To be fair, until well after Biden takes office, the SEC - just like every other regulatory oversight organ of the US govt - may as well not exist.

OK, dip's over!

Check out this textbook XRP pump 'n' dump.

That's how you end up with this sort of wallet.

ain't it just. boy did those people time it badly.

Yeah, I spotted that. When I saw the value climb, figured something must be up.

I'm not sure whether this is very right or very wrong. But Shub knows eth took another big dip and is bouncing around like a yo-yo right now. Anyone timing those oscillations right is making serious gains.

This is a tremor. When USDT loses its 1:1 peg we will see the 9.0 quake.

USDT losing it's stable coin dominance will MAYBE cause a Mt Gox style market shake up. There are plenty of other stable coins that can fulfill the role. Do you think Morgan Stanley/Microstrategy, for instance, cares to use USDT as they hoover up the available Bitcoin?

annnd finally I can get some work done! I remember June 2017 watching Eth go from $500 to $250 and I felt like I was going to die. A mate of mine developed an instant cold sore in that week.

I suspect 'institutional money' is a droplet in an ocean of deeply questionable liquidity. True there are other stablecoins but their impact isn't significant.



Source: coinlib.io (tracks all major exchanges)

Vitalik addressing perhaps crypto's most significant flaw: wallet recovery.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html

Apropos:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/t...-fortunes.html

So many tales of lol.

I hope they can see the funny side of it. They could be a millionaire, but will have to settle for middle class. First world problems. An opportunity to be thankful for what you've got and not what could have been.

On the subject. I ordered a Ledger Nano X (upgrading from Nano S) last week and it's already arrived! Only reason for upgrade is firmware is more compatible with Eth 2.0 (although the basic transaction message protocol remains the same from Eth 1.0 to 2.0).

Any of you guys staking? I would be all up on that shit, but in regional area and power / internet is prone to outages. Don't want to risk it until I've got an uninterruptible connection.

Had a quick look at staking, but not keen on having my staked ETH tied up until ETH 2.0 is ready. Its possible its never ready, however unlikely that is.

Oh, if you're worried about your QoS just stake via a pool?

Not here. Let us know if you take the plunge.

I figure there will be some options for pooling a node fairly shortly.

How long till someone starts offering node insurance?

ETH ATH incoming...

today was bonkers, I actually got scared and bailed early.

Did you need the money? If not, why sell? It's the lowest hanging investment with virtually unlimited upside potential. Take that bet (with money you don't mind losing), keep it safe with a hardware wallet, then check back on it in 3-4 years.

Uninstall crypto price checkers, uninstall crypto twitter, and keep away from CNBC and youtube "day trading TA".

If youre making a decision to sell on the day, sleep on it first and see if you still want to sell.

The crypto I had set aside longterm investment all got used as life-support during the incomeless winter. What I have now is a smaller amount of play money; I'm basically baby day trading and trying to ensure that my numbers are better at the end of the week than at the start. But by "bailing" don't worry; I don't mean "withdrawing fiat to a bank", I just mean "hopping sideways between coins". When I get to a certain threshold I do liquidate a bit and use it to pay down debt. After 2020 I'm pretty fucking debt-averse.

Out of interest, what exchanges/markets do you guys use when you're buying and selling?

Very brave to trade in this environment. Ignore what I said then. You have a different strategy than me.

I use btcmarkets.net always.

You know, since I made that post and re-reading your preceding comment a few times, I've come to Jesus. I was getting gamified and the fact that I'd gone back in, made some quick money, and got out with a profit before Xmas was clouding my judgement. You're completely right, I shouldn't be doing this.

Everything's now back on my Ledger Nano and it has been put away.

Hey does btcmarkets.net let you transact straight to your Ledger address? Or do you have to transact to an on-site wallet and then send the crypto to your hardware wallet in a separate transaction?

Ahh good. A man can lose more than his shirt attempting to day trade in these times. Coins are literally doubling or halving in value in a day. I like to set my position, then enjoy the show up or down. Patience.

re btcmarkets.net: they own the private keys. So get it off exchange withdrawal to hardware wallet, or money in the bank.

One thing I like about easycrypto.ai (kiwi outfit) - they're a noncustodial exchange, so when I place an order the coin goes straight to my Nano. No extra transaction fee to get the coin from the exchange to my wallet.

