Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

TheBeagle said:

Wouldnt be turning it into USD for the foreseeable future. Just wondering if, hypothetically, a player could remove some BTC and sit on it anonymously relatively simply. Also, if this player wanted to transfer that BTC to another site that may be a little more above board like, say, a poker site. Or just sit on it and if BTC ever moons again then look into USD options.

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Right on, then yea the options I listed would be the best bet. using mixer would give forward facing privacy (anyone that knew you owned a particular UTXO wouldn't know what you did with it) and you could just hold that in a wallet till whenever. If privacy is a concern I would suggest learning about address reuse (don't do it) and UTXO management more broadly. Not hard to dox yourself if you don't understand this stuff.

Good primer on privacy basics here: Bitcoin Privacy 101

Nevermind- chat GPT is worse than useless for financial predictions. for now anyway

Arden said:

Nevermind- chat GPT is worse than useless for financial predictions. for now anyway

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Haven't read up on chatGPT in a few months, but the glaringly obvious flaw was it doesn't have live financial data whatsoever. In fact, the entire AI database was based on year(s) old archive data. Kind of useless for making any kind of forward projections. You could perhaps build some advanced backtesting strategies and perhaps some other backward looking data uses.

Jysin said:

Haven't read up on chatGPT in a few months, but the glaringly obvious flaw was it doesn't have live financial data whatsoever. In fact, the entire AI database was based on year(s) old archive data. Kind of useless for making any kind of forward projections. You could perhaps build some advanced backtesting strategies and perhaps some other backward looking data uses.

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The new GPT connects to the nets and can provide up to date data. The issue is it seems limited in the sites it targets and the data it scrapes. You can point it to certain sites though, so that alleviates some of the issue. For example:




I'm sure they have GPT models specifically built to handle financial stuff. This is what it eventually spit out:

Obviously, the above is a super simple query that anyone could do if they took 10 minutes. I tried to get it to prepare a chart showing the predicted price from between now and 2/1/23. It gave me a crazy looking chart that was clearly insane but that ended up with a pretty reasonable final BTC price on 2/1/23. Then I realized all it had done was add a 10% increase in total value to BTC and drawn a bunch of insanely volatile swing lines on the chart. We all know crypto is volatile, but that chart is lol. Regardless, I'm curious about what made it add a 10% value between now and 2/1/23. More than likely, it just picked up some article that estimated that result- but who knows? I will be checking on 2/1 to see how close we are to this predicted high of ~42,250.

The great thing about GPT is that you can always ask. Unfortunately it doesn't always give you useful data. In this case I could probably continue to dig to try and figure out where it got the data for "recent market trends" and what factors within the data made it land on a 10% increase, etc.

So, uh, ETF approval tomorrow or what?

Tmac said:

Open air until $48k.

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Yep. I've been standing by waiting to invest in some low cap coins. Went ahead and sunk some money with the theory that BTC is the tide that raises all boats.

I pulled the trigger earlier this month after the first big bump and thought I would regret chasing. That turned out to be a worthwhile risk- hoping this one works out too.

One of my very favorite wallets added native Bitcoin holding/buying today. Self-custody to me is everything, so this very convenient to now hold more of my coins in one wallet. The wallet is still low on chains it does support (BTC, ETH, Polygon, Arbitrum), but it's got the best tech for security to abstract the account and be recoverable if you lose your seed phrase etc. (you don't even have to write down a seed phrase with this wallet, but can access it through the wallet - it's very crypto newb friendly).

If the seed phrase is recoverable without you storing it yourself... its stored by someone else and thus someone else has access to it. Be -very- cautious of trusting stuff like the above. I know nothing about this wallet, but sometimes you have to do the inconvenient (take responsibility for your own keys) in order to be secure. I would also suggest keeping your Bitcoin in a separate wallet than your coins if you insist of holding them. Any wallet that supports both makes significant security and privacy sacrifices to do both. Especially if this wallet is all about you exposing your holding to "Defi" markets lol. Be cautious

With a new bull market coming there is going to be a ton of new shiny crap to try to rob you of your holdings, often shilled by people who genuinely don't know any better.

Flobee said:

If the seed phrase is recoverable without you storing it yourself... its stored by someone else and thus someone else has access to it. Be -very- cautious of trusting stuff like the above. I know nothing about this wallet, but sometimes you have to do the inconvenient (take responsibility for your own keys) in order to be secure. I would also suggest keeping your Bitcoin in a separate wallet than your coins if you insist of holding them. Any wallet that supports both makes significant security and privacy sacrifices to do both. Especially if this wallet is all about you exposing your holding to "Defi" markets lol. Be cautious

With a new bull market coming there is going to be a ton of new shiny crap to try to rob you of your holdings, often shilled by people who genuinely don't know any better.

