For myself, life over the past few years has seemingly gone from bad to worse - and before I go into the details -this isn’t a “pity-post” or a sympathy searching exercise, this is simply a warning, and hopefully a lesson to others who are entering the crypto scene.
My crypto journey began back in earnest at the start of that famed 2017 “bull run” – I had a little bit in savings and had done my due diligence – this really was the future, and it could potentially set me and my family up for life.
I bought in with every bit of money I had to spare. All told, it was about £6,500, and the price of Bitcoin sat at just under £9,000.
This was exciting. The price continued to increase and I religiously opened and closed the Coinbase website to see the price soar by the hundreds and into the thousands. Work took a backseat and I became consumed with the markets, red and green candles being the first and last things I saw in the day.
I wanted more. I became envious of those that had bought into cryptos years before. So I looked at alternate avenues to increase my Bitcoin holdings… this was going to be the making of me! Sadly it turned out to be quite the opposite.
Scams, Scams everywhere…
The first venture I looked into was a third party bitcoin mining platform which promised exponential growth. It sounded too good to be true (spoiler: it was). I used a credit card to buy more Bitcoin. First mistake. I maxed the card and sent around £6,000 in Bitcoin to a mining company known as Crypterra. The reviews were good, the discord was active, people were seeing payouts – it was all looking legitimate. But of course it wasn’t. Payouts dried up. The devs went silent and the site disappeared and re-appeared sporadically before going offline indefinitely. It was over and I had lost most of the £6,000 from my credit card.
Robots are the future?
The price of Bitcoin was still holding strong and I’d made small gains with my original investment which was still untouched. Perhaps I could increase by Bitcoin gains elsewhere and pay off the credit card I had maxed out.
Again, I looked into ways to bolster my Bitcoin reservesI looked into trading platforms, cryptocurrency bots in particular. How hard could it be? As long as the price of Bitcoin went up, it should balance out any losses as I learned the ropes. There were a few that caught my eye. And following what I thought was sage “youtuber” advice – I dove into the world of trading with bots – linking up a Binance account and setting up my automated systems to work their magic and trade whilst I was asleep/working/sitting on the toilet, you name it.
As you can imagine, these bots weren’t the holy grail they were promoted to be, and I was losing Bitcoin left, right and centre. I became more and more “experimental” with the strategies… doubling my stakes, tripling my stakes to recoup what I had lost. I didn’t see it as real money (despite paying with hard earned money to fund these accounts) – it was magic internet money, just ones and zeroes – so the reality of it didn’t hit home how much I was actually losing. Shock horror, I lost it all.
Taking it to the bookies…
I had effectively been gambling my money away, and in my increasingly agitated state I sought out other communities to try and regain my money. Sports-betting communities, gambling communities, Twitter “tipsters” and Facebook groups who had all the inside knowledge.
I was down over £12,000 from my savings and the £6,500 from the credit card combined. I decided to open another two credit cards. One to fund my betting account and the other for backup. I quickly went through the first card’s funds, but I was ‘still learning’, this was ‘Ok’ – next time I would get it right. The second card (third in total) was quickly exhausted, and I was now close to £20,000 in the hole from when I started, all within just a few months.
The hole grew ever darker
As I write this now I am actually afraid and embarrassed to share the total losses I have made over the past few years (it’s actually much worse than I could have ever imagined). I have no-one to blame but myself; the greed, stupidity and at times, pure arrogance have lead me down this path. A path which at the moment seems irreversible for me.
To see the price of Bitcoin now makes me feel physically sick – if only I had been patient. If only I hadn’t chased my losses, if only I hadn’t played with money that wasn’t mine - I wouldn’t be in this predicament. As the debt mounts ever higher and interest rates on credit cards are crippling me, it will be an incredibly long time before I have any financial stability again. It has made me mentally unwell and I’m still figuring out the next steps which I know include professional support and removing my head from the pile of sand in which I have buried it.
I sincerely hope that those who read this account of my situation don’t fall into the same trap. The world is once again hyped for crypto, and with it come the pitfalls and scams and false promises of financial freedom and becoming rich. Don’t try and cheat the system, don’t chase your losses and don’t use money that isn’t yours in the first place.
TLDR:
To put it succinctly, the above is a very short overview of the financial hole I have found myself due to greed, arrogance and stupidity over the past few years. Hopefully a warning to others. Don’t chase losses, don’t look for the next get rich scheme and don’t invest money that isn’t yours to start with. Basically, don’t ruin your life like me. If only I had just held.
EDIT:
A quick edit to say thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read the above and replied in the comments. I've had some very honest and insightful responses and some incredibly useful suggestions about how I can bring myself back from this dilemma. I'll be seeking professional help both for the gambling and the debt management and hopefully get myself on the right track for the sake of my own sanity and that of my family's.

