Wow. Bitcoin is almost $1,500

[Alpha One Seven]

http://fortune.com/2018/01/10/bitcoin-warren-buffett-cryptocurrency/

 

[VirtualLarry]

http://fortune.com/2018/01/23/ethereum-price-mining-nvidia-amd-stock/

 

[DrMrLordX]

Nah, I get around $15,000 / yr in SSDI. Maybe a little more now with the 2018 2% COLA.

Yeah, pretty small budget for hardware purchases, huh? The last year or two, I was borrowing from good old Mom. Now that I'm doing mining, and have a number of decent Ryzen rigs, and as many GPUs as my PCs will hold, I'm going to be paying her back this year, hopefully substantially.

I've pared back my cell phone ($160/yr), Internet ($9.95/mo, $112/mo for the gigabit FIOS connection, debating on keeping that), the things that are expensive are my car ins. ($200+/mo), and rent (~$400/mo). But thank the Lord Above that I can manage on that income. Mining is a nice little bonus, even though it rolls in really slowly. Even if I have to pay taxes on it. Which, given my low income otherwise, I wonder if I maybe don't have to?

I wish I had told you to sock away some $1 ETH in early 2016 and HODL it. Your situation would be a lot different now. Hell I wish I had figured that out for myself. I was a few months late.

At least things are going better for you now. It won't last forever, though, so I hope you have a plan for that. Settling debts (family or otherwise) now is a good idea.

As far as taxes go, you may be able to dodge taxes altogether just from standard deduction, though I'm not sure how your mining income will interact with your SSDI. I thnk SSDI is not taxable in most cases:

https://www.disabilitysecrets.com/l...curity-basics/disability-benefits-taxable.htm

. . . even if you have extra income on the side.

Assuming the mining income + SSDI are your only income, that would give you roughly $6k/year in taxable income before taking into account deductions. For unmarried single filers, personal deduction is $6,350 in 2017 plus personal exemption of $4,050:

https://obliviousinvestor.com/2017-...duction-personal-exemption-and-other-updates/

. . . meaning you probably have $0 in taxable income.

Edit: I eat a lot of Ramen and McD's dollar value menu stuff.

Been there, done that. Take a multi with one of your meals and get a cheap source of dietary fibre. Some of us have to live in the industrialized food world, and that's the way to survive if you're stuck in that zone.

Canadian power company(ies) are actively working on attracting bitcoin miners and large datacenters to use their extra unused power & recycling the heat produced so it's put to good use in greenhouses cause is cold AF a lot of the year.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/energy-company-hydro-quebec-looks-attract-bitcoin-miners/

It's a race & competition to attract the most big miners.

Thanks to China kicking out their miners, all that equipment is looking for someplace to go. Canada has an interesting combination of cheap(ish) power and cold weather that is great for running mining rigs.

Holy cr@p!

Somebody moved $400+ million dollars worth of Bitcoin's for $1 transaction fee in one shot.

https://blockchain.info/tx/92785a57f6e9e9eb9d37a00e6e8be7f888376f65fa2b8f868db261cbf6cca7b0

Segwit transactions are really fast & cheap, but WOW that's a lot of money

They're doing better, but $1 is still a bit much - remember, people are going to be paying that much for any transaction, regardless of its size. Sure is better than $5-$25 transaction fees though.

Let's see if Bitcoin can get its act together well enough to catch up to Ethereums tx/day count and get tx fees down in the ballpark of $.20 or less. Then there is hope.

Still, with all the reliance on off-chain solutions like LN that may be required to get there, it becomes questionable as to why anyone would pick Bitcoin's blockchain as the basis for those transactions. Most off-chain solutions can be applied to multiple blockchains.

 

[Yakk]

They're doing better, but $1 is still a bit much - remember, people are going to be paying that much for any transaction, regardless of its size. Sure is better than $5-$25 transaction fees though.

Let's see if Bitcoin can get its act together well enough to catch up to Ethereums tx/day count and get tx fees down in the ballpark of $.20 or less. Then there is hope.