That is preferable indeed, but I just wouldn't use my main wallet for such integrations.

Dip buying opportunity between $27-28k.

(No, you can't double spend bitcoin)

I don't think we're going to get the opportunity, looks like BTC and ETH are bouncing already.

PS - it it just me, or are the rates in the Ledger Live app completely divorced from reality?

yeah I never trust what ledger says regarding price. The only thing I can trust is the exchange I'm using, there's quite a difference in price discovery between US, China, and Australian exchanges. They should remove the $ value altogether.

if you're not connected to a Kiwi fiat bank account:

https://changelly.com/

boinnnnngggggggg

Aaaand we go bouncy-bouncy, bouncy-bouncy, fun-fun-fun, fun-fun!

I figure the frothiness will go on for years yet.

Further to that and your comment earlier in this thread along the lines of "we're still in the early stages" - that's why I'm kinda skeptical on Bitcoin. It was the first and the noisiest and got the most attention, but anyone who's ever used it knows that it's kludgy as fuck. Slow, power-hungry, transaction fees are ridiculously expensive. Of the coins that came afterwards it's Ethereum and things like Stellar and stablecoins that are going to be the bases of products and services that people actually use.

Put it this way: if I had lots of money and I wanted somewhere to put it for investment returns med-long term based on actual usefulness and value (rather than hype), it wouldn't be Bitcoin. I suspect Bitcoin's big jumps have already happened.

But wtf do I know, I'm an underemployed alcoholic video gamer who thought the iPhone would be meh and who completely missed the boat on bitcoin anyway, and there are lots of big investment funds pouring money in to bitcoin and it's their job to predict the future.

fuck, I'm caring again, god I hate this thread

I don't see how Bitcoin survives. I think its inevitable crash will set back the public perception of cryto systems a good decade. But that won't really matter in the long run. But the long run is very long, I think 50-100 years. Which conversely is also very fast, if you consider how long traditional banking and legal systems took to be established and a normal part of human day-to-day life.

Agreed.

Bankless podcast - Why Proof of Stake? | Vitalik Buterin
https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/why-p...ik-buterin-7f4

Convex and Concave Dispositions
https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/08/concave.html

As Vitalik puts it:
- Bitcoiners are convex, extremists, all or nothing
- Ethereans are concave, best of all worlds, balanced

This is why flippening can, and likely will happen.

Changes in banking systems take ages to happen until they do, and then they happen overnight. The example that comes to mind for me is the Renaissance transition from bookkeeping in Roman numerals to bookkeeping in Arabic (yes, Indian, I know) numerals. When it became obvious to every banker that keeping track of compound interest in Arabic decimal notation was more efficient (i.e., profitable) and that doing so gave the bankers using it a competitive advantage over all the other bankers who were still using Roman numerals, the change happened just like that. Two and a half thousand years of carefully tuned systems went out the window because something better came along and the first movers with the new thing had an advantage over their competition.

We don't yet have the something better. However the tools for building the something better are coming together, and it just seems to me that the tools coming together don't appear to involve Bitcoin.

But here's something I really worry about: in the hypothetical future worlds in which cryptocurrency really takes off, the early adopters (which is still anyone up to and including now) will have huge leverage. The people who have the time and play money and philosophical interest and technical capacity to BE early adopters are overwhelming already-affluent white dudes. There is going to be a HUGE inequality gulf between the early adopters and everyone else, and call me a godless communist but huge inequality gulfs tend not to work out that well for society.

Cryptos of the future will need to be very stable and predictable to function as everyday currency, not assets that fluctuate wildly in value or give early adopters a massive advantage.

Think of it this way: the cryptos currently in existence are like Benz Motorwagens: crude technology demonstrators, but clearly very promising. The crypto Model T hasn't been invented yet.

I wonder.

I see what you're saying. We have the current set of "early adopters", largely just people buying in. Leveraging the platforms beyond currency handling is nearly non-existent. However this white, male, monied crowd in the best position to buy in are going to be stymied by traditional systems they're already bought into.

On the flip-side the bulk of people do not enjoy the benefits of robust, transparent, corruption free financial and legal systems. They will have strong incentive to develop and use these new systems. And there is so much untapped potential to be unleashed. I'm anticipating developing nations leap frogging past Western institutions.