The Mods of WSB & A Coordinated AMC Pump

Going to be editing this with info as I come across it. Please DM me if you have anything to add. Many of you have reached out and I've complied a lot of evidence. I realize now that these pumps originated in Discord groups, but this is something I am still actively looking into and won't be including here.
Users of wallstreetbets (and also places like Stockwits, amcstock, and Youtube chats) attempted a coordinated pump on AMC (& GME) today, Feb. 3rd. These comments are still avaible. The fact they are still up and that I found them very easily means that the mods are not able to moderate their community well enough to stop coordinated pumps. There is not evidence that shows the mods were in on coordinated pump, but the fact that they were unable to stop it taking place shows that the subreddit has grown far too big to be managed by a team of 35 mods.
There is evidence that some mods owned both AMC and GME, and it is possible they held these shares while the coordinated pump was happening in threads they were supposed to be moderating (proof of GME ownership at the bottom).
Coldcutcombo69 was mod on WSB during the AMC coordinated pump. Here is them claiming that they were a mod on WSB. This image of mods before and after the day of the pump confirms they were a mod during the AMC pump-and-dump.
Coldcutcombo69 posted a picture of them having a sell order on their AMC stock that never hit, making it possible they owned AMC shares during the coordinated pump.
Coldcutcombo69 also posted some kind of DD thread about AMC two days ago, promoting the stock here. The content of this post has been removed. This post promoting AMC was made while Coldcutcombo69 was a moderator.
Coldbutcombo69 was a moderator during the AMC coordinated pump. They are no longer a moderator as of the time of this post, only a few hours later. They confirmed this here. A WSB mod was posting comments and threads promoting AMC while possibly still holding AMC shares, and a pump-and-dump occurred in the daily threads that they (along with others) were supposed to be moderating.
turdled is currently a WSB mod. They said, "We don't comment or promote trades. That's up to the subscribers and their upvotes/downvotes to decide." View it here.
turdled's claim was false. Coldcutcombo69 had been a moderator for 25 days. During that time they posted comments and threads promoting AMC, while providing evidence that they actually owned AMC shares. A moderator (who may command more respect in a community of 8.5 million people) promoting a stock is wrong, and the mods clearly believe that is the case since they said they don't do it. But at least one of them did. It could be that Coldcutcombo69 was removed because they were promoting AMC, but they had been doing this for days and were only removed a few hours ago.
ZJZ (a well known moderator) posted this today and was removed as a mod. The head mods also removed more mods, cutting the number of mods from from 62 mods to 37. Coldbutcombo69 was cut from the mod team at this time. It seems very suspicious to me that the head mods removed a bunch of mods from their positions after the events of today, especially because one of those ex-mods had been promoting AMC so much while being a mod.
Note: there is some kind of extended purge happening within the mod team right now. The mod team started at 62, then was cut with ZJZ to 37, then 36, now it's down to 35. EDIT: Two new mods have been added, bringing the count back up to 37. One of them tried posting something in a WSB thread, but their comment was deleted by the auto-mod because they have never posted in WSB before. Here is some proof of what's going on there.
ZJZ has exposed that there are bad actors on the mod team, using their power on the sub to try and make cash off movie deals and crypto scams. This at least adds weight to the points im raising in this thread.
EDIT: There was a thread on WSB by a moderator trying to explain what happened with the mod team. You can see that thread here. There is a lot of push back in the thread. The mod's claim is that the profit from the movie deal would have been given to charity. This may not be true, as Discord logs show another mod asking what their profit will be from the movie deal, asking "What's our cut.". Infighting with the mods seems to be a continued issue with a mod changing the subreddit description from the classic "like 4chan found a bloomberg terminal" to this. This change was instantly reverted.
MOD UPDATE 2/4: It seems that the moderator team has changed again. 23 mods now remain. OPINION_IS_UNPOPULAR is now listed as the most senior mod, and they have allowed this thread to stay up. The mod reports that the Reddit admins have stepped in.
Statement from Reddit admins, according to OPINION_IS_UNPOPULAR: "After reviewing this situation based on input from both current and past moderators, we have decided to remove several moderators at the top of the list that were creating instability in the community." Source.
NEW INFO: I've also been sent a good amount of evidence from multiple people indicating these types or coordinating buying and selling schemes were happening on places like Youtube, Twitch, and Discord. All of these groups seem to be composed of WSB/WSB spinoffs users. These users would spam hash tags, spam and raid Twitch channels, and coordinate these social media pushes with timed buying and selling of GME/AMC/BB/NOK. It is possible (and looks likely to me) that the timed pumps you see below were organized by a Discord group. I have collected a lot of evidence on this front, but this evidence of the real organizers of the pump is something I might have to pass along to someone who is more experienced at dealing with this stuff.
The AMC Pump
Here is evidence of the coordinated pump by users on WSB. The coordinated pump effort occurred in the daily thread, but also spilled out into some posts. Note: I have yet to see any comments/posts that moderators made showing them participating in the coordinated pump effort. It is not known if they knew about these comments or not.
"AMC 1 pm LET FUCKING GO" - WildPhoenix55 58 upvotes. Posted around 12:00 PM CST. Not removed as of 8:40 PM CST.
"AMC 2 DA MOON @ 1PM EST" - OutlandishnessOk4137 Posted around 12:00 PM CST. Not removed as of 8:40 PM CST.
"watching that 1pm movie"
At 1 PM, we’re going to the Moon! Get ready! 🚀 🚀 🚀Discussion *Note that this thread was 6 days ago. Still strange that it was not taken down
Comments in this thread talking about 1 PM pump
EVIDENCE THE 1 PM PUMP WORKED: 1 PM seems to be the main time that was set. You can actually see the coordinated pump spike the price of AMC up to $9.70 right after 1 PM. You can also see the massive amount of volume increase during that time as well. Volume between 1:00-1:05 shot up to 8,725,700. This was the highest volume for a 5 min period all day. Check it out here.
It was also reported to me that some users received DM's about the pump. If you are reading this and received any kind of DM like this, please message me. After seeing the first pump work successfully, they tried it again 1 hour later. Here are a swarm of comments made coordinating the pump for 2 PM.
"2 shares at 2 pm AMC!!" EDIT: This account has been deleted. You can view a picture of this post here.
"Everyone buy 2 shares of AMC and 2pm let’s rush these heggies 💎💎💎💎🚀🚀🚀" "AMC at 2 !!!!" "2 AMC shares @2pm rush" "AMC at 2. Let’s give them some payback🚀" "do i buy now or at 2" "Buy AMC at 2pm Eastern, 11am Pacific. 2pm is when it’s happening."
The 2PM coordinated pump was not as successful. It could be that some users were confused with the time differences. Either way, there was still a marked increase of volume during the 5 min period of 2:00-2:05 which also resulted in the stock re-testing its daily high. Check it out here.
You can actually watch a Youtuber Trey's Trades see the pump at 2 PM in action. He is reading comments on a WSB spin-off subreddit amcstock. You can see people spamming chat for people to buy at 2 PM. Here is the video. The fact that this guy's stream chat is filled with a pump-and-dump scheme and he did nothing about it is pretty telling.
I've backed up the comments and info here. If you find anything else suspicious about this, please DM me. I want to make it clear that there isn't evidence that the mods participated in the pump. But the pump-and-dump (which is illegal) happened under the watch of the mod team. They may have tried to stop it, but 8.5 million people is a lot. If they didn't think they could keep the place running without illegal things happening in the comment sections, they should have set the sub to private and put in proper pre-cautions first.
EDIT: This pump also occurred for GME and users in the GME thread were able to comment about it. None of these comments are removed and they exist in very large numbers. They are mostly heavily downvoted, but the fact they are able to stay up means the mods failed at their job.
Comment 1 Comment 2 Comment 3 Comment 4 Comment 5 Comment 6 Comment 7 Comment 8 Comment 9 Comment 10 Comment 11
The volume spikes do show an uptick in volume around 1PM and around 2PM, but they are not as strong as the AMC boost in volume. The volume during these times were high, but they weren't the highest points in the day for GME.
EDIT: I want to make it clear to people who are saying "those are just bot accounts." Bots are still controlled by humans. If bot spam cannot be caught and deleted, that means 8.5 million people are exposed to pump-and-dump schemes run by bots. It does not reflect any better on the mods if the comments are made by humans or made by bots controlled by humans. It is now a day later, and still none of the comments have been removed by a moderator or moderator bot.
UPDATE: Wall Street Bets has completely removed any post talking about ZJZ and his post about the head mods trying to engage in crypto scams and strange movie deals. (EDIT: This has changed, see above.) The rising sections is now completely filled low-effort, small text posts that are only pushing $GME. Here are those threads. Low-effort threads like these are explicitly against WSB rules. Why are mods letting rule-breaking, ticker spamming posts stay up?
Example 1 Example 2 Example 3 Example 4 Example 5 Example 6
WSB mods are banning users for mentioning ZJZ and his post. (EDIT: This has changed, see above.)
Mods Removing Negative GME Posts
I started digging into this when I posted to Wall Street Bets with a post containing some information about GME. The post pushed back against some of the "GME revolutiuon" talking points. It was a pretty tame post, meet all the guidelines for posting, and contained enough content to warrant staying up. The post was removed by the mods, but you can still see it up here. The content of the post was a combo of these two comments I made. This comment here and this comment here. Somebody in the comments recommended I make the contents of the comment into a separate post- which I did until it was removed.
The moderators removed this post, the removal states: "Moderators remove posts from feeds for a variety of reasons, including keeping communities safe, civil, and true to their purpose."
I sent a DM to the mods asking why exactly the post was removed. I have not been given a reply. Does the content of the post I made (pt.1 / pt.2) break any of their rules? Why would the mods remove a post containing that info?
Even worse, the exact contents of the post I made exist in comment form and are still up. If the info somehow breaks their rules, why leave it up in the comment section? Why haven't they removed the comments that contain the EXACT wording I used in my post?
It seems very strange to me that a post I made that contained some research to counter act the "GME Revolution" narrative would be singled out removal for "keeping communities safe, civil, and true to their purpose."
The front-page of Wall Street Bets is FILLED will positive memes and DD that supports GME. There is not a single negative post about GME on the entire front page that I can find. Why not leave up some negative DD and let the community downvote/upvote it?
The mods will let the comment section of threads get filled up with misinformation (GME SI being 226% is a common one that is easily debunked, yet is posted every 5 min in daily threads). People are gambling their life savings on outdated information yet when I make a post to push back against some of the common GME arguments, it gets removed.
Mods removing negative GME posts is unethical because WSB mods own GME shares.
jamsi is a mod on WSB. They left this comment: "I just received this e-mail from Robinhood. I am no longer using Robinhood for any of my purchases. Only keeping my $GME - not selling." Here is the comment.
Swedish_Chef_Bork_x3 is a mod on WSB. They left this comment: "Another $2k locked and loaded to buy in tomorrow. Feels like fucking Helm’s Deep in here. I have tomorrow off work, gonna get drunk and hope I don’t sleep through my alarm.". Here is the comment.
rawbdor is listed as a mod under the Moderators section of Wall Street Bets. rawbdor posted a comment saying: "The price is going to plummet hard no matter what we do. The real question is, will they be able to steal our shares in the process. They can drop the price all they want on low volume. But they'll never be able to buy it back unless you sell it to them."
A link to that comment is here.
This comment makes it pretty obvious that rawbdor owns some shares in GME, right? Saying things like our shares implies they own some.
ITradeBaconFutures is also listed as a mod. They made it clear that "Mods did not trade GME". You can find that comment here.
turdled is listed as a mod. They said, "We don't comment or promote trades. That's up to the subscribers and their upvotes/downvotes to decide." View it here.
One mod claims that mods don't trade GME, when its obvious from the three examples above that they did. Another says they don't comment or promote trades, which is also a lie. Other mods have been doing that. They also "promote" trades when they remove content that argues the other side of GME. If the only content they allow on the front-page is GME Positive content, they are promoting that content.
WSB has a mod team of 35 accounts moderating 8.5 million people. CNBC gets about 200k viewers at peak hours, while WSB has almost a million viewing it at a time when the market is open.
The mods could simply send me a DM and explain why my post was removed. They haven't. Market manipulation is bad. It's bad when investment firms do it and its bad when retail investors do it. The mods could DM me right now and say "Hey, here is the reason the post was removed." They haven't. If they do send me a DM, I will post an update here.
TL;DR
Now-former WSB mod ZJZ, in a removed & locked post, accused dormant top mods of coming back to siphon media coverage, potential movie rights, and springboard a cryptocurrency, while suppressing other mods
Coldcutcombo69, a moderator on WSB, was posting comments and threads promoting AMC. A coordinated AMC pump happened in the daily threads and comments that this moderator (and others) were tasked with moderating. This mod was removed as a moderator after this thread was posted. Coldcutcombo69 held AMC stock before the pump, but it is unclear if they held or sold that stock around or after the time of the coordinated pump.
Today, several users, but no mods, in a discussion thread attempted to push buys of AMC at 1 & 2 PM EST. Those times would later coincide with high volumes of stock trades for the day. Similar coordination was attempted by users (no mods) for GME.
WSB's front page is filled with only positive coverage of GME (here's a snapshot), while they removed my post containing negative GME DD with no legitimate reason given.
Mods are holding GME contradicting another high level mod's comment that "mods did not trade $GME". Mods made a false statement that they don't promote stocks, as one of them clearly did. You can also see the other mods comments about GME as also promoting stock.
Tervia's comment here has good info on Reddit moderation.

PSA for new Dogecoin / Crypto buyers

Some points to newcomers after reading some frightening comments over in dogecoin:
·If you don't hold the keys to the crypto, you don't own the crypto. If you can't even withdraw the crypto, you definitely don't own the crypto. RH doesn't sell crypto, period. They sell supposed unwithdrawable custodian rights to crypto, and we are hopefully now all aware that RH is full of crap.
·Setting price targets like that of Bitcoin (30k or whatever) is completely nonsensical. Bitcoin has 18M coins out of 21M total possible mined coins. Dogecoin has 128B coins right now, thats 7100x as many. DOGE also doesnt haven't a hard cap due to regularly halving rewards, so its not deflationary in the way BTC is. It would need a market cap of $4Quadrillion to hit Bitcoin levels. In other words, bigger than all equity markets combined afaik. Dollar cost average (DCA) sells on the way up unless you want to drop off the cliff of euphoria into a 50-90% loss like Jan 2018 for a lot of people here. Its already x8 in a week. Bull runs rarely take coins more than x20 or so in a single major rally, and rallies are normally spaced a couple of years or so apart.
·Don't chase rallies. Buying significant positions after a 800% rally is a good way to be left holding bags. You should be DCAing buys, not throwing all of your savings at it at once. Its also pretty stupid to be all-in on a 9B mcap coin. That's high risk gambling if you're dropping most of your assets into it. It will legitimately most likely throw you into a year or two long depression if you lose half of your savings on Fing Dogecoin.
·Crypto should not be a significant part of your investments. If you're throwing most of your assets in this, and especially at one coin at the end of a major rally, you're not only placing yourself at an insane amount of risk, but you put steady growth of the asset at risk when you inevitably panic sell once the momentum runs out or a big seller enters the market. Everyone in crypto has done this to some degree. Its easy to say diamond hands all you want, and convince a thousand other sardines to buy in, and then have a whale decide they want to sell $200M worth over the next month who doesnt give a shit how it effects you. People have their own motives, and most whales probably aren't on Reddit. The people posting six figure holdings aren't remotely close to whale territory. There's 15 addresses with more than 1 Billion DOGE, and more than 100 with over 100 Million DOGE. Those people could potentially wipe out a rally solo.
·Diversify your bonds. Have other investment vehicles, AND other coins. My favorite analogy is that of a castle. You want to build your castle with stable assets, this is your emergency cash fund, index/mutual funds, maybe some large cap stocks, real estate, bonds. That should comprise at least 50%, ideally 80-90%, of your assets. Speculative investments are the raiding party that you send out to loot shit once the castle is built. That's riskier stocks, options, cryptocurrency, etc. Yes, its possible to get lucky if you're solely doing speculative gambling, but its fucking reckless and stupid, and for every DeepFuckingValue, theres 20 people posting loss porn about how they took out a loan for a crypto/options play and got destroyed. It's rolling around with a small army with no defensive position. Really easy to get annihilated by shifting tides in the market, particularly when its all in ONE position.
·Time in the market > timing the market. Quit trying to get rich in 3 weeks, or you'll end up constantly desperate for get rich quick schemes because you never bothered to build a stable base. Having a large emergency fund, and a significant amount of assets because you played it safe is a peace of mind that you cannot know until you have it. Don't throw away the possibility of that in a few years because you wanted to YOLO into Doge and be rich next month.
·The diamond hand thing is really...unconvincing, in case you're wondering. If you're trying that hard to convince yourself and others that you can hang on, you won't. Because anyone who's trying to convince themselves of it is clearly not used to having investments go +100-2000%, especially at the speed that crypto does it, so you won't have any instinct for when to take profits. Greed will set in, and you'll convince yourself that it can survive any correction, and you'll still be waiting for the quick recovery once it drops 60-80% and sits there for 2 years. People who do well in this market have limited exposure, and thus can basically forget about their coins for months or years, because they have other investments and secure finances whether crypto does anything or goes to 0. Euphoria and blind optimism doesn't keep someone holding until something goes x100+. Indifference, apathy, and patience are the more frequent catalysts, because you arent checking Blockfolio every 20 minutes and goading yourself into a panic sell when it corrects hard or crashes. Living in an emotional state thats constantly tied to whether the market is red or green blows. Most of us in crypto experienced at least a little of that in our first year or so. In a away, its exciting because the risk doesn't let you focus on anything else, but its a horrific way to live. The mania eventually gives way into broke disillusionment if you don't have at least a partial exit strategy.
Good luck and be safe. I'm sure this sub would really prefer not having to sticky the suicide hotline number again
Edit: please take note of ajaxhacker who has posted numerous comments to this thread spamming amc, nok, gme. This is shilling 101. "We the people have spoken"...lmao. Okay buddy. If the people had actually spoken it would involve financial regulation, not trying to make a quick buck. You think we haven't seen this crap before? People were doing this nonstop in 2017 with crypto. Your know what happened? Whales gobbled up everyone, a few shrimp got minted into sharks, but mostly...the rich got richer. Institutions will happily take profits off these before all retail investors have the opportunity to. Who, once again, don't give a shit about "holding the line with their diamond hands" and you losing money, because they've been holding since fall of last year and are already +10s of millions or whatever. Don't be naive and don't get stuck holding bags. This type of sentiment is your worst enemy in trading and is one of the earliest and most painful lessons in speculative markets. These are the whales Im talking about:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-27/reddit-day-trader-army-fattens-fortunes-of-world-s-super-rich

The next BTC crash could be something to behold

Also on my blog with better formatting, cute footnotes and inlined images.
Note that not much here is new material, mostly rehashing existing points.