Still, with all the reliance on off-chain solutions like LN that may be required to get there, it becomes questionable as to why anyone would pick Bitcoin's blockchain as the basis for those transactions. Most off-chain solutions can be applied to multiple blockchains.

I do not see having free or near-free onchain transactions as the goal. A second layer solution like LN seems to be working out much better than I originally thought. Those are essentially free and instant with the benefit of working through the TOR network and are offchain. So the blockchain remains relatively light on resources for full node operators, wth really needs to fix that fits their node operators.

 

[ImpulsE69]

That isn't the 400 million in crypto that was just stolen in Japan was it?

 

[DrMrLordX]

I do not see having free or near-free onchain transactions as the goal. A second layer solution like LN seems to be working out much better than I originally thought. Those are essentially free and instant with the benefit of working through the TOR network and are offchain. So the blockchain remains relatively light on resources for full node operators, wth really needs to fix that fits their node operators.

Onchain or offchain won't really matter for the end-user so long as the money gets where it needs to go. All Lightning transfers will incur some cost since you have to pay to open and close channels . . . it's just a matter of how many transactions you can resolve in the interim. In the long run, I think most crypto-based payment networks will use a combination of on-chain and off-chain solutions until we migrate to something more sophisticated than existing blockchain tech (tangles possibly, not sure what will win out in the end). You will want higher onchain throughput and lower latency to make offchain transactions less onerous (slow onchain transactions could make the opening and closing of Lightning channels problematic, for example; ditto for Raiden).

Another problem is that the LN developers are practically begging people to stop using the alpha version on the main net. It is working for some, but not for others:

https://www.ethnews.com/lightning-network-users-report-losing-bitcoin-due-to-bugs

On the one hand you have rabid pro LN/RSK pushing for rapid adoption and lecturing everyone that "it's ready today", but on the other hand you have developers cautioning people to slow down and let them work on the code some more. Given the buggy nature of LN right now, I'd say caution is warranted.

 

[Zeze]

Oh god LOL.

Look up coin called PONZI. It's a literal joke. Their whitepaper is a dictionary definition of the word ponzi scheme (I'm not being figurative!).

And their website is a tongue in cheek.
http://ponzicoin.co/home.html

From their Q&A
Q: Is this site secure?
A: We use Equifax-grade security.

From their website:

Well it started $0.003 last March. Shot upto $0.05 in December... now it's $0.13.

What the fack.

 

[zinfamous]

Oh god LOL.

Look up coin called PONZI. It's a literal joke. Their whitepaper is a dictionary definition of the word ponzi scheme (I'm not being figurative!).

And their website is a tongue in cheek.
http://ponzicoin.co/home.html

From their Q&A
Q: Is this site secure?
A: We use Equifax-grade security.

From their website:

Well it started $0.003 last March. Shot upto $0.05 in December... now it's $0.13.

What the fack.

This was the exact plan for NefCoin, wasn't it? I blame all of you guys and not me at all for being too lazy to do exactly this. we could be millionaires, you know?

 

[Ns1]

It's not too late. The day is still young.

 

[Yakk]

Canada is on a roll, first the government is inviting all miners with cheap renewable power & space, now they're going to introduce their first regulated crypto fund consisting of BTC, ETH, & LTC. That should be good for tax purposes for both individuals and governments, curious to see how it will develop. Some provinces have reached over 5% of the population having bought or own cryptos. Adoption is accelerating there at almost Asian-like speed it looks like.

Onchain or offchain won't really matter for the end-user so long as the money gets where it needs to go. All Lightning transfers will incur some cost since you have to pay to open and close channels . . . it's just a matter of how many transactions you can resolve in the interim. In the long run, I think most crypto-based payment networks will use a combination of on-chain and off-chain solutions until we migrate to something more sophisticated than existing blockchain tech (tangles possibly, not sure what will win out in the end). You will want higher onchain throughput and lower latency to make offchain transactions less onerous (slow onchain transactions could make the opening and closing of Lightning channels problematic, for example; ditto for Raiden).

