Doge seems like nothing more than a pump and dump to me. Various celebrities tweet about it, it climbs, and then settles.

I think a lot of the current price is because Musk has tweeted about it or mentioned it here and there. His recent purchase of BTC and general quirkiness has presumably held doge up around that .08 mark. Who knows... if he invests in it, it might just blow up. As far as I can tell, there's really no tangible reason why it should be climbing at all, which makes its climb that much more precarious. I got in on it for a minute and made a quick $50, I consider that dumb luck.

How much of Elon's mention of Doge was a market test for BTC? It would almost seem as though he was testing the market and how it would reply to his support before jumping in on his actual target of BTC. He made what, close to 20% just by putting his money into it? Does he have any obligation to announce that he's sold his position (could he just take the money and run)?

Are there any mining opportunities in any of these cryptos left for someone with a relatively basic gaming PC? The feasibility of mining BTC seems long gone, but I'm not sure if there are others that might be viable.

GTX 1070, so getting a little long in the tooth. I'm looking to upgrade to a 3080 once stock becomes available.

Thanks! I'm going to give it a try.

As a total noob on this, it looks like wallets provide the ability to mine? Any recommendation as to what one to select?

I appreciate the help! Does that mean that it will just increase the intervals at which the funds would appear in my wallet, or does it mean that I may not get a cut of a block at all if I don't hit that contribution threshold?

I've been running this for a few hours, do these numbers look right? It really hasn't changed much (if at all) since when I first checked it shortly after setup. I went with 2miners. I'm not sure if there's a reason to choose one pool over another.

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Maybe this isn't allowed, but..

If anyone is thinking about opening a coinbase account, if you use the link below and fund with $100 we both get $10 in BTC.

https://www.coinbase.com/join/beimbo_2

If I get the referral, I'll donate $10 to a charity of your choosing (preferably one that makes a small donation really painless) with screenshot proof.

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I just can't imagine anyone holding a joke coin past 200k, 500k, etc etc to get to 1.2m. Who are these maniacs? I would have tapped out when I accumulated enough funds for a NIB.

Anyone have a suggestion or advice on a first ASIC miner?

It seems like there's a lot of doubt about mining after Eth2.0. I'm going to keep looking into it as I really like the idea of mining as a potentially profitable hobby.

Has anyone heard of Helium? That's a really intriguing option. The hardware cost is relatively low (<500), the problem is that the supply is non-existent until mid summer or later and there's a halving taking place in August. I'd probably still roll the dice as the coin really seems to have some promise, but I hate preorders......

It sounds like the end of the year

Which did you order? The bobcat seems like probably the best shot to get one relatively soon, but I don't love the order process.

I'm just mining with my current gaming PC with a 1070 card. I'm entering newegg raffles everyday hoping yo upgrade my GPU some time soon, but nothing so far. My hash with the 1070 is around 27mh/s. Not great, but still a good way to continually add crypto to my portfolio.

I really like mining and have kicked around an ASIC, but I think I'll just let my gaming PCs run double duty for now.

What's the opinion on bitcoin cash? I'm pretty evenly split between ADA, ETH, and BCH at the moment.

Very little invested. I'm looking to keep mining and diversifying from that, and also doing a recurring monthly of maybe 100.

Yeah I don't really have any issues with it. I game every night and turn off the miner, and then fire it back up when I'm done. If I can land a 3080, even at the inflated prices (newegg and such), it should pay itself off in about 200 days. I suppose there's some risk, but it helps to pay for one of my hobbies. I guess you could equate it to routing pinball, but a lot less work.

The guys in this thread got me started back here:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/cryptocurrency-and-decentralized-finance-defi/page/2#post-6125353

Here's another guide I found helpful:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/lncviw/a_noobs_guide_to_mining_with_your_home_pc_from/

Wow, well that's discouraging. Any sources you'd recommend watching to grab one of the next gen cards?

I'm using minerstat as a frontend, but I'm using phoenixminer as the actual miner program

same here, and I don't really plan to change that. SNL will be interesting. It might not even get mentioned, or elon might buy 100m live on air. Who knows.