Disclaimer

This article started out as research for my betting against Bitcoin on the stock market. This isn't financial advice. As a matter of fact, I encourage all readers you to not buy or short crypto, through any market or derivative. Use your money for productive uses.
Here's a TL;DR:

The current parabolic price increase in Bitcoin is a bubble that has started popping.
A stablecoin called Tether is either one of the largest frauds or money laundering operation in history, and is providing most of the liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
A BTC bubble pop, incoming regulation on stablecoins or the current NYAG investigation into tether will expose tether's insolvency to the crypto market. This is bigger than it sounds.
(Speculative, but one can hope) Current prices to mine BTC could end up higher than BTC market price, exposing BTC to a 51% attack.

A Recap: Bitcoin is useless and should go away

Bitcoin serves no purpose. Let's just rehash that by quickly debunking the major claimed uses over time as seen here

Proof of concept: No argument here, but now that the market cap of cryptocurrencies is closing in on a $700B, this seems moot.
Cheap Payment Network: Nonsense, since BTC transactions are currently >$10 and this worsens the more people use it.
Anonymous Darknet Currency: I'd have said "no argument here", but apparently it's surprisingly easy to trace BTC nowadays. However, crypto ecosystem as a whole seems to do a decent job at laundering money as we'll see later.
Reserve Currency for Crypto: Since a reserve currency should be useful as a means of exchange, and I wrote several thousand words on how BTC is not that, my position is pretty clear. Also, the fact that a cryptocurrency indexed to the US dollar has trounced BTC as the main means of exchange in the crypto ecosystem speaks for itself.
Programmable Shared Database: You know what's programmable, shared and a database? The database we use at work. Just learn to implement access control lists on your SQL server.
Uncorrelated Financial Asset: Given BTC crashed just like the rest of the market when COVID showed up, this doesn't hold up

The stupidest version of the "uncorrelated asset" argument I hear is "Bitcoin is a great hedge for inflation!"
You know what's a good "hedge for inflation"? Literally anything. The definition of inflation is "the price of money". If the price of money goes down (inflation) then everything else has a positive return by comparison.
People who say "bitcoin is a good hedge for inflation" shouldn't be trusted to manage their own money, let alone give financial advice to anyone.

Censorship Resistant e-Gold: This is a roundabout way of saying "BTC is a store of value"! Which, again, can only be said by people who've never read the definition of "store of value" in a textbook.

I already went into detail into this, but BTC is a terrible store of value because it's volatile. Assets that can lose 20% of value overnight don't "store value". BTC is a "vehicle for speculation".
The only way price is sustained for BTC is that you can find some other idiot to sell it to. Just as a reminder, 50% of Gold is used for things that aren't speculation, like Jewelry, so you'll never have to worry finding a seller there.
Here are some real uses for bitcoin:

Gambling is fun. You buy BTC, the price might go up! Or down! This is exciting.
Hackers, money launderers and other criminals certainly find cryptocurrencies useful.

Reminder: BTC is an ecological scourge
The current cost to mine a BTC is around $8000 in electricity. This electricity mostly comes from subsidized coal in China.
And given the current amount of BTC generated each day, we're using about equivalent to the electricity from all of Belgium, largely in coal, to keep this going.
I don't mind wasting time on intellectual curiosities, but destroying our planet for glorified gambling is not something I'm happy about. I want cryptocurrencies to go away entirely on this basis, philosophically.

Current BTC prices are a bubble

Before we go into tether, reminder that at the time of writing, the plot of BTC price against the S&P500 looks like this
BTC price has increased by ~800% since March. Still, no one uses it for anything useful since the last bubble in 2017, or the other one before that in 2013. This is another bubble however you put it.
BTC is not "new technology"
10 years the internet became popular, Google and Amazon already existed. We're 8 years after the popular emergence of deep learning and it has already revolutionized machine translation, computer vision and natural language processing in general.
You could argue that deep learning and the internet existed before their emergence, but so did cryptocurrencies. Look up b-money and hashcash for instance.
Bitcoin has existed since 2008 and emerged in popularity around the same time as deep learning did, yet we're still to find actual uses for it except speculation and criminal uses. It's a solution waiting for a problem.
Institutional investors are also idiots
The narrative this time is that "institutional investors" are buying into BTC. This doesn't mean it's not a bubble.
Many of the institutions were buying through Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. Rather, many of them were chasing the premium over net asset value that hovered around 20%. Basically, lock money in GBTC for 6 months, cash out and collect the premium as profit. Of course, this little Ponzi couldn't last forever and the premium seems to be evaporating now.
Similarly, totally-not-a-bitcoin-ETF-wearing-a-software-company-skinsuit Microstrategy (MSTR) trades at a massive premium over fundamentals.
There will always be traders chasing bonuses from numbers going up, regardless what is making the number going up. The same "institutional investors" were buying obviously terrible CDOs in the run-up to 2008.

Tether is lunacy

Tether is a cryptocurrency whose exchange rate is supposed to be pegged to the US Dollar. Initially this was done by having 1-to-1 US Dollar reserves for each tether issued. Then they got scammed by their money launderer, losing some $800M, which made them insolvent.
Anyway, now tether maintains their reserves are whatever they want them to be and they haven't gotten audited since 2017.
You know, normal stuff.
There's a problem to backing your USD-pegged security with something that isn't US Dollars. Namely, if the price of the thing you're backing your US Dollars against goes down, you're now insolvent. If you were backing $10B in tether with $10B of bitcoin, then the bitcoin drops by half, you're insolvent by $5B.
And then this spotlessly clean company they somehow added $20B to their balance sheet in the second half of 2020
Reminder: one side of that balance sheet is currently floating around the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Cryptocurrency traders own it as an asset and sell it to others. The other half of the balance sheet is whatever tether wants.
There are only two possibilities that explain tether's growth:

Massive unbacked issuances, because they're afraid their scam has run its course.
Money laundering. Lots of it.

It could also be a happy mix of both.
One particularly interesting date is 30/8/2020, where tether added $3B to its balance sheet overnight. This is interesting because it predates the subsequent movement in bitcoin price and large movements in other cryptocurrencies.
The story from tether and tether's bank's CEO is that this money largely comes from foreign nationals through an OTC desk which implies the transaction goes as following:

A foreign national sends money in a foreign currency to an OTC desk. This is exactly as clean as you'd think -- often raw cash transactions in the millions.
That OTC desk converts the money to USD and sends it to tether's correspondent US bank. The OTC desk gives tether to the foreign national.
Wait tether has a correspondent US bank?

Oh, I forgot to mention, no bank wants tether as a customer because they obviously break KYC/AML compliance. So tether first ~~bought~~ invested in a bank called Noble which then lost its relationship with Wells-Fargo when they realized tether were lying to them about AML. Poor tether lost its legal access to USD.
Tether has been banking in the Bahamas with a bank called Deltec since. First they had a money launderer called Crypto Capital Corp to send funds to customers, who stole the $800M from them and subsequently went to jail.
But worry not! Tether found a way to get banked in USD afterwards. Curious coincidence, an executive at Deltec was randomly blogging about buying small US community banks in 2018. You know, that thing money launderers do.
So tether's story is that in 2020, they took in roughly twenty billion USD of shady foreign money into the small community US bank their deltec bankers bought. These transactions are necessarily breaking KYC/AML. The foreign parties to those transactions wouldn't take such a rickety route to convert billions into cryptocurrencies if they weren't laughed out of the room in serious banks.
But of course, Deltec will say it did KYC on tether. Really solid KYC, clearly, since they're the last bank on earth taking tether's business. Tether says they do KYC on their customers (the large OTC desks). And I'm sure the OTC desks would be shocked, shocked if the cash money they get in Russia and China turns out to be dirty. So everyone can pass the buck of responsibility down the road and claim "We do KYC on our customers".
Sure you do, tether. If you did such great KYC, you wouldn't have such problems finding banking relationships. I mean when even HSBC is not doing business with you you're apparently more obviously moving criminal money than fucking drug cartels.
And, according to tether's people, this money is what's backing tether's reserves. Money that will get frozen the instant a prosecutor even looks at it.
Reminder: the above is the charitable, positive case for tether.
The less charitable case is that they took crayons and added zeros to their balance sheet, and that there's a couple billions waiting to burn a hole in the crypto ecosystem.
Anyway, the $25B garbage fire that is tether will make a great book/netflix series at some point and their hilariously stupid CTO going on podcasts while flinching on questions about how BTC ended up on their balance sheet will be a fun part of it.
But I'm not here to write a book, I'm here to make money by shorting all of this. For my purposes, even in the positive case tether is a ticking time bomb waiting to burn a hole in the crypto ecosystem, because...

KYC and AML are coming for cryptocurrencies

If you listen to "crypto news", all incoming crypto regulation is just great, because that means crypto is becoming legit. However, companies investing in crypto are very angry about them.
This is because crypto transactions break the FinCEN travel rule, where KYC information should "travel" along transactions, to prevent money laundering obfuscation schemes.
Of course, according to the crypto industry this is "stifling innovation". A more reasonable take is that by being leaving the crypto industry outside normal financial regulations, we're enabling a "race to the bottom". As we saw with shadow banks in the 2000-2007 era this leads to "creative banking". I don't want my bankers to be creative, I want them to be solvent.

Tether's effect on the crypto ecosystem

When tether implodes, it's taking most of the crypto industry along for a fun ride. Tether can implode in one of a few ways:

A BTC price crash triggers it. If
Regulators decide they've had enough of AML avoidance and regulate them.
The NYAG investigation, which is waiting for an update in a few weeks, finds something and shuts them out.

