,588 or a gain of $2,088.

On the other hand, $2,500 would get me 2,681 ADA. If ADA goes up to $2, my return is $2,863, or a 37% increase over the BTC purchase.

To me, it just looks like multiples on my return are more likely with the Alts.

Ouch. I took a hell of a beating this weekend.

I dropped my car off for inspection and while I was waiting for the loaner, I thought, might be a good time to buy. So I grabbed $1,500 in BTC not sure if I was going to transfer it and buy an Alt or sit on it.

Drove home and BTC had dropped another $3,700.

I think you found it. My portfolio is down 20% in the last 24h. I could have bought a car with what I lost.

Hummmm.......ADA or DOT. I'm on the fence on what position I want to add to while it's down.

I'm not 100% sold on ETH. Development has dropped in terms of Github puts, gas fees are through the roof and the network is just overloaded. I've been seeing a lot of developers jumping ship. I'm not saying it's going to go away, but it's going to be a lot more competitive really fast.

I ended up grabbing some of both (ADA and DOT).

I know I didn’t lose it, but it still stings. I’ve been HODLing since sometime in 2017 before the first run up. You’d think I’d be used to these crazy swings by now.

It still hurts when you wake up and think “Shit, I could have paid off my car with what vaporized overnight”.

Anything for sale sitting in the corner that you’d want to sell?

I can’t get my hands on anything!

I’m not sure if anyone follows him, but this guy does a pretty good job of analyzing the charts on top currencies.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/price-analysis-2-22-btc-eth-bnb-dot-ada-xrp-ltc-link-bch-xlm

So with Celsius, does anyone know if the interest payout is based on the dollar value or the number of coins.

I’m assuming it’s on the number of coins or they would be calculating interest all the time as prices change.

I didn’t see anything specific on their website.

EDIT -> Nevermind. I found it. Looks like it’s based on price every Friday at a particular time.

Reward calculation price snapshot: Friday 05:00:00 UTC

Ouch. 1/3 of my portfolio has been wiped out in the last 36 hours with no end in sight.

Unfortunately you do. If you do any amount of trading I’d recommend tracking software. If you’re just doing a few trades a year you can use some of them for free. More than something like 50 transactions and the start charging.

I posted a link in here somewhere of what I use. I haven’t had any issues with it.

Unfortunately, I can't point you in any particular direction. I've been reading about it for the last few years. If you have any specific questions, I'll be more than happy to help.

The "nuts and bolts" of the blockchain is that it acts as an immutable distributed ledger of account balances. Think of those big books you see in the old movies the banker has behind the counter. Says Smith - $86.75, Jones - $34.87, etc. That's the blockchain. The big difference is that the names are wallet address and the balances are coin quantities (ETH, BTC, LINK, Etc).

You lay claim to the wallet with your public / private cryptographic key pair which is basically your username / password combinations when you log into your bank account.

Transactions are validated, most typically, by PoW or Proof of Work. Meaning there are piles and piles of computers all over the world working to validate transactions on the blockchain. That's what makes it decentralized (not controlled by one entity like the company that owns the bank) and immutable (one computer can't just make a change to the blockchain). The computers do work and race to find a solution to the cryptographic algorithm. The first one to find the answer wins the block reward. Once the answer is found, all the other computers verify the solution and the transaction is written into the blockchain and can never be edited again.

Staking comes in with another transaction validation method called PoS, or Proof of Stake. In this case, the transactions are validated by a randomly chosen participant, called a Validator, that has coins staked or essentially pledged to the blockchain. The more coins you have staked the higher your chances of being chosen to validate the next transaction and get the block reward for validation of that transaction. Attempt to double-sign or attack the network and the penalty is losing what you have staked.

When staking with Coinbase, you're contributing to a big pool of other people staking with Coinbase. The larger the pool, the higher the chances of getting chosen to validate the transaction and the higher the payouts. For contributing to the pool, Coinbase, or whoever else you stake with, gives you a percentage of the payouts.

As far as continuing to have value, it's all belief. Just like fiat. If people feel it has value, then it does. That's why I try to find utility tokens, things that provide a service or fill some role in the world of cryptocurrency. I want something people will use. I feel those are the ones that will make it in the long run, whereas the off the cuff ones will die out serving no purpose and providing no value to the infrastructure.

Hopefully that helps a little.