Tomorrow will be interesting. I have all of $50 on it, so not exactly high stakes. I'm planning to watch the episode live with my finger hovering over the sell button... I think we could see anything, from it never getting mentioned, to him buying 50m worth live on air.

What's the best value 4100 pin..

ST pro?

I'm spreading out between BTC, LTC, ETH (mining), ADA. I'm only contributing about 100/month for now, plus whatever I can mine. Really interested to see what others might recommend for some high potential fliers though.

I've seen enough bond movies to know that Elon is the bad guy

Or start his own..

A friend of mine is a HS teacher. He asked the class whom they would most like to interview. About half the class said Elon. Something to consider in the years to come.

Technical looks like 2,550 and then 2,165. But 3,000 is psychological support. It will be interesting to see if it can hold there.

Trading and Investing are different things.

I have investments I'll never touch until I need them. I check their value maybe quarterly or less, mostly for peace of mind. It's rare I make any alterations to my strategy. I just continue to put money into it on a continual basis to dollar cost average into the market. If I notice a dip, I might throw more than normal to get a little more bang for the buck. Those assets are mostly spread across indexes or managed accounts. Recently I started throwing a little into crypto for much the same purpose. That's it.

Trading is what I do with my idle pinball money... I'm not likely to outearn my investment strategy, but my goals are different. One, I like following the markets, doing the tech analysis, trying to catch some runners, etc. It's another hobby I enjoy that at least has some potential to be profitable. Two, I want to pull some gains and throw it at a new machine or other toy as I please. This isn't retirement money, it's play money.

That's some really shitty risk/reward for anyone that takes that bet.

The reason crypto is so volatile is people that are in 'the know' are unflinchingly confident in its viability but simultaneously mostly incapable of articulating that utility to anyone in less than 10 pages

Until that gap has been bridged, expect extreme volatility. There's tons of stuff I don't understand about this. I learn as I go, and I'm investing long term with as a speculative play.

I do think it's possible that doge becomes an accepted currency - thus having an accepted value. You might be able to make money off of it, but probably only in the same way you can on the forex market with any other currency.

What Astro says about bitcoin makes sense to me. I guess I'm not 100% convinced that it can't be replaced, but the value reaching what it has certainly suggests it would be pretty difficult to overturn as a store of value at this point. For me though, psychologically it's really difficult to throw my piddly current $100/month crypto allocation into something that already has a value of 35k+. I've still allocated some of those funds to BTC, but I've put more into things like ADA recently because they at least feel like they have a non-zero shot at 10x'ing in the relative near term. I think my best move forward is to continue farming ETH, and probably split the rest of my allocations 80/20 between BTC and some other 'moon' coins like ADA, etc.

So you're using ledgerx for your option plays? I kind of want to give that a roll, but getting annoyed that there's seemingly no single spot to handle all of my crytpo needs.

I've thought about something like keepass. How well does it work across multiple devices? I sign into various sites via several computers and my phone.

Passwords are getting out of control. My work computer requires a passphrase that's something like 30 characters long and has to be updated every 90 days and must be x% different than the previous password. Not only do you have to remember the passphrase, you have to be able to type it with perfect precision blind. I've been close to throwing the damn laptop against the wall on several failed login attempts, and I'm a pretty calm dude.

I finally got my Helium miner a little over a week ago. I'm in a suburb and have some pretty big trees around. I placed it in my room with the stock antenna outside on my window sill. At this point I've earned a single Helium in a week, but most of that has come in the last 48 hours after moving the miner outside the window (apparently double pane glass takes away quite a bit of its transmission strength).

I'm considering getting an aftermarket antenna. Ideally I could get this thing placed on my roof, but I'm not too keen on doing that installation myself. I'm thinking of calling one of the local satellite installers around me and asking if they might be able to take care of that for me.

Yep, I went with Bobcat. I was pretty surprised when it showed up, I was half expecting it to never ship.

I think I might grab the 8dbi RAK antenna and see how it does.