Let's assume tether falls to $0 for simplicity. The analysis is the same directionally if tether significantly "breaks the buck".
This doesn't happen instantly, but it happens quickly. The peg breaks, and most people holding tether will try to sell it for other crypto (BTC, ETH, etc.). This puts downward pressure on the price of tether, incentivizing even more people to "pass the buck". Automated inter-exchange arbitrage bots might try to exploit emerging gaps in bid-ask spreads, only to end up with worthless tether instead, as their operators rush to pull the plug.
Then, we have a small village of cryptocurrency enthusiasts being out some $24B. With the trading bots turned off and the trading lubricant (a dollar pegged asset) gone, the bid-ask spreads blow up. You get a predictable flight to safety -- that is, to real money. This puts downward pressure on BTC.
While all of this is happening, there are all sorts of fun second-order effects happen. A lot of DeFi derivative products are priced in cryptocurrencies, so having normally stable prices shuffle around (eg. USDC price moving above $1 in a flight to safety) triggers a tsunami of margin calls. Some exchanges might insolvent (they're the ones redeeming tether for USD after all).

If BTC price drops below $8000, fun things happen

Currently, the price to mine a BTC is roughly $8000. Most of the mining comes from huge mining farms using subsidized coal in China, and mining costs more the more hardware there is to mine it.
Since the price of BTC hasn't substantially dropped below cost to mine we're in for a fun experiment if the price drops below this threshold. Most of these farms should turn off so that the price to mine comes back to breakeven in a case of prisoner's dilemma.
But if too much hardware turns off, this leaves mining hardware idle and the door becomes wide open to a 51% attack. It's not clear at what price below breakeven cost to mine a 51% attack becomes a serious threat, but once this threshold is crossed, we're in the "irreparable harm to BTC" risk zone.
And for a person like me, who just wants to see crypto disappear forever this is very exciting.
Maybe those mining farms could be replaced with nice forests soaking up all the carbon they emitted for posterity. One can hope.

How do I bet against all of this?

Microstrategy (MSTR) is, at this point, a bitcoin ETF wearing the skinsuit of a dying software company.
Michael Saylor, MSTR's CEO, is quite the character. I wrote a lot about his lack understanding of what a currency is, but it's on another level to look at the early stages of a bubble pop and decide this is a good time to buy $10M more of the stuff, as seen here
However, this bubble is tame by Michael's standards. Look at the historical stock of his company
What's happening on the left is that Saylor pumped the numbers with accounting fraud then the SEC took issue with the fake numbers. The stock dropped 90% practically overnight. Their accountants, PWC, paid $51M in fines. Saylor and friends paid fines, partly with company stock.
You could also short GBTC, but when Mr. Saylor provides you with an options market instead, why not use it? Shorting on crypto exchanges that might become insolvent in the very event you want to happen with this bet is a bad idea, on the other hand.

Mike can't cash out

The bitcoin market is illiquid and leveraged when it comes to real money coming in and leaving the ecosystem. Buys in the $10M-$100M seemingly move the price of BTC by upwards of $1000 in the last weeks. This means hundreds of millions of real money means tens of billions in movement in BTC market capitalization.
Now imagine what cashing $1.1B of BTC into real money would mean for the price. And this is purely in market terms, before the PR damage from bitcoin's demigod abandoning ship would have second-order effects.
Saylor has painted himself into a corner. Even if he wanted to cash out, he can't.

MSTR fundamentals: Why it should be valued below $10

In early 2020, MSTR was a slowly dying business. The EBITDA has been rapidly evaporating in the last 5 years
At that point, MSTR a stock price of $115 meaning a market cap of $1.1B. This included some $560M of cash they were sitting on. I presume the remaining $550M was an implicit sales premium for the inevitable private equity firm investors expected was going to relieve them of this stock and make the business profitable again.
Of course, they didn't sell.
Instead, they took the $560m they were sitting on and bought $400m of BTC at prices $11k and $13k in late summer 2020. Then, in early December, they took on $600m of debt to buy BTC with at $23k. They also bought $10m more in January at a price of $30.5k.
At this point, we can mostly value MSTR like a trust.

Price the underlying software business as being worth $600M, as the market did before the bitcoin nonsense. If BTC went to $0, this is what we'd value it at, and the MSTR stock should be around $65.
But wait! MSTR took on $650M in debt in December. Their actual value with a BTC priced at $0 should be much, much lower than $65 depending on how you value the debt. You could make an argument it should be in the single digits.
They hold 70,784 BTC. At current prices ($32,000) this is worth roughly $2.2B. With the current market cap of MSTR ($577 stock price), this means MSTR is currently priced at an eye watering $3B premium over fundamental value.

GBTC's 20% premium-to-NAV is a joke compared to the MSTR premium.

Is BigToken one of the most undervalued penny stocks in the market?

I want to thank everyone else who takes the time to write out thoughtful and truthful DD’s, this shit is like writing a college final research paper the night before it's due.
It’s a little scary to think your reddit post could influence someone to spend, and potentially lose, money on a stock just by taking your word and not researching on their own, so this post is definitely not advice and I am definitely not a financial advisor. This is simply a think piece that is open for discussion.
I’ll link all sources to my information below.
You may not have heard of BigToken. I barely noticed it’s vague ticker $FPVD as I was scrolling through the TSNP Stocktwits feed, wondering how TSNP blew up. A fashion tile company? Oh wait no, an app named HUMBL that hasn’t been released yet, something about blockchains, a ticker change and reverse mergers… I never really took an interest in it and thought it seemed suspiciously pumpy as it saw gains from $0.16 - $1.70 in one month, but like it or not the retail investors had made a statement. I am neither bullish nor bearish about TSNP, however as pointed out by an author at SeekingAlpha the blind enthusiasm of some fans was reminiscent of the electrolyte scene in the movie Idiocracy (TSNP’s electrolyte = blockchain).

Attorney General: Brawndo's got what plants crave. Secretary of Energy: Yeah, it's got electrolytes. Joe: What are electrolytes? Do you even know? Secretary of State: It's what they use to make Brawndo. Joe: Yeah, but why do they use them to make Brawndo? Secretary of Defense: 'Cause Brawndo's got electrolytes.

Truth be told I have a vague familiarity with things like cryptocurrency, blockchains, and crypto wallets, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that crypto is the future. It’s legitimacy is evolving by the day - for example just 5 days ago Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin and is now accepting it as a form of payment.
While I was mindlessly swiping the TSNP feed a few days ago, I noticed this ticker being cross posted: $FPVD. I almost disregarded it at first, the ticker letters did not stand out on the feed and I’m wary of what is posted on there. When I finally did decide to click on it, the company’s name was Force Protection Video Equipment Corp but the comments were flooded with information about a reverse merger with BigToken and parent company SRAX Inc.
BigToken is a 4-star rated passive income app on the AppStore. Essentially, “BigToken is the app to own and sell your own data.” Data privacy has become a hot button issue in the age of Facebook and Google watching and selling your every move, we all know the warning “if the service is free, you are the product.”
And that’s true with BigToken too. We are the product and have always been the product, but at least here’s an opportunity to get paid for it. You choose to give permission about what data to submit via options like surveys and questionnaires, linking your social media, enabling location, and then this data is then sold to advertisers. BigToken has an established clientele list with a 100% retention rate. The results of a case study for their client Kraft may give you a glimpse into how their business works:
Case Study: Kraft Heinz Instant Pot Meals at Publix

Result: BIGtoken closed the loop, utilizing the platform and panels to measure campaign effectiveness. ●This campaign had the highest recall rate of all channels, outperforming in-store tactics as well as digital offer tactics like Shopkick. ●45% of reported Instant Pot Meal Kit purchases at Publix. ●84% of shoppers who saw BIGtoken’s ads said they did or were likely to purchase an Instant Pot Frozen Meal Kit at Publix. ●Social media had the greatest advertising recall, reporting a total of 16K+ likes, comments, and shares, plus 21K+ clicks to Publix.com. In addition, it exceeded the total impressions goal by 17%. ●BIGtoken’s proprietary panels were leveraged to create insights, audiences and data that Kraft Heinz will use to drive future sales

Okay, so let’s recap. BigToken, a previously privately owned subsidiary of SRAX Inc. with 16 million app users has chosen to become public by way of reverse merger, acquiring the shell share structure of FPVD, and in the process has avoided going through an expensive and time consuming Initial Public Offering (IPO). They are in the AppStore, the reverse merger has been completed and they pay users via PayPal or gift cards for their data. They are currently under the ticker of $FPVD, and are releasing their 8-K any day now with a ticker change on the way.
Great. All of this is fine and dandy, but I wasn’t really convinced to invest until I researched their CEO Lou Kerner.
Lou, a crypto and data privacy advocate, former Wall Street analyst, angel investor and businessman, lurks Reddit. So if you’re reading this Lou, my mom says hi.
He has written thoughtful articles about GME and WallStreetBets, cryptocurrency, and the stock bubble we are currently in. By a combination of chance and tragedy (the CEO before him sadly passed away), he was announced as BigToken’s new CEO on January 24th, 2021.
If you read his article, 5 Reasons Why I’m Joining BigToken as CEO, you are hearing from him directly. It’s an illuminating piece about the direction of this app. Until now, BigToken has only paid customers via Paypal or with giftcards. Lou is here to take this app from crypto-adjacent, to crypto-centric. His ideas are to provide users with the option to be paid in crypto, in addition to providing a digital wallet meaning the app could expand exponentially. He has mentioned it would be at little to no cost to create BigToken’s own stablecoin. If someone like me who is crypto-clueless can see the massive amount of potential in this app, I would love to hear from someone who really knows what they are talking about. If TSNP/HUMBL has value at $1.40 a share without having an app, why would that not be out of the realm of possibility for BigToken?
The Cons: * Penny stocks are inherently volatile. * The market has a mind of its own and everything is a gamble. * The share structure BigToken inherited from FPVD is not the prettiest. Take a look at the SEC filings - as of yet the 8-K has not been released so whether there will be a s is a big concern. * With promising penny stocks come pump & dumpers. * The app could flop.
The Pros:
You can make passive income on this app. If you used that money to buy a few shares of BigToken, your money can make it’s own money and you could be tumbling blissfully away in a money making washing machine. If and when the stock market bubble pops, this doesn’t seem like a bad investment to hold.