Another problem is that the LN developers are practically begging people to stop using the alpha version on the main net. It is working for some, but not for others:

https://www.ethnews.com/lightning-network-users-report-losing-bitcoin-due-to-bugs

On the one hand you have rabid pro LN/RSK pushing for rapid adoption and lecturing everyone that "it's ready today", but on the other hand you have developers cautioning people to slow down and let them work on the code some more. Given the buggy nature of LN right now, I'd say caution is warranted.

I've tinkered a bit with LN and it works well. A channel can basically stay open until either of the 2 participants decides to close it. It just works really fast and even the phone app is much easier to use than I'd imagine at this stage of development.

It's a bit trickery when it comes to deployment. Since BTC itself is a completely open development (main developers have only limited say at best which is a good thing) anybody is free to do whay they want. I wouldn't deploy LN commercially for myself yet until there's a lot more peer review, but good luck to those that do like TORguard, it does works quite well as-is, just not bullet proof yet.

Onchain for major transactions and a 2nd layer offchain for everyday transactions with separate wallet funding seems the best & safest setup for the foreseeable future. Cold storage, Layer 1 wallet, Layer 2 wallet.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Canada is on a roll, first the government is inviting all miners with cheap renewable power & space, now they're going to introduce their first regulated crypto fund consisting of BTC, ETH, & LTC. That should be good for tax purposes for both individuals and governments, curious to see how it will develop. Some provinces have reached over 5% of the population having bought or own cryptos. Adoption is accelerating there at almost Asian-like speed it looks like.

Difference is that some Asian countries are going through growing pains when it comes to crypto adoption. China is paranoid about currency outflow, while S. Korea is . . . kind of a mess.

The Canadian model seems pretty positive all around, assuming the crypto world can overall maintain its momentum. Giving the average Canadian a piece of the expanding crypto pie may be one of the best ways to assure that everyday folks have the opportunity to own part of the future.

I've tinkered a bit with LN and it works well. A channel can basically stay open until either of the 2 participants decides to close it. It just works really fast and even the phone app is much easier to use than I'd imagine at this stage of development.

It's a bit trickery when it comes to deployment. Since BTC itself is a completely open development (main developers have only limited say at best which is a good thing) anybody is free to do whay they want. I wouldn't deploy LN commercially for myself yet until there's a lot more peer review, but good luck to those that do like TORguard, it does works quite well as-is, just not bullet proof yet.

Onchain for major transactions and a 2nd layer offchain for everyday transactions with separate wallet funding seems the best & safest setup for the foreseeable future. Cold storage, Layer 1 wallet, Layer 2 wallet.

As long as you understand its still a development-phase project, you'll be okay. People using it for commercial transactions right now are treading on dangerous territory.

 

[Papa Hogan]

This is still a thing? I mean, come on, let the gpu's drop.

 

[destrekor]

This is still a thing? I mean, come on, let the gpu's drop.

Seriously. I need a new gaming GPU... so that I can get my current GPUs back to mining 100% of the time and away from my home office.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Now would be a good time for a competitor to Nvidia and ATI to come in the game. Nvidia and ATI don't want to produce more since they are scared this is a bubble that will soon burst and are counting on that. If another came into play and was more aggressive and mass produced enough GPUs to fill in the market, ATI and Nvidia would feel pressured to produce more as well.

 

[destrekor]

Now would be a good time for a competitor to Nvidia and ATI to come in the game. Nvidia and ATI don't want to produce more since they are scared this is a bubble that will soon burst and are counting on that. If another came into play and was more aggressive and mass produced enough GPUs to fill in the market, ATI and Nvidia would feel pressured to produce more as well.

Honestly I do not believe this is a case of choosing to not ramp up manufacturing. Remember, neither company directly runs their own foundry. Radeon Technology Group (RTG) has the closest ties to a foundry in that GloFo is an AMD offshoot, meanwhile Nvidia relies heavily upon TSMC and a few other foundries. All those foundries also spin silicon for other chip designers. The market suspicion is that production capacities are strained for the current lithography levels and the top-end massive GPUs are very sensitive to defects so a lot of consumer parts get binned chips that aren't maxed out. But Nvidia especially has strong demand for their enterprise offerings and may actually be seeing fewer defects in their largest chips, meaning fewer would get binned to a consumer model.