It's really not hard to setup at all. The big thing is finding a good placement. The miner itself is really quiet and efficient.

Yep. I basically considered it a gamble. I didn't like the idea of paying in crypto, but the other options have way longer lead times. I ordered one and actually received it, for what that's worth.

I'm about 4(?) weeks in. I got it setup with the stock antenna, put it in a window, took out the mesh, and waited. That took about a week to sync to the network. I ran it for a couple days and wasn't thrilled with the results. I watched some video and learned more about signals. Windows (especially 2 and 3 pane) are actually pretty disruptive to the signal. I opened mine, put it out on the sill, and left the device inside.

I was earning for about 2 weeks, and earned about 2.4 HNT.

I decided to order a new antenna. There's some mixed info out there. I went with a 8dbi antenna because, other than some trees and similar height homes, it's pretty darn flat around me. I ended up ordering the wrong cable for it, so I won't have that connected until Sunday.

But right now, I'm experiencing an outage. My hotspot has been syncing for a few days again now. I think it might have had something to do with a pretty intense storm that went through, as they do align pretty closely on timing. I'm not too concerned as I do hear it takes quite a while to sync, and experienced it myself on initial setup. Still, I'm hoping I don't need to go through that again upon new antenna installation.

I plan to mount the antenna on some 3m broom handle holders outside my 2nd story window. The cable can close under a window with supposedly minimal loss. Depending on how that works out, I may try and move it up into the peak of my attic. I'm not opposed to mounting it on my roof, but I'd really prefer to get some comfortable earnings without that hassle. I'm not too keen on climbing my happy ass up on my 2 story, so I was thinking about calling a local dish installer I found around me to mount and wire it for me.

I haven't really decided how much I want to convert over into BTC or straight USD.

Good news for spyder? What's the breakeven on your NFT, @spyderturbo007?

The government seems to think that the answer to volatility is regulation. Plenty of normal people can make money with volatility. And most would know to park those funds someplace safer when they need the funds for retirement. How about instead we regulate public servants from serving on advisory boards and dumping stocks before announcements?

Starship Troopers... RAD!

Didn't realize he did any.

Re: Helium

No sense in only talking good on these endeavors. I've had a pretty shitty time with this over the last couple of weeks. There was an update to the Helium blockchain around 9/16. I wasn't aware of that, and thought that a storm had put my hotspot offline and forced a resync. I had also upgraded my antenna to an 8dbi and mounted outside my 2nd story window at the same time. Way too many variables working at once...

I finally did get resynced, but I've only been earning about .01-.02 HNT per day. Apparently there was also a firmware update to the Bobcat miners around the same time, and others are experiencing similar issues.

It's really tough to get any real direction on what to do. The Bobcat support isn't very responsive, and the discord channel moves way too fast (am I the only one that hates discord?). Most people in a similar situation are being told that their rewards dwindled as a result of more hotspots being put online recently (either by way of the update that fixed fairness in assignment, or actual new physical units being setup), but that really doesn't seem to apply in my situation. I was pretty darn remote compared to other hotspots, and was still seeing decent earnings before. There haven't been any new hotspots added to my area at all. I've tried switching back and forth between stock antenna and the 8dbi.

I'm pretty tempted to just completely reset and start over, but it can take 4+ days to sync. At this point though, I'm not really sure I have many other options.

There's nothing on this planet that cannot be completely ruined by my mere participation, so I'm going to hold off on this NFT stuff for the sake of everyone else here.

I wanted to get in on the meka thing, but I needed to transfer from my mining pool to my eth wallet, and then to metamask.

I didn't have metamask, so created an account. Can only deposit 500...? OK, well no problem, throwing real money at this makes it feel different, so I wanted to transfer my mined eth anyway. Had my threshold set to .1 payout on my mining pool, with about .092 earned. I set the threshold to .09 as it's supposed to cash out every 2 hours if you're over the threshold. Except apparently when it doesn't. Going on about 24h and nothing yet.