With 16 million users across 30 countries, BigToken has generated 2.2 million in revenue in their first full year as an app (2020), and is only set to grow with a projected revenue of $400 million in 2022.
Cryptocurrency is trending and the deep value is being recognized.
The release of the 8-K and ticker name change have not yet happened, and relatively speaking BigToken is still under the radar.
Gig data and business analytics solutions is a booming business, one that is projected to reach $260 billion globally by next year.
The cryptocurrency market was valued at USD 1.03 billion by 2019 and is projected to reach USD 1.40 billion in 2024

Shares of $FPVD are $0.054 at this time of writing.
Articles by Lou
Lou’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/loukerner
(5 Reasons Why I’m Joining BigToken as CEO) https://medium.com/quantum-economics/the-5-reasons-im-joining-bigtoken-as-ceo-6f216c1f1020
(The Robinhood Debacle Lesson: The Way Forward is Rules Without Rulers) https://medium.com/quantum-economics/the-robinhood-debacle-lesson-the-way-forward-is-rules-without-rulers-69ff9a9d5c2e
(Top 10 Reasons People Can’t See The Crypto Light) https://medium.com/quantum-economics/the-top-10-reasons-people-cant-see-the-crypto-light-ffcb8317b80a
Sources:
(Revisiting TSNP/HUMBL - It’s Got Electrolytes) https://seekingalpha.com/article/4404398-revisiting-tesoro-humbl-got-electrolytes
(Tesla Buys 1.5 Billion in Bitcoin) https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/tesla-buys-1point5-billion-in-bitcoin.html
(BigToken’s Website) https://bigtoken.com/
(How BigToken Works) https://bigtoken.com/how-big-works/
(BigToken Announces Closing of Share Agreement with Force Protection Video Equipment Corp.) https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210127005621/en/BIGToken-Announces-Closing-of-Share-Exchange-Agreement-with-Force-Protection-Video-Equipment-Corporation
(Major Director Change Statement FPVD SEC Filing) https://sec.report/Document/0001640334-20-002751/
(Kraft Case Study) https://s3.amazonaws.com/bigtokenresearch-prod-wp-media-s3/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/08203300/Case-Study_-Kraft-Heinz-Instant-Pot-Meals-at-Publix.pdf
(Cryptocurrency Market Estimate) https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/cryptocurrency-market-158061641.html
(Gig data and business analytics solutions estimate) https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/censorship-and-data-the-stakes-and-consequences-are-getting-serious-301215887.html
(SRAX Offers Valuable Consumer Insights in Shifting Covid-19 Era with BigToken Data Driven Platform) https://www.networknewswire.com/srax-inc-nasdaq-srax-offers-valuable-consumer-insights-in-shifting-covid-19-era-with-bigtoken-data-driven-platform/
Disclaimer: This post is an opinion piece and should not be taken as advice. The author (me) has a position of 35k shares in FPVD entered at variations of .03, .04 and .05 Edit: Formatting Edit: Added projected revenue for BigToken and updated # of app users

Guide to mining for noobs part 2: Because I couldn't be bothered to write the hardware guide first.

Ethereum Mining Guide Part 2

Step 1: Is your GPU Profitable?
Check https://whattomine.com/gpus and find your GPU on the list. If you are planning to purchase more GPUs exclusively for mining, then check the calculator at https://www.mycryptobuddy.com/EthereumMiningCalculator for a model that allows you to factor in difficulty increases and price decreases. In general, mining calculators can only make a prediction that is good as the information that you give it. You can see that it asks you to predict the price of Ethereum, so these become highly unreliable for long-term predictions.

Step 2: Set up a wallet.
Good, now that you know that you’re not going to be wasting your money on electricity. Going forward, you will need somewhere to keep all the Ethereum that you mine. I’ve linked some of the more popular wallets below. You can also consider a hardware wallet as a more secure option.

Do not share your seed phrases. Do not store your seed phrases in a computer. Do not share your seed phrases with a website. Do not share them in a box. Do not share them with a fox. Do not share them in a house. Do not share them with a mouse.
Cryptocurrency involves you taking responsibility for protecting your own money, so don't muck it up.

Step 3: Pick a miner.
Fantastic, you have a wallet set up. Now you need to install the actual mining software. You have 2 main options for mining software if you use Nvidia cards. I’ve linked them below with their pros and cons. I don’t have experience with AMD cards, but I’ve heard that lolminer and Teamredminer are both good. Remember to only download miners from the actual bitcointalk forum posts.
T-Rex miner:https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4432704.0

Pros: Did not suffer from the overclocked DAG bug.
Cons: 1% devfee

Phoenix Miner: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2647654.0

Pros: .65% devfee
Cons: Had a bug which caused DAGs generated while overclocked to cause 100% invalid shares

Step 4: Pick a pool.
So you have a wallet and downloaded your miner. Now it’s time to actually get to mining. For most small miners the likelihood of finding a block on your own is so low that it would take years for you to get lucky. Thankfully, people have come up with a solution. Miners pool their efforts in order to get more blocks and split the profits which means that they don’t have to gamble on getting a block. You can find a list of mining pools at https://miningpoolstats.stream/ethereum. If you are interested in becoming politically involved in the Ethereum community, then you can select from the list at https://stopeip1559.org/. EIP-1559 is a proposed change that would cut miner revenues.
There are 3 main factors in selecting a pool: Fees, Payouts, Payment Scheme.
The most straightforward are fees. The higher they are, the less you earn.
Payouts are a bit more complex. You have two main types of pools. Pools that pay for transaction fees on payouts and pools that don’t. Pools that pay for the transaction fees earn ~2% less than other pools because their blocks contain their payouts instead of actual transactions. Pools that don't pay the transaction fees require you to set higher payouts to have payouts with +98% efficiency and beat other pools.
Finally, you have the payment schemes. There are a lot of them, but here are a few of the biggest.

PPS: Every share submitted by miners is paid an amount of Ethereum determined by the pool. This does not typically payout on transaction fees which currently make up a significant portion of blocks.
PPLNS: When a block is found, miners are paid based on what proportion of the last N shares they submitted. Over time, this should average out as if you were mining solo.
PPS+: Like PPS, but miners are paid an additional amount determined by the pool to compensate for transaction fees.

Step 5: Create your bat file.
Inside the zip file that you downloaded there should be several .bat files. I’ve created an example .bat file for t-rex miner below. Follow its model in order to create your own.

[INSERT FILEPATH]\t-rex.exe -a ethash -o stratum+[PROTOCOL]://[POOL ADDRESS]:[PORT] -u [WALLET ADDRESS] -p x --coin Ethash
Pause

[INSERT FILEPATH] - Copy and paste the filepath for the folder that your miner is in.
[PROTOCOL]- This is the protocol you are using to connect to a pool. i.e: tcp vs ssl.
[POOL ADDRESS]:[PORT] - Copy and paste the address and port listed on the website of the pool you selected.
[WALLET ADDRESS] - Copy and paste the public address of the wallet created in step 2.

Step 6: Pick an exchange.
Fantastic, you have a wallet, your miner is set up, and you have pointed it at a pool and have received your first payout. Your last question should be: “How do I get fiat?” To do that, you need to pick an exchange where you can sell your Ethereum. I have linked three of the main U.S. exchanges below with a short list of pros and cons.
Coinbase Pro: https://pro.coinbase.com/

Pros: No withdrawal fee.
Cons: Highest make/ taker fee. Terrible support and controversy with locking accounts with large amounts of cryptocurrency on the platform.

Gemini Activetrader: https://www.gemini.com/

Pros: No USD withdrawal fee
Con: Medium maketaker fees for converting from Ethereum to USD

Kraken: https://www.kraken.com/

Pros: Lowest maketaker fees
Con: Flat USD withdrawal fee.

That’s it. You’re done. Enjoy your money.

Extra credit: Overclocking to save your GPUs.
If you want your GPU to do it’s best work, then you will need to overclock it’s memory and undervolt it. To do this, download MSI afterburner, then follow these steps.

Underclock your core clock as much as possible to reduce the power usage.
Set your memory overclock to half of it’s maximum overclock (usually 750).
If this overclock is stable and has improved hashrate, then add half of the previous memory clock adjustment (ie:375)
1. If it isn’t stable. Reduce it by half of the previous memory clock adjustment.
Repeat step 3 until you no longer see any performance increases
Lower your power limit by 10% and check to see if it causes your hashrate to decrease.
If your hashrate decreases by more than 2%, then return your power to the previous level.
Repeat step 7 until you’ve reached the highest efficiency
If your card is running above 70*, Increase your fan curve to extend the life of your card.

Disclosures: I currently use metamask, and trex miner to mine on flexpool, and I exchange on coinbase pro. Please do your own research and determine which of these is the best for you.