AMD likely struggles more with cost for production capacity as their market performance has been weak and they have been slow to catch up in chip design. They have access to only so much cash and debt, so the combo of ramping up production, then shipping chips to production partners to turn into a video card, and then getting cargo shipped via the slowest routes possible (container ships)... it takes a bit to get a surge in parts at retail. Frankly I just think they've been around max capacity for a long time - there's also temporary increased costs in memory chips and other components. Most components are actually far more expensive than usual, whether it's directly seen by the consumer or not. There have been strained production limits for memory components for quite some time, for both RAM and NVRAM/Flash memory. Nature hasn't been lending any helping hands as of late, it has been responsible for most production/supply issues, especially in East Asian territory near the Pacific.

A strange twist of fate awaits us down the road: due to climate patterns, it may become more costly to produce silicon chips in Asia and cheaper in the US.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Hello everybody! I'm not sure how to approach this subject here since it could come across as shilling/doomsaying for personal profit, so some personal disclosure is in order.

Whatever crypto holdings I had of any substance, I dumped in Dec 2017. The IRS is getting their money, all fed/state laws were obeyed, etc. I have no skin in the game outside of a few piddly tokens I've mined since then.

One of the things that had me spooked back then were rumblings about Tether (USDT) and its influence on the crypto world. I had set a baseline profit goal and a maximum profit goal as well, and prices pushed past the maximum so I said, "why not? Let's sell this crypto", and so it was.

If you think I have a warchest sitting to the sidelines awaiting investment somewhere else . . . well yes, actually, I do, though all I will say about that, is that it is %5300 larger than it was when I started in 2016. So yeah theoretically I could FOMO back in after a crash and increase my stack, or I could just walk away.

The fact is that what I'm about to tell you is already circulating in the crypto invesetor world, so . . . I didn't start this talk, and whatever any of us do here will likely be irrelevant to whatever price shifts we see over the next month or so. The market is bigger than just us.

Tether is coming apart at the seams:

https://mktstk.com/2018/01/28/tether-is-breaking-its-peg-to-the-dollar/

Others are saying stuff like this, though I can't confirm/deny their claims:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/7tmkol/tether_is_breaking_its_peg_to_the_dollar/dtedce5/

Personally I think the above poster has not gone far enough in describing the risk levels posed by the USDT situation assuming his assessment of crypto capitalization is correct. USDT printing goes further back than Nov. 2017; in fact, you could probably trace it back to H1 2017. The last time that BTC appeared to have anything resembling an "organic" price level was late July when it was around $2k, though others have estimated that USDT pumping started $1k earlier, in Feb. 2017.

The simplest way I was able to wrap my mind around the probable effects of a USDT-based fallout was to come to the following conclusions:

1). Any exchange that accepts USDT will fall apart, potentially stranding assets Mt. Gox-style
2). AT BEST crypto values will retrace to Feb-July 2017 levels.

For BTC that would mean a drop to the $1k-$2k range. For ETH things could get much worse, since the Feb 2017 price was under $16, while the July price was averaged around $200 (there was a big dip back then, following stabilization in the $300 range, but I do not expect a USDT collapse scenario to bring ETH down to a floor as high as $300).

And that assumes a straight-up historical rewind of prices. Things might not shake out like that. Also consider that tokens like BCH didn't even exist back then . . . some of those could have value 100% backed by USDT. Take USDT out of the equation, and they evaporate. Poof! Gone. Or they might survive the crash, and other tokens that had value as far back as Feb 2017 might take a disproportionate hit in market cap. ETH could get pushed to Dec 2016 levels (~$7).

Outside of the fact that a lot of people would be wiped out by a market cataclysm of this scale, it also sucks that a lot of excellent tech projects would be rapidly defunded in a heartbeat. Crypto moves FAST. Stuff like OMG and RDN could lose capitalization overnight.

Not good.