A big pain, and a reminder to me that all this stuff is still in its relative infancy, which is good if you're already investing.

Good luck, fellas!

That's what I ended up doing, already being setup with a coinbase account. I really didn't want to throw more money into my account to go after one of these, so I really wanted my mining pool to payout to my wallet, and then transfer to metamask (not the wallet I normally use).

The good news is, I did eventually get everything sent over to metamask and ready to go. The bad news is, it was too late. And I paid all the transfer fees etc for nothing (well, other than to consolidate my ETH into my metamask wallet for some future reason, I suppose).

Reported stolen. Good luck.

I don't see 'game tie-in' and such promises as adding much value. If mainstream games, say WOW, fortnite, etc get into NFTs, then look out... Could you imagine if they created NFT drops from raids, etc? That's gotta be coming..

The idea that someone is going to create some desirable NFT, and then bake that into a compelling video game of some type that someone would actually want to play... well that would be pretty impressive. The idea would seem to be that you need an NFT to get into such a game universe. I find it hard to believe that there would be much of an incentive to create and maintain such a game when you're limiting your potential player base immediately.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding these extras, but I just don't see how it works in reality.

What a disaster that game is. I was really close to supporting it multiple times over the last, what, 10 years??

You're right though, I could see them rolling out some NFT ships.

That guy never returns my calls

I've been mining helium for a couple of months. I think I've managed about 5 hnt. Part of it is on me just not keeping up with some of the problems that popped up, but there are certainly some network things, as well as some issues with some of the bobcat miners. I think I'm pretty well setup now, and with more miners in the area (but not too close yet) I think I'm in a pretty good spot. I just ordered a 5.8dbi antenna, figuring maybe I don't have the elevation to take advantage of my 8dbi. I'll see how those earnings compare for me. Assuming 5.8 works out, I may have an 8dbi I can part with if someone is interested.

Yeah I'm having kind of a rough time at the moment. I originally set this up with wifi, but moved a mesh unit near the device so I can connect via lan. I seem to have trouble when using ethernet, unplugging it and relying on wifi works, but my port doesn't want to forward on wifi.

I think I may be best off just resetting the unit and doing the whole setup with just lan. The pain point there is the 4+ day sync time, and I'm not even sure that's my issue.

I also need to move the antenna up in the attic, but I'm not sure of the best way to make that happen. I also feel like I should be getting better earnings than I am without optimizing the antenna based on your numbers. I'm starting to get some more hotspots within range, so antenna reach isn't as important to me as it was just a month ago.

I already have a coinbase account, what's the best exchange to catch the earlier stuff?

It's backwards so far. So many video games fail, or have a really limited life. What will be interesting is when someone like Epic Games (fortnite, rocket league) with a long successful franchise starts to tie in NFTs. My nephew basically considers VBucks to be legal tender.

There's been quite a few commercials and the market is currently down. I think the ads were pretty bad. Not clear... who's going to scan a floating QR code??? And I'm sure people are confused that there are so many markets.

Some political talk is inevitable, but if we want to be allowed to freely discuss those things and how they affect crypto, it makes sense to keep those comments to the point. Maybe even treat others with a modicum of respect.

I'm really not interested in hearing anyone's thoughts on the vaccine, communism, blah blah fucking blah. It's not relevant. If you start using crypto discussions to take political digs it can only mean you've exhausted all other audiences, and you're a full-blown asshole.

Seeing Ukranians standing in line at the bank is a bit of an eye opener to the benefits of decentralized finance.

As long as they didn't sell it for $115

Wow, well done. I don't really get the nft thing in its current form, but definitely see its future potential. Really hard to ignore some of you guys making a killing, but the projects I've shadow picked have all fizzled, so it doesn't seem like I have the chops to turn a profit in that arena.

I think you did the right thing in liquidating one of them. I think holding the other until you're comfortable selling is a reasonable play. Scratching out those gains to buy-in on a more expensive counterpart would make me really nervous. That would really be the opposite of diversification, which is what you stated you're looking to do.

I'm loving the point, counter-point.