Why Dogecoin to $1 is Only a Matter of Time

Why Dogecoin to $1 is Only a Matter of Time

The Bubble
It’s February of 2021, and let’s be completely honest: We’re in a bubble. It’s kind of like 1999 but not the same. In 1999, interest rates were much higher. Today, they are nearly zero. In some countries, they are even negative. From a long-term perspective, this is very bad.
The Federal Reserve is completely to blame for this. Their policies are entirely reckless, and officials refuse to acknowledge what is going on here. The Coronavirus hysteria caused by the media and enabled by officials made the crash last summer the worst man-made disaster in the history of our financial system. The Great Depression was caused by over-speculation and a lack of regulation in an emerging financial system. The Great Recession was caused by greed and fraud (strangely, no one is in jail for this). This market collapse was caused by elected officials and the fed, who got trigger-happy and cut rates to zero back in the spring of 2020.
Whatever we wind up calling the burst of this bubble is to be determined. It will, however, be entirely manmade because the fed refuses to acknowledge the speculative behavior currently going on in SPACs, Cryptos, Penny Stocks, and anything else that serves as a legal Ponzi scheme for inflating the bubble. Even real, dividend-paying stocks have gotten way overvalued in some sectors. Also, since the fed has no plans of raising rates within the next two years (so they say for now, at least), if you’re searching for yield, you have nowhere else to look than the equities markets or one of these legalized forms of Ponzi schemes. It’s extremely unfair to conservative or retired investors looking for an honest return on their savings. This all is actually why it is a great time to look at Dogecoin, as I will get to in a moment. So long as rates are near zero, the bubble will continue to go on for longer and longer. And while it continues, people will constantly look for the next big thing.
For How Long?
Now, this may sound all doom and gloom, but that’s not my point. One day the bubble will burst, but I’m not making a prediction of when that will happen. Anyone making up dates for when the bubble will burst is either clueless or a con artist. No one knows when this bubble will burst. It could be weeks, months, or even years. One thing is for sure, the bubble will not burst just because things are overvalued. That’s not how bubbles work.
There needs to be a catalyst to burst the bubble. A major military conflict. An unexpected move or comment by the fed (raising rates, calling out the bubble for what it is, etc.). Another nationwide lockdown. I can go on with examples, but a little selloff here and there (August 2020) that causes the financial media to lose its mind is not enough. Just because you claim the bubble is bursting isn’t enough either. If you follow the media, you will get burned over and over again. That’s how it works. They want you to go to their sponsors for help, and once they burn you (sell you gold, overcharge you for poor investments, etc), you’ll come back to them hoping to figure things out. It’s a shell game. When the bubble burst, it will happen extremely fast and unexpectedly. There’s nothing wrong with playing the bubble, but you need to be mindful of when it ends because once the music stops, there will be a mad rush for the exits. You don’t want to be stuck holding the bag because everything will get crushed when the bubble burst. Even the blue-chip stocks that pay solid dividends will get hammered.
Fundamentals Don’t Matter (For Now)
In this bubble environment, fundamentals don’t make sense and, quite frankly, they don’t matter. You can argue back and forth all day long about whether something has a practical future or whether something is overvalued. I’m not here to do that about Dogecoin, Bitcoin, or any other crypto. The same could be said about Penny Stocks right now. (Hint: virtually all of these companies are way overvalued). You can find tons of articles of that nature, and I’m not likely to change your preconceived notions anyway. If we look at all the irrational bubbles that have occurred lately, you are a complete fool if you believe that TSLA or BTC is worth nearly a trillion dollars. It’s worth nowhere near that valuation.
How do I determine what something is worth, and who do I mean? It is called the market cap. In layman’s terms, that is where you take all the stock shares and multiply it by the share price. And I’m not recommending buying or selling TSLA or BTC, I’m just pointing out that these valuations are absurd. Does that mean they will not pass 1 trillion dollars? Of course not. There’s a very reasonable chance they do pass a $1 trillion market cap. That sounds absurd to write but it’s true. When the bubble bursts, you better believe fundamentals will be back in play. This disconnect can’t last forever. But it can go on for a while. And while it lasts, we all want to make some money
A Quick Word About ALL Cryptos
While I don’t believe Cryptocurrencies are going anywhere (as in, people will always buy and sell them), I also do not see any APPLICABLE future in them other than trading with other people. In fact, the biggest use I see of Cryptocurrencies is for illegal and untraceable transactions. The government will do all they can over the next several years to bring in lost tax revenue and track transactions better, but that’s the extent to which Cryptos will have relevance. How do I know this? Because the federal reserve, which is backed by the taxing authority of the US Government and the might of the US military, isn’t about to let some alternative currency usurp the US dollar. How do you think we can afford to provide all this government stimulus to fight Covid? If you think about this, you will see why other countries are much worse off. They must play by our rules, while we get to export our inflation to other countries because they must use the USD to buy commodities on the international exchanges (look at what happened when Saddam tried to circumvent this). If they print more money, their currency gets devalued. That’s why as bad as things look, relatively speaking, the US isn’t in terrible shape compared to the rest of the world.
If your financial future is so married to Bitcoin, ask yourself this: what happens if your account gets hacked? Who will you call? Who will make you whole again? If you have a brokerage account with legitimate stocks, there are regulations in place. There is the SIPC which protects again brokerage failure. With Bitcoin, you are completely gambling. This lack of regulation and lack of price stability means that there is no viable path to Bitcoin being a legitimate currency. Does it mean people can buy and sell it? Of course. But if you are in the cult of believing that Bitcoin is the future world reserve currency, you need to get your head examined.
Gold and Silver con artists have been trying for decades for people to get on this alternative currency train. At least gold and silver have some practical industrial applications. And hundreds of years of history on its side. Crypto isn’t anything but something people agree upon as having value. Why do I point this out? Because the one thing you need to do is separate yourself from what you think you know about Crypto and Blockchain, etc. While it all sounds cool and revolutionary, it really doesn’t matter. The US government could easily create their own form of Crypto that gives them more control. The decentralized part just doesn’t jive with our current global hegemony. If you don’t understand this, you should think more and read less. Once you accept this, you can start to see all Crypto as fundamentally worth the same: virtually nothing. The technicals, however, are why we want to look at Dogecoin.
Relative Valuation of Dogecoin
Now that you understand a little more background into where we are, I believe Dogecoin is extremely undervalued. Why? It’s simple. Relative valuation. This is one of the easiest and most efficient ways to compare investments. Ok, so maybe this isn’t really investing anymore; it’s gambling. Still, we can apply the same concept. Imagine two companies: they are in the same industry and have similar margins, earnings, growth prospects, etc. One company is valued at $50 billion and costs $120 per share, and one is valued at $85 billion and costs $80 per share. Which one would you invest in? Of course, you would invest in the one that is worth $50 billion at $120 per share. The cost per share means absolutely nothing. It is psychological.
Now, you say Dogecoin isn’t on par with Bitcoin and that where I’m going with this isn’t a fair comparison. Go back and read the last section. That’s why I wrote about the practical applications of Cryptocurrencies in general. None of that matters. The only thing that matters is the general sentiments shared by people that buy and believe in Cryptocurrency. So, let’s look at the current valuations:
Bitcoin – Price $40,500, Market Cap $755B (estimated as of 2-6-21)
Dogecoin – Price $.05, Market Cap $4.4B (estimated as of 2-6-21)
(Source: Yahoo Finance)
Now, I’m not saying Dogecoin is worth what Bitcoin is. I’m not even saying it's worth half or a third of Bitcoin. Who really knows? No one does. You certainly cannot say for certain that one is better than another. One is more “established” and has more name recognition. What I am saying is this: if Dogecoin goes to $1, it will have a market cap of just over $85 billion. Even at Bitcoin’s current market cap, that’s just over 1/10 of its value. And that isn’t even pricing in more appreciation of Bitcoin’s value over time. This means I see tons of room for Dogecoin to run. (I know some will mention dilution via minting of new coins, but that’s another discussion and not entirely relevant to the points I am trying to make in this piece.)
Could Dogecoin match Bitcoin? That sounds absurd, but let’s look just for fun: if Dogecoin were to have the same market cap as Bitcoin, that means it would have a current price of $8.55. So, what am I saying here? You must know the range of possibilities (within reason, if that even exists anymore) before you start thinking about price targets. To say Dogecoin is going to $100 is just absurd; things need to be put in the proper context.
Why Dogecoin?
Using relative valuation, I believe you could make a case for any Crypto. Will they all run to Bitcoin’s level? Of course not. The last question is why Dogecoin? This is the most important one that we have to answer before deciding on buying Dogecoin. The answer is simple: hype and name recognition. If I look at the most valuable cryptocurrencies by market cap, Dogecoin is number 12. I have taken an informal survey of probably 100 people over the last two weeks. I showed them the top 15 Cryptocurrencies by market cap to see which they were familiar with: Stellar, Binance Coin, Cardano, Polkadot, XRP . . . almost all of these were completely unheard of. But, somehow, they have valuations of 2-3 times Dogecoin.
Dogecoin has a few things going for it. First, hype. Elon Musk and many other prominent celebrities are pilling in. Mark Cuban has said he’d buy it over a lottery ticket. That alone can help aid a very quick lift off. Second, the name Dogecoin is very easy to remember and a trendy thing. What the heck is Cardano anyway? XRP? I mistakenly called it XPR before I edited this piece. And if you are still hung up on the practical use of Dogecoin or other Cryptos, you are missing the point of this piece entirely. Look at the story behind Bitcoin. An anonymous person online created a decentralized platform for money movement or something like that. What? How in the world did that idea ever take traction? It’s just like people online arguing over which Penny Stock is the next big thing. Neither person is right, but the perception is really all that matters.
Third, stimulus checks will be hitting within weeks or months. This naturally promotes price inflation when people have more dollars chasing few goods. People will inevitably pile into whatever they think is the next great thing. Dogecoin has momentum right now. And this brings me to number four.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, FOMO is very powerful right now. There are people all over the world that know people who have won big money in this bubble. Penny stocks, GameStop, Bitcoin, and many others that you can name. How many people do you personally know that have won big in the lottery? Probably none. This is a unique time in history. People have won big in this market and are looking for the next thing.
Dogecoin is something that could pick up steam quickly. It could blow up overnight. It may not, and that is the risk you take. At the end of the day, it’s just money that you can always make more of. Life-changing money is worth the risk when you find the right risk-reward ratio.
Do your due diligence, but also think ahead to a scenario that you could imagine. Would you be that surprised if Dogecoin reached $1? And if it did, would you be surprised if it started running towards multiple dollars? $1 is a psychological number that typically leads to a further breakout. The current market cap suggests this is all very possible. Now imagine getting in at four or five cents.
Disclosure: Long Dogecoin with Diamond Hands. No positions in any other things mentioned. -BJ

Some useful principles, if this is your first rodeo.

Don't invest recklessly - a few pointers for all the new guys.

Managing risk to make money

There has been an influx of discussion surrounding GME recently in this sub. Because of the frenzy of speculation, I thought I'd share my thoughts on risk management when it comes to making money.
1. Don't be afraid of taking risks
If you take on risk, be sensible about it. Think about what you have at risk, what you have to gain, and what the chance of success is.
Say you have the opportunity to start a business. What have you got to lose? Maybe you need to quit your job and lose your income stream. Maybe the time you spend on your business could be better spent on your career. Maybe starting a business will put a lot of stress on your family.
What is there to gain? Maybe it's possible this will catapult you towards financial independence. Maybe you can spend a few years building up a business and be set for the rest of your life. Maybe starting a business will give you purpose in life.
What is the chance of success? Maybe there are forces working against you. Assess the risks. You won't know for sure what the future holds, but think about the probabilities of various scenarios. Then you can better mitigate your risks and work out how to lower them.
All of this risk management is the same when it comes to the stock market, or cryptocurrency or whatever other speculation. Write down what your risk to reward ratio is. If you risk $X, or Y amount of time, how much could you potentially gain?
For example, with a speculation or investment, it may be worthwhile to risk $1 to make $3 if there is a 50% chance of success. It may not be worthwhile to risk $1 to make $2 if there is only a 50% chance of success.
GME has been a rarity and most likely the reward for the early speculators has been way more than they anticipated. But if the risk was $50k to make $1m, then that could be well worth the risk. Similarly, if you were to invest into your own business, or quit your job, that could later turn into a multi-million dollar business, then that could be well worth the risk.
2. Do not gamble
Some people believe that putting money into GME was a gamble. I do not believe that is necessarily true. Of course many people were gambling, but most of the gamblers lost.
The difference between gambling and investing/speculating is a gamble is uncalculated, whereas an investment/speculation is calculated. Buying a lottery ticket is a gamble because you cannot realistically expect to win. Starting a business is an investment because you can calculate -- to a reasonable degree -- what are the risks and what are the rewards. When you invest in something you can calculate what you believe to be its value and make an assessment of what it may be worth in the future. When you speculate on something you can evaluate what are the catalysts, understand what may stop the catalysts and estimate what may be the result from the catalysts.
You cannot accurately estimate what the final reward will be, and that's okay. It'll probably be less than your estimations. Maybe it'll be more. You can make an assessment on whether the risk is worth taking. At least it is not a gamble where you have no clue what the odds are and you're almost guaranteed to lose. Gambling is just something to do for fun and you shouldn't expect it to be sensible.
3. You don't have to take on risks
Taking on risk is not necessary to become successful in life. You can work hard, put all your savings into reasonable investments like ETFs, and let compound interest do its magic.
If you're going to take on risk, make sure you're doing it because you've done your own research and it's worth it to you. Don't do it just because you want to jump on the bandwagon. FOMO rarely works out. You wouldn't start a business in a field you know nothing about just because your friend did it. Don't risk money on a speculation you don't understand the mechanics of just because some guy on reddit did it.
4. Do not risk more than you can afford to lose
You want to be able to live to see another day. It's okay to take on big risks. You can take on more risk if there is a higher probability of success. If there is a low probability of success, take on less risk. If you're young then it may be okay to risk your life savings because you have plenty of time to recover. If you're older then risking your life savings would probably be stupid.
There are no hard rules when it comes to how much you should risk. There are mathematical models you can use, but our emotions don't care about math. We are usually very good at overestimating our risk tolerance. You may think you're okay with risking $X, yet when you lose you may realize $X was way above your risk tolerance.
If your life would be dramatically impacted by losing $X, then do not risk $X.
5. Cut your losses quickly
You need to be confident when you take on risks. See them all the way through. If you're starting a business, put all your effort into it. If you're making an investment or speculation, stay with it until your thesis is either validated or invalidated. Don't be afraid of volatility or the ups and downs along the journey.
Continuously monitor your thesis and adjust as necessary. If your business model is not working, change it. If it can't be changed, then end it. Do not double down when you are losing.
If you make an investment or speculation, monitor it and compare it with your thesis (if you don't have a thesis then you're not investing or speculating, you're gambling). Is it doing what you expect it to do? If it isn't, get out. Don't watch it go all the way down to zero.
6. Double down when you are winning
Most people tend to cut their winners and double down on their losers. This is the opposite approach you should take. A winning investment is more likely to continue winning in the future. If it's winning, what's stopping it from winning even more? A losing investment is more likely to continue losing. If it's losing, why do you think it'll win in the future?
Winners win. Losers lose.
If you're working on a business and the business model has proven profitable, then it can make a lot of rational sense to double down and put more time or money into it. Likewise, if an investment is proving to be profitable, then it can make a lot of rational sense to double and and put more money into it.
7. Cut your profits and run
This one seems to be the hardest one for many to do. There is a difficult balance between not waiting long enough, and waiting too long. There's no perfect solution here.
In the GME trade I've seen people sell too early and miss out on huge gains. I've also seen people have huge paper gains and then go into the red.
Selling along the way can help psychologically, but is not always the best move. This is why it's so important to have a thesis. Once the thesis is broken and your investment is no longer doing what you expect it to, take your profits and run.
A business model may work today, but a competitor may arrive tomorrow and send you bankrupt. Keep your eyes open. If the game changes, cash out.