So what should you make of this? All I can really ask you to do is watch the market carefully, and be wary of automated trading tools protecting you in the event of a crash. Get any crypto assets you're holding on Poloniex or Bitfinex off those exchanges ASAP since they may go Mt. Gox on us within the next year. Have a plan to liquidate or move to a crypto that you think will be safe BEFORE things go tits-up. Once the panic selling starts, it's already too late.

Those of us who have already moved to fiat in bulk could be well-positioned to buy at the floors once they emerge, but outside of ETH PoS I'm not sure why I would. Once the USDT fiasco runs its course, there will be a major loss of confidence in crypto assets, and possible regulations following up afterwards. I think some projects - like ETH - will do well under regulatory supervision, but others may not fare so well. Outside of a dead-cat bounce, I don't see crypto rising very far above the post-USDT floors for awhile. The only good thing I can say about the potential crisis is that a lot of weak hands that never belonged in the cryptoverse will be pushed out, and that a lot of bad projects will die on the vine. The scammier they are, the quicker they'll fall.

I don't know how long it will take for all this to play out. As I said above, noise about USDT goes back to at least last Nov/Dec, so this kind of information isn't necessarily new. But dumping your auditor like that? That just makes no sense.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Can you comment on what "USDT" and "Tether" is, in relation to Bitcoin and Eth? And why I should care?

Edit: Who produces "Tether" tokens? The US Gov't? A private 3rd-party?

I had not heard that exchanges denoted their trading pairs in "USDT" rather than "USD".

The exchange that I use (Coinbase), uses "USD" as far as I know. I use it to "cash out" my mining assets that I get in BTC.

Edit: Re-reading your post, seems to suggest, that the entire reason for the stratospheric rise in value of BTC and ETH, is because of "printing" of these "USDT" tokens, that are supposed to be pegged and backed by USD, but really aren't anymore, and that will cause CC valuations to collapse soon?

Hmm. Not sure what to make of all this. Have always just been cashing out BTC for USD.

Edit: Is this why my GTX1060 3GB card is only earning $1.60 USD / day, doing Equihash?

 

[DrMrLordX]

I'll be happy to tell you what I know about USDT.

In order to buy and sell crypto for fiat currency, at least in the US if not in other countries, exchanges have to have the proper banking permits and agreements to carry on such business. I don't know EXACTLY what an exchange like Coinbase/GDAX must do to earn such a status, but whatever it is they've done, it's worked. You can send funds from and receive fund to your bank account using Coinbase in a number of ways. Unless you do business in the UK where Coinbase is largely frowned-upon but I digress.

Some exchanges like Poloniex and Bitfinex don't have those permits (or in Bitfinex's case, they keep losing theirs; see Bitfinex's trouble with Wells Fargo). So they only offer crypto-to-crypto trades.

That presents liquidity issues for people looking for a "stable" temporary off-ramp during times of volatility. They want to sell for fiat, hold fiat on the exchange, and then buy in after a dip (for example). Enter USDT:

https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/what-is-usdt-and-how-to-use-it/

Tethers - USDT - are technically crypto tokens. The key thing to remember here is that Tether Limited is supposed to have $1 USD held in trust for every USDT it prints. But who determines that? Apparently, auditors. Nobody's been really happy with Tether Ltd.'s transparency to date, so in the face of stiffer auditing requirements, Tether Ltd. cut ties with their auditor. Hmm.

Now read these gems from last year:

https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/bitfinex-tether-scam/

http://fortune.com/2017/12/05/bitcoin-btc-price-usd-tether-limited-bitfinex/

https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/bitf...-bitfinex-started-a-ponzi-scheme-86a9291add29

The Bitfinex/Tether scam goes pretty deep (read up on BFX tokens, that's a laugh a minute there), but it's just the tip of the iceberg. The main thing to notice here is that both Bitfinex and Tether Ltd. have a history of printing USDT or other no-value tokens in order to shore up debt that they can't/won't pay otherwise. Nobody knows how much USD Tether Ltd. holds in trust to back its crypto. It is possible that it holds nothing at all, or that if it had holdings at some point, that they've been embezzled by unknown parties. Embezzlement and money laundering are possible here. People's eyebrows were raised in Dec when Tether Ltd. printed enough USDT to exceed 1 billion USDT in circulation, and now reportedly we're up to 2.2 billion. So they've more than doubled the amount of USDT in circulation in the last month-and-a-half.

