Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Ashin

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Earlier today I was looking at possibilities to put some of my 100% USD into for swing trading while I wait for a BTC or ETH lull. Top of the list for me was Solana. Looks like it went up about 12% since then, so I wish I'd followed my nose. Most of the big players have dipped a little bit in the last few hours, though nothing substantial.
I'd look at MATIC, it usually lags behind an Eth pump. Assuming Eth stays +$4k, I think Matic could go back to $2
 
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Flobee

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Earlier today I was looking at possibilities to put some of my 100% USD into for swing trading while I wait for a BTC or ETH lull. Top of the list for me was Solana. Looks like it went up about 12% since then, so I wish I'd followed my nose. Most of the big players have dipped a little bit in the last few hours, though nothing substantial.
Decent chance you get that dip by the beginning of next week

 
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Rajaah

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Yeah MATIC hasn't gone up much past 1.50 so it's uncharacteristically low relative to the numbers BTC and ETH are putting out. In April when both were slightly lower than they are now, MATIC followed suit by hitting 2.70. 2.70.

I'm probably going to hold on and wait for the next big dip though. I've seen MATIC sitting in the 1.10-1.30 range too much this year to do a big buy at 1.50 expecting a leap that seems very lagged. Let's see how things look next week. If everything dips I'll be glad I'm in USD and can capitalize more than usual. There's no reason I have to re-invest immediately after selling high, aside from impatience and FOMO I suppose.
 

Rajaah

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In other news, withdrawing from Binance for the first time in like six months (Uniswap gas fees fucked up my checking acct a bit so I'm replacing the money I used by taking some from Binance, then putting it back into Binance next paycheck). Is it supposed to take a super-long time? I put the Binance->bank withdrawal through yesterday evening, now here we are at almost 2 PM EST and it's still sitting there pending. Roughly 14 hours later. I recognize that Binance is on Chinese time, but we went through an entire Chinese workday and half of a US workday since I put in the withdraw order.

This isn't going to be very helpful if people ever need to do an emergency money withdrawal from their crypto exchange.
 

Rajaah

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Brooooooo. Get a savings account. You should NOT be investing emergency money. Got damn!

Bro, reading comprehension. I didn't say I was doing an emergency money withdrawal. I said if other people need to do an emergency money withdrawal from a crypto exchange. Like if someone has some massive emergency car repair expense and needs to pull money from their crypto, and it takes DAYS for Binance to deposit money into your account, I could see that being a real problem for a lot of people.

There's no emergency here, I'm just replacing the money in my checking that got burned up in Uniswap fees yesterday, which was almost $300 or so when it was all said and done, and that's gonna have to come out of my crypto portfolio for now until I make it back. It was an entirely unplanned expense and right now I've got money budgeted fairly tightly.

You're right about needing a savings account though. I've got the crypto account and a checking account, and the checking account is pretty much there to pay bills and have some emergency funds left over at all times while the crypto account is where excess goes. I should take 25% of the excess and keep it in a USD savings account in case I have a car emergency of the kind I mentioned above and need a quick infusion to checking, especially if exchanges take days to move money over. This is the first time I've ever felt the need to pull anything out of the crypto account, I think, and I thought it'd be more or less immediate (or at least less than a day).

Edit: Between the Uniswap bullshit and now Binance taking so long to do a (relatively tiny) withdrawal, I'm really questioning the feasibility of crypto as being a "replacement for banks" for most normal people
 
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Flobee

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Edit: Between the Uniswap bullshit and now Binance taking so long to do a (relatively tiny) withdrawal, I'm really questioning the feasibility of crypto as being a "replacement for banks" for most normal people
Your issue is with the traditional payment rails, not crypto. ACH transfer is what you have a problem with here, your ETH moved within minutes. Uniswap issue was caused by their garbage UX, which presumably will get better with time. I'm not a huge fan of Uniswap either, but the concept (AMM) will likely stick.

This (ACH finalization time) is actually an example of -why- the system is superior and is forcing the traditional banking to adapt or die. I'm sorry if this comes off as condescending, but if you don't understand this I question whether you understand what you're investing in at all?

EDIT: Added explanation for how/why this technology can/will replace current system
When Binance sends money to your bank they rely on traditional payment rails. Most likely this is going to be a system called SWIFT, which is run by the US (sending USD) and used world-wide. As I understand it, the system acts as a trusted third party so that your bank can confirm that Binance did in fact send the money to them before crediting your account. SWIFT acts as a centralized trusted third party.