What is Monero? Why is Monero? How is Monero? Everything you need to know in 5 minutes or less.

Monero is one of those coins that doesn't really seem very important or useful but once you understand it a bit better you start to appreciate the fact that it exists.

What is Monero?

Bytecoin, now an ancient name in the crypto community, was forked by an anonymous Bitcointalk forum user thankful_for_today and BitMonero was born in 2014. The very community that backed this fork at first, threw sticks and stones at thankful_for_today so he disappeared from the stage. 5 days later the community took over, renamed the coin to Monero (Esperanto for "Coin), and made quite a sensation out of it. In 2016 Monero was the most transacted cryptocurrency out there, mostly thanks to the Darknet markets and the privacy features of Monero, but since the regulatory crackdown of those same markets in 2017 didn't kill Monero we can safely assume that it doesn't only relate to criminal activity. In fact, it has a lot more to offer.

Why is Monero?

There is a distinct difference between privacy and anonymity. If you want to keep your transactions private, you don't want others to know where your money is going. On the other hand, if you want to keep them anonymous, you don't care if they know where the money is going as long as they don't know who is spending it. Bitcoin already offers anonymity and it may seem impossible to figure out who is behind that random string of numbers and letters but it's actually a lot easier than you think.
If you use the same address for everyday payments long enough, by simply observing your spending habits all of us could know exactly where you live, what you like, how much you like it, and what you are willing to pay for it. So, if you had a gambling habit and I was a casino manager, I would probably send you some free money to try out our games but that is just the tip of the iceberg. What if someone has a personal grudge against you but is also a bit insane? At best, we will be annoyed by push notifications on our devices and at worst a lot of psychos will know where we live.
Monero solves this problem by creating decoy transactions almost all the time. It uses an obfuscated public ledger that allows anyone to broadcast or send transactions, but outside observers can't tell the source, amount, or destination. The inner workings of Ring Signatures and Bulletproofs are a bit complex but in simple terms, for every transaction you create Monero creates a dozen fake ones meaning that no one can tell the difference, thus your privacy is guaranteed. Reciever addresses are protected as well with a "stealth address" so both sides of the trade are covered.

How is Monero?

Monero is secured by the proof of work consensus meaning that the coin is mined. To be exact, 1.26 XMR per block with a block time of 2 minutes. Recently there have been some concerns raised about the privacy features of Monero.

In August 2020, renowned blockchain auditing and security firm CipherTrace announced that they had developed the world’s first Monero tracing tool in collaboration with the United States Department of Homeland Security.
The Monero dev team quickly responded to CipherTrace’s announcement, revealing that a new algorithm called ‘Triptych’ was in development, which promised to protect users against the reported detection methods.

It feels like there is a constant effort to shut down and delegitimize Monero by regulators. In December last year, the IRS offered a $625,000 bounty to anyone who can crack Monero’s privacy. This just goes to show how big of a deal Monero actually is and if you want a confirmation of that in practical terms, here is a simple example.
If you don't want others to know your transaction history with Bitcoin you can simply convert that BTC to Monero, convert it back to Bitcoin, and send that Bitcoin to a new address. Even if someone linked the previous address to you, they will have no clue where that Bitcoin went.
Monero is designed as a currency but it can also be used as a tool. Those that consider privacy to be a right can now use this tool to gain that right on their own terms. No one can say for sure if privacy coins will survive in the long run but for now, there seems to be a high demand for them.
So how is Monero? Very untraceable.
TLDR;

Monero is a privacy coin that helps you buy drugs on the internet but also protects you from crazy people and Facebook.
Some coins have optional privacy features but Monero's privacy is mandatory as it is built-in.

Edit: Formatting and typos.

DOGE, to the MOON? Then, YOU need the RIGHT ATTITUDE.

I agree with Elon Musk. DOGE is the people's crytocurrency. That is what makes DOGE great, but that's what also makes DOGE a problem. I see a lot of you dunking on the smaller investors of DOGE. If you want DOGE to grow as a currency, then you need to stop. Crypto currency is about decentralizing the financial markets. It's about removing a governing authority. Yet, many of you are trying to position yourselves as the new governing authority. You call those who are less fortunate than you all sorts of names that can't be said in a post, but can be said in the comments (for some reason) because they aren't holding the DOGE to MAKE YOU MORE WEALTHY. Isn't that exactly what the fat cats on Wall Street are doing? They are calling you dumb money and unsophisticated investors. Sadly, many of you are doing the very same thing when given an opportunity. You're looking down on those who are excited to sell off and earn $7.00 while many of you are making $7 grand. Gross.
This isn't Dark Souls the video game. This is real life for many people. The response of "git good" just doesn't apply here unless you want to take on the personas of the Wall Street Fat Cats you claim to hate. If you people with the money to spend are getting upset because the value of DOGE is fluctuating, or not seeing a bull rally to the extent that you wanted, then you are the unsophisticated investor. You should know better. Market value tends to fluctuate. Deal with it. If you got $7K in your account and you are getting upset that poor people are selling their DOGE for a $7 profit, then you are a product of your environment instead of an instigator of a financial revolution. What is the point of supporting cryptocurrency if you people are just going to be the new Wall Street fat cats who think those who aren't playing the game your way should just not play at all.
Many of you are becoming the corruption you claim to hate. Stop it. Reel yourself in.
I once had BlackBerry and Nokia stock, along with DOGE, about a year ago before everyone had a hardon for these assets. However, I went through a snow storm that cut power for a week. I worked from home at the time, so I had to take time off of work until I had power again. That snow melted and turned into a flood that wiped out everything I owned. I even lost my pet cockatiels whom meant everything thing to me. I took a while to get a job after Facebook canceled all of their independent contracts after the phone recording scandals. I was a transcriptionist doing transcripts for Facebook. I didn't have much more than a few pairs of clothes. It was hard to get a job because I didn't have the right clothes anymore. I had to sell off my stocksat a loss just to cover my body, cover rent, but a new phone, pay for service. It took me months to get a job until I got myself in a good position. Then, I found out in February of 2020 that I am going blind (glaucoma and macular degeneration). Just when I was starting to get my footing again, the pandemic hit. Then, the place I planned on moving to got burnt to the ground by wild fires. Blue River, Oregon essentially doesn't exist anymore. I also never got my $1,200 stimulus, nor my $600 stimulus. I also am still waiting to get three months worth of unemployment when the job I just got a year prior had to shut down due to state regulations on which businesses can be open. Now, I am at a pretty good job. I was getting ready to invest again, except that I am being charged for insurance and benefits already even though I don't get benefits and insurance for another two months. I am paying two insurance premiums right now until they refund me for the erroneous charges. I was going to use that money to buy contact lenses. Try having glaucoma and then wear glasses with a face mask. It just doesn't work.
Despite my place in society a year ago, many of you would hate me now because I sold $27 worth of DOGE why you Reddit Fat Cats sit on your $7K. Screw you.
Don't be awful. Don't be the corruption you claim to hate. If I need to sell all my DOGE so that I can afford to take my clothes to the laundromat for another week, then so be it. I get to decide what to do with my money. Not you. I don't get food stamps or subsidized housing from you. You don't get to tell me or anyone else what to do. If you want a DOGE revolution, then be the revolution. Don't be the corruption. If you have the luxury to hold the DOGE, then you have the financial stability to deal with it and let the little guys do what needs to be done to take care of themselves. It seems like many of you are getting upset because you aren't getting richer sooner than later, that is so Wall Street Hack of you.
TO THE LITTLE PEOPLE: I am sure DOGE will go to the moon, but that responsibility doesn't rest on your back solely. It has to be a community effort. If you need to sell your DOGE to make it another week in your meager lives, do it. I'm there with you and I am committed to getting out from this hole I am in, just like the rest of you. Don't let any of these Reddit Street Fat Cats tell you how to spend your money. It's called FUD. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. These people will try to make you question your choices for their own personal benefit. Don't let that happen. Take care of you. It doesn't matter if you buy DOGE this week or sell DOGE this week. Your participation alone will contribute to the strength of the DOGE. Even if everyone sat on their DOGE investments, new DOGE is "minted" (not proper term, cannot recall the proper term for the life of me - but the same sentiments applies) all the time. The value of DOGE will go down even if everyone sits on their DOGE but don't bring new participants to the currency. Your participation is more valuable than many of these people will let on. It will take time for DOGE to hit a $1. It's not going to happen if these people insist on being nasty to people like you, and thus discourage your participation. If these guys are so well off, they can go buy a $30K Bitcoin then. The fact that DOGE is only a few cents is what makes DOGE the cryptocurrency for the people, as Elon Musk said. It's a great way to experiment with crypto and get your feet wet without experiencing significant loss. Buy DOGE. Sell DOGE. Do what you want. It's people like you who create an economy, not the people who hold onto their wealth. Holding onto wealthy only benefits the person holding the wealth. They don't even get taxed the same as someone who makes short term sells. IRS will punish you for being in a desperate situation.
Maybe, someday, you will be in a better position to accumulate wealth instead of making gambles to get there. DOGE is a great way to practice money skills. Have fun. Experiment. Learn. Ignore anyone who tries to dictate your life. Seek meaningful advice, but avoid those who are trying to put thoughts in your head as a collective swindle. That's how Wall Street works. A lot of people are following bad examples. Be better than that. Maybe in a few years, it won't be Reddit versus Robinhood. Maybe, it will be YOU versus Reddit. Stick it to the man. Do it for the people. Do it for yourself. Don't do it for their ego.
Please be advised that I am not a financial advisor nor tax consultant, and any claim I have said here should be verified by a qualified third party, as a legal disclaimer.