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Nah, it's multi-factor authentication where you need to hold multiple shards of your account that can help recover it. IE things only you control and you need multiples of to recover (Google, fingerprint, retinal, Apple etc.). Most advanced tech out there in crypto to reduce the barrier of entry to people afraid of seed phrases etc. Encourage you to research the tech, it's awesome.

This article has some info on it on the MFA:

Giddy’s smart wallet is known for its unique security features for self-custody, wherein a user's private key is separated into multiple encrypted shares and linked to hardware and software that only they control. This way, the wallet remains safe and recoverable in case one share of the private key is lost or compromised because multiple shares are required to access funds, and any one share does not contain the private key.

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Ranak said:

Nah, it's multi-factor authentication where you need to hold multiple shards of your account that can help recover it. IE things only you control and you need multiples of to recover (Google, fingerprint, retinal, Apple etc.). Most advanced tech out there in crypto to reduce the barrier of entry to people afraid of seed phrases etc. Encourage you to research the tech, it's awesome.

This article has some info on it on the MFA:

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Says who? Where is the code? MFA for what? If the company behind this goes tits up (its defi, they will) can you still recover the keys? Have you asked yourself these questions? Are they easily answered by the company?

No, no they're not easily answered. It appears to be closed source so you have no way to verify any of their claims. I'm sure their marketing team that you're linking to are totally above board and would never lie about technical details.

Lets assume a few things to make the strongest defense for this application:

1. They provide a seed phrase - If they don't and you're 100% reliant on their "authentication" service then if they disappear overnight you can't access your funds. RIP. If they supply a BIP39 compliant seed phrase then you can at least recover to a different wallet. (Assuming you wrote it down... you wrote down you're seed phrase didn't you?... What service is this providing again?)
2. They actually don't have access to the key "shards"- Big assumption here as they provide no technical details that I could find. Lets say they can't access these 'shards' because they had the integrity to encrypt in a way they can't backdoor. Where are the shards stored? Are the multi-jurisdictional? Across multiple custodians? Or are they in an AWS datacenter? Dunno closed source. You'll really find out on this one the first time they're served a subpoena.

Even if the above is true (I have serious doubts) here a couple things that are definitely true:




2. The way they are storing your private keys is a massive hacker honeypot.


3. I don't see any impressive tech, I see a seed phrase, chopped into multiple pieces and encrypted behind MFA with this company acting as your guardian. You're putting a lot of trust in people that are selling you "Defi" which is a proven scam... Also how would you research the "tech" all I see is marketing blurbs

4. DeFi is a scam, did you learn nothing from the collapse of Three Arrows Capital, Genesis, and FTX? Where does the Defi yield come from? Do you know? How can they offer 17% interest? What are the risks involved? If you don't know the answers... then YOU'RE THE YIELD.

All the above aside, by all means put your coins wherever you want. This wallet is probably as good as any other. Just don't put your Bitcoin here... grow a pair and learn real self custody or you're going to get wrecked, and you're going to deserve it. (assuming you're reading this, most people wrecked most certainly won't deserve it)

Tmac said:

To get scammed via MFA people would have to know you own a ton of crypto bc it would involve hijacking your phone number via the Verizon or ATT store, by stealing the admin iPad.

People with small beans don’t have to worry as much about connected wallet theft. Big holders definitely want to consider cold-storage and security of that cold storage above all else. And then don’t tell anybody.

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You're thinking about a targeted attack, which is true. However there will be servers that house ALL of the keys for all of these wallets which the authentication service calls, thats the concern, not them phishing you personally.

Conversation about how world economic policy affects 'developing' nations via currency devaluation, how the IMF/World Bank is instrumental in creating poverty and the massive wealth divide in the world, how deflation is the -only- path forward that doesn't rob one part of the world to fund another part, and how Bitcoin plays into this, resolves the core issues, and brings abundant energy to remote parts of the world while doing it.

This is a good introduction to -why- Bitcoin is so important from a non-technical standpoint.

Mist said:

MicroStrategy's bitcoin bet produces over 300% gain for investors in 2023

MicroStrategy began buying bitcoin in 2020 and has since become a popular way for investors to get exposure to the cryptocurrency

www.cnbc.com

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Having a pretty good end to the year for us crypto degens. Will be interesting to see what the week of Jan 8 brings. You sell all your Grayscale holdings yet, Mist ?