I would recommend a hardware wallet such as a Ledger or Trezor. I personally use a Trezor. You can absolutely break them, lose them, etc. When you set up the device, a 24 word mnemonic recovery seed based on the BIP39 word list is generated that you write down on a piece of paper and guard with your life. Those 24 words can be used to recreate your wallet.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/english.txt

I actually store my recovery seed on a steel plate which is then stored in a safe. Break your Trezor and you can recreate your wallet with the 24 word recovery seed.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RZW8CWY/

It's actually HODL.

Hold On for Dear Life

I was day trading 0.10BTC back in 2017/2018 on an almost daily basis when it was range bound between $11k and $14k for weeks. I really just accumulate these days.

Fees definitely suck sometimes. I'm not familiar with either NiceHash or Exodus, but coin transfers always involve some sort of fee. That's paid to the people validating the transactions as a mining fee. Without those fees, I'd turn off my miner.

Anyway, sometimes those fees are fractions of a penny and other times they are crazy high like they are with ETH right now. I was looking at a Uniswap between two tokens on a relatively complex smart contract. The fees were insane and made the trade not worth completing. I posted it around here somewhere. I always check fees for the entire transaction before starting.

Other times exchanges will have additional fees on the back end for moving the crypto within their own organization. Keep an eye out for those fees. I've found they are normally in the order of a few percent.

As you indicated, you need to watch when trading crypto / crypto pairs. Things can go sideways in a hurry if you're not paying attention. Especially like you said, if one currency is going one way and the other is going the other way. I'd suspect your issue was a combination of both. My 60 Coinbase purchases / trades have cost me $853.95 in fees.

That doesn't even include that damn premium they put on currency when you're in a hurry and just buy with your debit card. You'll look at the market and BTC is $50,000 and when you hit the buy button on Coinbase, the price is $50,500 when it's still sitting on Coinbase Pro at $50,000. They always do that shit and charge you a fee on top of the premium.

Some good stuff in here today.

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

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

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'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.

You're allowed to be excited.

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

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.

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.

I'm assuming you own the business? If not, a lot of people are getting fired and or arrested for stealing power. I just wanted to to throw that out there in case.

On a side note, 20 x 2070's will pull in about $2,200/month.

Anyway, here is how you set it up.

1. Create a wallet. I'd just use the MEW (MyEtherWallet) for your iPhone/Android to create the wallet. Make ABSOLUTELY SURE you write down the recovery phrase and store it in a safe place. Do NOT show it to anyone and DO NOT store it electronically. It will generate a wallet address and look something like this:

7a285f9b972648789d3b7b851e8efc253f41ffe9

Copy that wallet address somewhere safe

2. Download your mining software. A lot of people use PhoenixMiner, but you can use whatever you want to use.
a. Mining software is always picked up as a virus due to its interaction with the HAL. Anyway, you're going to have to create an exclusion in your AV software for the folder. I just create a folder on the C:\ drive named Mining and exclude that folder. Then you can drop whatever you want in there and it won't flag it.

Phoenix Miner

https://mega.nz/folder/2VskDJrI#lsQsz1CdDe8x5cH3L8QaBw

3. Extract the Windows PhoenixMiner_5.5c_Windows.zip file into the C:\Mining folder you created above.

4. Right click -> Edit the start_miner.bat file

5. Replace the wallet address in the .bat file with yours. You'll want to edit the .bat file for each computer and change what comes after the . in the wallet address. So use .miner1, .miner2, .miner3, etc.

PhoenixMiner.exe -pool ssl://us1.ethermine.org:5555 -pool2 ssl://eu1.ethermine.org:5555 -wal 7a285f9b972648789d3b7b851e8efc253f41ffe9.Rig001

6. Save the file and then right click the start_miner.bat file you just edited -> Run as Administrator and away you go.

7. After about an hour or so, go to the ethermine website and search for your wallet address in the "Miner Address" search box to find your miners.

https://www.ethermine.org

If you want to get cute about it, you can create a task in the Windows Task Scheduler to fire off the .bat file at a particular time. So if everyone leaves at 5pm and you want it to start at that time, you can. If you want to do that, let me know and I can help out.

Feel free to mine for me if you're bored. I left mine wallet address in there just in case you wanted to donate.

Anyone have their eye on anything today? I have a little spare cash laying around.