What Bitcoin (and, IMO, to a lesser degree other L1 crypto's) does is replace that 'trusted' third party in this transaction and replaces it with the distributed ledger (the blockchain). Since the blockchain is immutable and new blocks are created regularly (~10 minutes for BTC, faster for ETH etc) the transfer from one entity to another can be 'finalized' much faster than it can be on traditional rails, which generally will take 3-5 business days.

You can verify that a transaction was made on the Bitcoin network within 10 minutes, and if you want to increase security you could wait for a few more blocks to be written. Each block exponentially decreases the chance of the previous blocks be rewritten due to a chain split, thus increasing the 'guarantee' that the value has been transferred.

This is what makes Bitcoin exponentially better than the SWIFT system (developed in the 70's) because it validates transactions with finality in <60 minutes rather than 3-5 business days. By finalized what I mean is that they cannot be reversed in any way. Solving this issue (double spend problem) is one of the main innovations Bitcoin made, in this way it allows the disintermediation of the 'trusted' third party in interactions between two parties that don't have a relationship. Thus, the term 'trustless' you hear thrown around all the time in the space.

Hope thats helpful
 
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Arden

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Your issue is with the traditional payment rails, not crypto. ACH transfer is what you have a problem with here, your ETH moved within minutes. Uniswap issue was caused by their garbage UX, which presumably will get better with time. I'm not a huge fan of Uniswap either, but the concept (AMM) will likely stick.

This (ACH finalization time) is actually an example of -why- the system is superior and is forcing the traditional banking to adapt or die. I'm sorry if this comes off as condescending, but if you don't understand this I question whether you understand what you're investing in at all?

EDIT: Added explanation for how/why this technology can/will replace current system
When Binance sends money to your bank they rely on traditional payment rails. Most likely this is going to be a system called SWIFT, which is run by the US (sending USD) and used world-wide. As I understand it, the system acts as a trusted third party so that your bank can confirm that Binance did in fact send the money to them before crediting your account. SWIFT acts as a centralized trusted third party.

What Bitcoin (and, IMO, to a lesser degree other L1 crypto's) does is replace that 'trusted' third party in this transaction and replaces it with the distributed ledger (the blockchain). Since the blockchain is immutable and new blocks are created regularly (~10 minutes for BTC, faster for ETH etc) they transfer from one entity to another can be 'finalized' much faster than it can be on traditional rails, which generally will take 3-5 business days.

You can verify that a transaction was made on the Bitcoin network within 10 minutes, and if you want to increase security you could way for a few more blocks to be written. Each block exponentially decreases the chance of the previous blocks be rewritten due to a chain split, thus increasing the 'guarantee' that the value has been transferred.

Yeah, your delay has nothing to do with Binance or crypto and everything to do with banks. I moved all my crypto off Binance into a wallet months ago and it took all of 30 seconds to complete the xfer.
 
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Rajaah

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Your issue is with the traditional payment rails, not crypto. ACH transfer is what you have a problem with here, your ETH moved within minutes. Uniswap issue was caused by their garbage UX, which presumably will get better with time. I'm not a huge fan of Uniswap either, but the concept (AMM) will likely stick.

This (ACH finalization time) is actually an example of -why- the system is superior and is forcing the traditional banking to adapt or die. I'm sorry if this comes off as condescending, but if you don't understand this I question whether you understand what you're investing in at all?

Currently, traditional banks are what most people need to withdraw to. Crypto exchanges taking entire days to perform a transaction with traditional banks, regardless of whose fault it is, makes this harder for normies to use. Though I see what you're saying, crypto-to-crypto wallet transactions (i.e. if I were to pay a bill directly with Bitcoin) that cut out the bank as the middleman would not have this massive wait time that ACH does. When I sent my Truebit money from Coinbase to Binance yesterday, the exchange took all of five minutes and cost virtually nothing, compared to the time it would have taken if I'd moved the money to the bank and then used some of it on Binance.

So yeah, the bank is the problem in my case and an unnecessary middleman, and I perhaps erroneously blamed Binance. Either way this is the sort of thing that will make widespread adoption harder, not to even get into the nightmare that is Uniswap. While likely below-average for this thread, I'm fairly computer literate compared to the average person in the world, and Uniswap still caused me grief. I could see most users of it tapping out after one session when they're losing gas money (and sometimes crypto itself, I've read) over low slippage and other factors that Uniswap doesn't even bother explaining to the layman.

Anyway, not poo-pooing crypto in general or its potential for bank-slaying here, just going over my own frustrating experiences trying to move some money around over the last day or so. I wanted my TrueBit money out of Uniswap/Coinbase and into Binance to re-invest in other things, it was way harder to accomplish that than it needed to be. Now I need to reimburse my checking for some of the wasted money and the bank / Binance aren't communicating. When combined with the previous events, it's understandably off-putting. If someone perfects a network that eliminates all of these issues and is usable by the average dumbass, we'll have something huge, but it ain't nearly there yet.
 