The kicker though is . . . well, let's look back to my previous post, about market captialization vs market liquidity. We have $2.2 billion in potentially "fake" assets being used to buy up crypto over the last 6-9 months, right? Because that's what people do with USDT, especially if Bitfinex is receiving newly-minted USDT and buying Bitcoin for itself as a way to pay off debts/scam people (which is not exactly proven yet, but still). As my earlier link explained, market cap can go up much faster than the incoming liquidity would indicate, due to the way valuation of crypto tokens (or any other asset) can fluctuate on a non-linear scale. The present valuation of BTC may be entirely reliant on only $2.2 billion, which in turn may be nothing but imaginary money.

Oops.

It gets worse when you think of how many other crypto assets were bought with USDT on Bitfinex, Poloniex, Bittrex, or any other exchange that messes with that particular token; or, perhaps people used BTC they bought with USDT to trade for other crypto (which is pretty common). Someone's got that USDT, and they're going to scramble for some other crypto and then dump it on "legit" exchanges for actual fiat once the house of cards starts to collapse. Sell pressure ensues, and everything goes to hell.

As to whether any of this is related to your income with a 3 GB 1060, I can't say for sure. Usually reduction in payouts from mining comes from a combination of rising difficulty and drooping token prices. Since you are probably mining a basket of tokens which NiceHash converts to BTC for you, it's hard to tell exactly which tokens are dropping in price to cause you such trouble. Downward markets rarely see rising hashrate (in my limited experience) so something is probably going down somewhere. Hell BTC is down to $11k again, so that could be part of your problem. Just another day in crypto, right?

The real hell breaks loose if it just keeps going down. Too many days like this, and it's trouble.

 

[zinfamous]

Hello everybody! I'm not sure how to approach this subject here since it could come across as shilling/doomsaying for personal profit, so some personal disclosure is in order.

Whatever crypto holdings I had of any substance, I dumped in Dec 2017. The IRS is getting their money, all fed/state laws were obeyed, etc. I have no skin in the game outside of a few piddly tokens I've mined since then.

One of the things that had me spooked back then were rumblings about Tether (USDT) and its influence on the crypto world. I had set a baseline profit goal and a maximum profit goal as well, and prices pushed past the maximum so I said, "why not? Let's sell this crypto", and so it was.

If you think I have a warchest sitting to the sidelines awaiting investment somewhere else . . . well yes, actually, I do, though all I will say about that, is that it is %5300 larger than it was when I started in 2016. So yeah theoretically I could FOMO back in after a crash and increase my stack, or I could just walk away.

The fact is that what I'm about to tell you is already circulating in the crypto invesetor world, so . . . I didn't start this talk, and whatever any of us do here will likely be irrelevant to whatever price shifts we see over the next month or so. The market is bigger than just us.

Tether is coming apart at the seams:

https://mktstk.com/2018/01/28/tether-is-breaking-its-peg-to-the-dollar/

Others are saying stuff like this, though I can't confirm/deny their claims:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/7tmkol/tether_is_breaking_its_peg_to_the_dollar/dtedce5/

Personally I think the above poster has not gone far enough in describing the risk levels posed by the USDT situation assuming his assessment of crypto capitalization is correct. USDT printing goes further back than Nov. 2017; in fact, you could probably trace it back to H1 2017. The last time that BTC appeared to have anything resembling an "organic" price level was late July when it was around $2k, though others have estimated that USDT pumping started $1k earlier, in Feb. 2017.

The simplest way I was able to wrap my mind around the probable effects of a USDT-based fallout was to come to the following conclusions:

1). Any exchange that accepts USDT will fall apart, potentially stranding assets Mt. Gox-style
2). AT BEST crypto values will retrace to Feb-July 2017 levels.