I was thinking maybe DOT, UNI or SNX. I have all three currently, with the largest stake in SNX. I have a little UNI and a little DOT already.

I have about 600 XRP. I'm not a fan of it at all. A lot of it is locked up for the creators and even more gets distributed to the guy that created it. I posted the details in this thread somewhere. I think if the lawsuit gets dropped it will spike, but in the long run, I'm not a fan.

Found it. I'm just going to quote myself.

I grabbed 2.323 AAVE @ $339.40 per AAVE a few minutes ago. It's been on my watch list for awhile and had a pretty decent pullback over the last week or so.

The way I understand it is that ETH 2.0 is just a protocol update and your ETH will just stay ETH. It's not a fork, just an upgrade. Coinbase is doing something different though that I'm not 100% spun up on. Typical ETH 2.0 staking involves your coins getting locked up until the 2.0 protocol is released. Meaning it could be tomorrow or it could be never, at which point your ETH is gone.

Coinbase is saying you can stake and unstake at will, which is different than what I've seen associated with the normal staking for 2.0.

Looks like they pay 3% at that level. Celsius pays 6.2%.

Never mind. I was looking at the wrong thing. It looks like they pay 6% up to 2.5BTC. They have a ~$100 withdraw fee though for more than one transaction a month.

I like that payout better than Celsius, which pays out based on the USD value of the wallet at the time of their snapshot. I'd rather get 13.99% of the SNX held in my wallet than 13.99% of the value at the time of the snapshot converted to to SNX. It's a little weird.

Are we in a bear market? Did I miss something? Last I heard we were in the middle of a bull run. I’m starting to get annoyed. I’m getting hammered over here.

My problem is I already spent my play money. Ugh.

Just for you new guys.....Welcome to the world of cryptocurrency.

I saw this in an article today that I thought was interesting.

“ Fortunately, the third retest of this key support level may have a silver lining for the bulls. Data analytics resource Glassnode noted that the daily Bitcoin Spent Output Profit Ratio (SOPR) has seen a "full reset."

The SOPR essentially shows whether spent outputs are in profit or loss at the time of transaction. This key metric turned negative for the first time since September 2020. In other words, investors are now moving BTC at a slight loss on average, suggesting that profit-taking has abated, according to Glassnode.”

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-sell-off-over-strong-buy-the-dip-signal-flashes-for-the-first-time-since-september

I noticed that the difficulty went through the roof really quick. I have older cards and was getting 100RVN about every 2 days. It now takes 7 days to mine 100RVN. I might need to see what else I can mine. It's still profitable though, but not by a lot.

Unfortunately, the DAG is too big for my 4GB cards.

The site I use for calculating hash rates doesn't have the 3090, but it shows the 3080 as having an Ethash rate of ~91Mh/s. Assuming an electric cost of $0.15/kWh, you'll be pulling in gross revenue of $7.88/day. Subtract estimated power usage of $0.83/day and it shows a net profit of $7.05/day or $211.48/month.

Edit -> NiceHash shows $8.51/day with the 3090.

I ran 3 x RX470s bolted to a piece of MDF for over 3 years. They were all overclocked, jammed together on the same motherboard. They are still running without any issues.

I moved them into two different cases and they are mining RVN now.

So pretty much 4 years, running 24/7 as fast as I could get them to go with absolutely no issues.

Just for fun I found some pictures of the old miner. Little bugger made me about $6,000 over its life.

IMG_4838 - Copy (resized).JPG

IMG_4839 - Copy (resized).JPG

Dammit. I was some freakin' CEL, but can't find a way to buy it.

I was also eying GHST with all the NFT stuff flying around. I had my eye on MATIC (Polygon) a few weeks ago at ~$0.04, didn't pull the trigger and it's up 500% to $0.229.

Once again, I'm kicking myself.

Were you over in the stock thread again?

Tulips I tell you!!!

BTC transfers were taking anywhere from 30 - 60 minutes from Coinbase to Binance.US last week. My buddy moved some ETH over the weekend. I think he said they went through in about 5 - 10 minutes.

You want to look at the trading pairs if you're going to be trading. Meaning, don't send BTC to Binance if you want to buy something that only has an ETH trading pair.

Do you have the TX number? We can check it on the blockchain and see if it's been confirmed.

No clue what that is?

I did read that and it makes absolutely no sense at all.

It's always a damn checkbox!!

Glad you got it resolved.