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Flobee

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While likely below-average for this thread, I'm fairly computer literate compared to the average person in the world, and Uniswap still caused me grief. I could see most users of it tapping out after one session when they're losing gas money (and sometimes crypto itself, I've read) over low slippage and other factors that Uniswap doesn't even bother explaining to the layman.

Anyway, not poo-pooing crypto in general or its potential for bank-slaying here, just going over my own frustrating experiences trying to move some money around over the last day or so.
I've lost an eye-watering amount of money using ETH based systems since I started playing with this stuff (in todays values). I totally understand. It is one of the reasons I don't love the future prospects of Ethereum as a network. I hope you'll take a moment to the read the spoiler I edited into the post you replied to as I think it better explains what I was trying to say + why I'm so much more bullish on BTC than everything else.

IMO so many of us get caught up chasing memecoins for short term gains we miss out on the major innovation that this space represents. Buy-and-hold has 0 gas fees, no slippage, and as of right now nearly 100% of HODL'ers are in profit. This is true for every L1 crypto so far as I'm aware.
 
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Rajaah

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Yeah, your delay has nothing to do with Binance or crypto and everything to do with banks. I moved all my crypto off Binance into a wallet months ago and it took all of 30 seconds to complete the xfer.

That's what I'll end up doing once I have the pieces where I want them. When BTC/ETH were in a price range I could jump in at, the alts I had weren't in a price range I could sell them at. It's the circle of life. After getting VET into positive, MATIC well into positive, and Truebit almost even, it was time to move back to USD so that I don't miss the next great BTC/ETH opportunity. Once I pull that off I'm going to stick with those two and move them into a wallet.

I haven't had a net negative transaction in a few months, though the Uniswap fees yesterday did their best to cut into the positives. Plan now is to try to get the numbers up a bit (with both DCA and a few trades) and be ready with the USD for BTC/ETH whenever they're down.

It's been asked before, but if I'd gone 100% BTC back when I started investing and left it alone instead of spending so much time flipping various alts, I'd be at about 80% of what I am now on grand total. AKA around 2x - 2.1x of money invested if I'd gone full BTC at the point I started investing, while right now I'm at around 2.7x. So I've got something to show for it at least. Full ETH at the point I started investing on the other hand would have put me slightly above where I am now (2.8x), which is interesting to note.
 

Rajaah

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I've lost an eye-watering amount of money using ETH based systems since I started playing with this stuff (in todays values). I totally understand. It is one of the reasons I don't love the future prospects of Ethereum as a network. I hope you'll take a moment to the read the spoiler I edited into the post you replied to as I think it better explains what I was trying to say + why I'm so much more bullish on BTC than everything else.

IMO so many of us get caught up chasing memecoins for short term gains we miss out on the major innovation that this space represents. Buy-and-hold has 0 gas fees, no slippage, and as of right now nearly 100% of HODL'ers are in profit. This is true for every L1 crypto so far as I'm aware.

One thing is for sure, when I started doing this 9 months ago, I read somewhere (maybe here) that chasing meme coins was a good way to get poor quick. I think that's very true, and the surest avenue to success in this field is to be patient and turn down the greed. It's possible to luck out with something unproven and score big, but it's mainly early adopters that benefit from that kind of thing, while everyone who follows them (out of greed) are more likely to end up bag-holding more often than not.

In short, going for slow and steady things that actually have a use case and reason to exist is the way to go, and you're only really gonna get rich if you're an early adopter of something...or have a lot of money to begin with to put in. It's much easier for me to make $1k now than it was when I had one-third as much 9 months ago. But mostly being an early adopter. Ethereum isn't gonna have a 200x growth spurt ever again. It's why I had high hopes for Truebit (which will surely go through the roof now that I offloaded it).
 

Flobee

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Rajaah Rajaah sold, everyone knows what to do
The sad truth is, alts will inevitably run once BTC starts moving sideways (it always does, and they always do). May or may not happen for TRU. Its not impossible he timed his exit wrong and loses even more on the move. L1s broadly are up around 20x since I first started paying attention. Buying an holding long term is IMO the only safe way to make $$$ in this space. Thats not to say that buying and holding right NOW is a smart move if your timeframe is less than multiple years. I'd say it probably still is, but who really knows.

As Sanrith Descartes Sanrith Descartes always says "pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered"

Granted, he'd probably think I'm dumb for holding through market cycles in this space
 
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Arden

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Holding through market cycles is how you make real money with crypto. Ask the guys holding from 2017.
 
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