For BTC that would mean a drop to the $1k-$2k range. For ETH things could get much worse, since the Feb 2017 price was under $16, while the July price was averaged around $200 (there was a big dip back then, following stabilization in the $300 range, but I do not expect a USDT collapse scenario to bring ETH down to a floor as high as $300).

And that assumes a straight-up historical rewind of prices. Things might not shake out like that. Also consider that tokens like BCH didn't even exist back then . . . some of those could have value 100% backed by USDT. Take USDT out of the equation, and they evaporate. Poof! Gone. Or they might survive the crash, and other tokens that had value as far back as Feb 2017 might take a disproportionate hit in market cap. ETH could get pushed to Dec 2016 levels (~$7).

Outside of the fact that a lot of people would be wiped out by a market cataclysm of this scale, it also sucks that a lot of excellent tech projects would be rapidly defunded in a heartbeat. Crypto moves FAST. Stuff like OMG and RDN could lose capitalization overnight.

Not good.

So what should you make of this? All I can really ask you to do is watch the market carefully, and be wary of automated trading tools protecting you in the event of a crash. Get any crypto assets you're holding on Poloniex or Bitfinex off those exchanges ASAP since they may go Mt. Gox on us within the next year. Have a plan to liquidate or move to a crypto that you think will be safe BEFORE things go tits-up. Once the panic selling starts, it's already too late.

Those of us who have already moved to fiat in bulk could be well-positioned to buy at the floors once they emerge, but outside of ETH PoS I'm not sure why I would. Once the USDT fiasco runs its course, there will be a major loss of confidence in crypto assets, and possible regulations following up afterwards. I think some projects - like ETH - will do well under regulatory supervision, but others may not fare so well. Outside of a dead-cat bounce, I don't see crypto rising very far above the post-USDT floors for awhile. The only good thing I can say about the potential crisis is that a lot of weak hands that never belonged in the cryptoverse will be pushed out, and that a lot of bad projects will die on the vine. The scammier they are, the quicker they'll fall.

I don't know how long it will take for all this to play out. As I said above, noise about USDT goes back to at least last Nov/Dec, so this kind of information isn't necessarily new. But dumping your auditor like that? That just makes no sense.

So what you're saying is that I might be able to find and afford a new GPU very soon?

cool.

 

[preslove]

If you think I have a warchest sitting to the sidelines awaiting investment somewhere else . . . well yes, actually, I do, though all I will say about that, is that it is %5300 larger than it was when I started in 2016. So yeah theoretically I could FOMO back in after a crash and increase my stack, or I could just walk away.

Congrats on being one of the minority to profit on a wild speculative asset bubble.

Man, the tether stuff makes my head hurt, but it seems like it will probably be the pin that pierces the bubble.

 

[Zeze]

Gemini finally verified me. Just casually took 45 days.

 

[IEC]

The Bitfinex/Tether scam goes pretty deep (read up on BFX tokens, that's a laugh a minute there), but it's just the tip of the iceberg.

I did essentially the same thing you did, though I spaced out my realized capital gains over 2017 and 2018. Uncle Sam will love me (again) this April. Purchasing $500 worth of ETH back in 1H 2016 was an exceptional investment, and I would be very surprised if I can ever replicate that success.

 

[VirtualLarry]

We have $2.2 billion in potentially "fake" assets being used to buy up crypto

The irony is strong with this one....

Edit: I guess the problem is, if those holders of USDT "launder" it through BTC, and then use something like Coinbase to pull out *actual* USD out of the equation... I mean, why is USDT actually even worth anything at all? Because we take their word for it? Doesn't that make it a fiat currency? At least Bitcoin has artificial scarcity going for it, which is backed by math.

Talk about a house of cards...

 

[KIAman]

Really cool info on USDT! It makes a lot more sense to me now. It's crazy to think that USDT is the "fiat" replacement when keeping a cash balance on an exchange but scary there isn't a lot of control on their supply or price!!!

 

[Crono]

New Augur whitepaper came out today. They've been making good progress on the system, getting close to release now. I've been waiting a few years (since they announced it, not very long after Ethereum launch) for it, so I'm very excited.