DOGE DD: We are in the middle of a bubble

TLDR: Price expectations of $0.01-$0.20 in the next 1-3 years will depend on how popular DOGE remains, and online use cases. But right now this chart screams Bubble!
Preface: I am a CPA but also have an IQ of 69 and are what some refer to as ‘legally retarded’. This is just my own personal opinion and does not constitute financial advice. Never gamble more than you can afford to lose.
So I’m looking at Dogecoin prospects closely and it’s difficult to predict it’s true present or future value but these are the factors I have considered:
Market cap: how much all Dogecoins are worth (note: these were values at the time of writing and are still fluctuating massively). Right now it’s $5b making it a top 20 crypto-coin today. But they all get compared to the #1 coin, Bitcoin, which is currently worth $625b. Next is Ethereum at $150b, followed by $28b for Tether. Big differences. For Dogecoin to be top 5, it would need to hit $15b market cap and my best case expectation is $20b in the medium-long term (1-3 years). The $1 Dogecoin meme is highly unlikely as it would require toppling Ethereum. Not impossible, just unlikely, as Ethereum has been been designed for other use cases outside of finance and is already better established in the market. Tether is popular because it’ll store USD safely. Below Tether, the crypto field gets crowded which is why DOGE needs social media hyyype to grow it to position 4 or 5.
Supply: new DOGE are being added every year, whereas Bitcoins aren’t. Limited supply = higher price, which is why Bitcoin is considered a ‘store of value’, akin to gold. Since almost every crypto-coin is pegged against Bitcoin, that further solidifies its top position. Sorry to say Dogecoin can never be top dog. Dogecoins are, however, intended to be closer to a regular (central bank issued, or fiat) currency. Continual new supply will put downward pressure on prices. While better for a stable currency price since it counteracts inflation, it’s less ideal for a speculative investment. Look at Bitcoin Cash, it’s another fast, low fee, stable value. Overall it’s devalued since launch, but still has the potential for 2-4x gains if traded low to high. There’s also the threat of large scale mining operations flooding the market with DOGE while the coin base is still in it’s establishment phase.
Hype: Cryptocurrency, and especially Doge, is popular right now driving up short term prices. Early investors (pre-2021) have already made the most on a fast 800% growth, which to me indicates a bubble. Having spent some time comparing this price spike to every other top 10 coin, it’ll likely settle back to a price of $0.01 after the hype dies. But Reddit is pretty good at running a strong hype train, so it’s possible the rocket stays firmly on trajectory for a moon landing.
Will DOGE still be popular in 1 month, or 1 year? Sure, but will that make it valuable? Not necessarily. Bitcoin and alt-coins are popular too but are just as subject to wild swings in value.
DOGE is ideal for tipping people small amounts online (much funner to send someone a DOGE than it is a BitCoin Cash), as well as through merchant transactions since it’s faster than most other coins. And that brings us to Dogecoin’s major edge: marketing. It’s heckin logo being a much cute, very wow Shibe Inu 🐕 Social media engagement, memes, celebs amplifying the memes, and constant online presence would need to continue for it to remain popular and not just ‘the 2021 trading frenzy meme coin’.
Conclusion: I feel Dogecoin is a SELL because it’s in a bubble right now. For long term HODL I’ll wait until the bubble bursts so I can scoop them up 0.01. But I will hedge my own recommendation by buying 25,000 if the price drops under $0.03. If that’s contradictory to you, I’ll refer you back to my smooth brain IQ. Highest expectation of a $0.20 price is provided DOGE solidifies itself as a popular and stable Top 10 alt-coin. Major risks to that assessment are price volatilities related to potential overhype, unlimited supply, Dogecoin failing to find common online usage, and to an extent future merchant adoption. These factors combined would potentially see the currency wind all the back to $0.003.

Birds, Bees, Bitcoin? - Simple guide

Disclaimer: I am not a finance professional, I do not have fiduciary duty to you. This is not a financial advice, this is purely for educational and entertainment purposes. If you lose money trading cryptocurrencies, do not hold me accountable.
Cryptocurrencies are like teenage sex, don't expect to talk people out of doing it. So instead of that, we should have a guide for safe and sane gambling plan for cryptocurrencies.
This guide is meant for beginners. You will see other experienced traders commenting in this section, take everyone's advice and comments with grains of salt.
Be very careful when someone is promoting their coin, pump and dump is rampant in cryptocurrencies realm. Play safe!

What coins to invest in?

For beginners, to play safe - Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Understanding how cryptocurrencies work require knowledge of computer science and cryptography, and none of us can likely explain them well and accurate enough in the comments section, so I will just point you to: https://www.luno.com/learn/en/
I am not gonna explain what they do, but rather, why they are my top picks.
Bitcoin's technology is proven. It's the first proven solution of its kind - proof-of-work based value transfer. However, the development has practically stagnated for past few years with little progress.
Ethereum's development is more decentralised and backed by more organisations. There are at least 4 ETH1 clients and 4 ETH2 clients for you to choose from, all built by different teams and companies. It's the first blockchain of its kind - smart contract.
The real kicker of Ethereum is that - it powers almost all the tokens in DeFi realm. Almost all the tokens you see like Uniswap, USD Tether, USD Coin, OmiseGo, HelloGold etc run on Ethereum. Whenever people send those tokens, they must buy and spend ETH. ETH is indispensable from DeFi realm at this point.
Until now, there aren't many altcoins out there that share the same advantages to these two. It pays to invest in chains with first mover advantages.
BTW, don't buy into marketing like "bitcoin killer", "ethereum killer", "more scalable than bitcoin" etc. Do more homework if you want to venture beyond the 2 largest coins. Rather miss out sick gains than getting scammed.

Where do we trade them in Malaysia?

To be safe, use the exchanges approved by Suruhanjaya Sekuriti. Luno is likely your best choice, they have good trading volume and low fees of 0.25% for makers, the fee applies to you if you only post order, not take them.
There are other exchanges you can use, just make sure you check their trading volume, history of being hacked etc: https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges

When do we buy and sell them?

Now this... nobody knows for sure, but there are previous data points we can look at and play safe.
There are a few graphs I have bookmarked since the last crash and they have been fairly accurate so far:

For example, you can buy when its below 2x the previous all time high, and start selling slowly bit by bit above that point.
Don't be greedy and hold all the way until the peak, you can't tell where it take a u-turn and crash. Take profit and come back years later. Repeat.

Should we withdraw them to our own wallets?

IMO, if you invest more than RM 10k, do it. Otherwise don't bother.
Sending Bitcoin and Ethers is not free, you need to pay network fees.
During peak hours, the transaction fees can easily surge beyond RM100-200 per transaction, regardless of amount transferred. Ethereum gas fees have reached 500 gwei recently, and I expect it to get a lot worse leading up to the peak.
Sure, leaving them on exchanges may be risky, but big exchanges are getting better at security, blacklisting addresses complicit in hacking.
If you don't hold a lot, maybe it's not worth withdrawing out to your paper wallet, phone wallet, hardware wallet etc.

Why don't diversify into many coins? (Addendum)

Even now, cryptocurrencies are highly correlated assets. Almost all the coins moon and doom together, with some spikes here and there like when Elon Musk tweets Doge.
Cryptocurrencies are volatile and risky enough, try not to take on more unnecessary risks. There are little chance the altcoins you choose will outperform the blue chips. We call them shitcoins.

Support Malaysians

Please use these services:

coingecko.com - the largest independent DeFi aggregators after binance acquisition of coinmarketcap
etherscan.io - The largest Ethereum blockchain explorer

Discuss

Please comments, ask questions, debate with me on what do you disagree or can improve on.
I kinda hope this can become the crypto megathread, seeing the influx of new posts asking the same q about crypto again and again.
Do not share referral codes under broad daylight, mods can ban you.

can you gamble with cryptocurrency video

Why Use Cryptocurrency to Gamble? As cryptocurrency starts to become more popular with the general public, many people ask why they should be playing casino games in this format. There are a lot of reasons why, but here are a couple of them. Security. First and foremost, when you make a deposit with cryptocurrency, there is a So, is it a gamble? Cryptocurrencies Can be Volatile. Cryptocurrency is volatile and it may lose its value, and this puts a lot of companies off accepting it as a form of payment. There are many stories of those who invested in cryptocurrency like Bitcoin in the early days and turned dollars into thousands, but there are just as many who invested in cryptocurrency at a later date and saw big losses on their investment. A crypto-only gambling site only accepts cryptocurrencies for payment. You can’t use credit or debit cards, bank transfers, e-wallets, or gift cards. You can only use Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and so on. The benefit of going this route is that you’ll experience all the benefits of using cryptocurrency. You won’t have to deal with banks. It’s official. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Litecoin have become legitimized by the mainstream. Just like any other cryptocurrency, the idea is to come up with a secure payment method online. There you have it the Top-3 cryptocurrency you can use to gamble in the US. Whether you choose to use Bitcoin, or any of the others, be sure to see whether the online casino will accept crypto as a payment method. The reality is that in a lot of ways, online gambling is safer when you play with cryptocurrency. It still isn’t perfect, sites could go bust, and owning cryptocurrency, in general, is a gamble, but in terms of protection of your identity, personal information, and bank account, online gambling with cryptocurrency is a safer bet. Bitcoin and other popular cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Dash and Litecoin are perfect for gambling. In fact, they are so perfectly suited for it that online-gambling related transactions are the single most popular thing Bitcoin is used for. Only invest what you can conceivably afford to lose. Don’t go cashing in your house deposit for cryptocurrency in the hope that you’ll earn enough in a year to avoid taking out a mortgage It may be even faster than Bitcoin, depending on the cryptocurrency you choose. Now all you need to do is choose your game and start playing! As you can see, it’s not that hard to gamble with bitcoin or altcoins. Anyone can do it as long as you have some coins. And even if you don’t, you can always mine some! Before you make the decision to gamble online using a cryptocurrency, make sure you have done some research and have found a casino that will offer complete player protection. Online gambling is always a risk, but with cryptocurrencies,

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Gambling platforms where you can pay with cryptocurrencies?

Luckygames is the best multi-coin dice gambling site. The main goal is to bring you the greatest gambling experience ever with all the high-end features. You can play using 100 cryptocurrencies and, if you want, exchange them in a few clicks.

Luckygames is the best multi-coin dice gambling site. The main goal is to bring you the greatest gambling experience ever with all the high-end features. You can play using 100 cryptocurrencies and, if you want, exchange them in a few clicks.

Luckygames is the best multi-coin dice gambling site. The main goal is to bring you the greatest gambling experience ever with all the high-end features. You can play using 100 cryptocurrencies and, if you want, exchange them in a few clicks.

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Bitcoin mentioned around Reddit: 99.9% Dice - Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Ethereum &amp; Monero Gambling/ A simple Dice game that with one roll of the dice you can bet Bitcoin as well as a few other Cryptocurrencies. /r/onions

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What coins to invest in?

Where do we trade them in Malaysia?

When do we buy and sell them?

Should we withdraw them to our own wallets?

Why don't diversify into many coins? (Addendum)

Support Malaysians

Discuss

can you gamble with cryptocurrency video

can you gamble with cryptocurrency top

You Can Still Get Rich With Cryptocurrency Without ...

Bitcoin mentioned around Reddit: 99.9% Dice - Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Ethereum & Monero Gambling/ A simple Dice game that with one roll of the dice you can bet Bitcoin as well as a few other Cryptocurrencies. /r/onions