BITCOIN

onomatopoeia99

Scottex99 said:

onomatopoeia99 said:

At the current price it would be tempting to sell 0.14 BTC to use up my CGT allowance, as it effectively cost me nothing, since I mined it a decade ago and the waste heat from the GPU reduced the amount of central heating I needed (marginal difference in gas and electric heating costs aside).

Since I've never bought or sold crypto I don't even know which exchanges are good and won't cause a problem when the money lands in my current account.

Interesting you mined so long ago and still have access to the coins, but have done nothing in the space since?

I ran a GPU miner (nothing more sophisticated than the computer I used to play games) and used an auto-switching pool that paid out in BTC (remember those? Middlecoin etc), until the GPU blew up. By then the BTC price had fallen a lot from the dizzy heights of $1000, so I basically forgot about it and I felt it wasn't worth starting mining again due to the electricity cost vs difficulty increases combined with the falling price.  I had been doing it mainly as a technical challenge trying to get the most out of the GPU by tweaking the settings both in the miner software and tinkering with the GPU clock and voltages and hoped I'd be able to make a few hundred quid out of it, but I ended up needing to buy another card.

When things went bananas at the end of 2017 and $10k was reached I found the old hard disk with the wallet.dat file on it and copied it to a new installation (and multiple other places to back it up).  So I've been HODLing, primarily due to inertia. I think what I have was worth around about 200 quid when the GPU blew up in 2014.  More like £30,000 now, so a 150x increase, which is a lot better than any of the funds, equities or investment trusts I have in my ISA or SIPP have manged.

I honestly don't know what I'd do "in the space" now, since even with the hashing capability per joule of something like the latest antminers, I can't see how it's profitable to mine unless you get free electric. Even then I'm not convinced the purchase price of the miner would ever be repaid.


 

Scottex99

Very cool.

i didn’t really mean mining specifically but yeah obviously the days of doing it on a laptop are long gone.

More interested that you didn’t go buy any more or do some trading at any point. Might have been a good thing as you could have ended up in Mt Gox anyway.

How did you find out about BTC at the time?

Enjoy the cash once you get it converted 

onomatopoeia99

Scottex99 said:

How did you find out about BTC at the time?

Almost certainly "The Register" (IT news website), though at the end of 2013 / start of 2014 it was reaching the mainstream media.  In real life I'm a software engineer.

MeteredOut

onomatopoeia99 said:

Scottex99 said:

How did you find out about BTC at the time?

Almost certainly "The Register" (IT news website), though at the end of 2013 / start of 2014 it was reaching the mainstream media.  In real life I'm a software engineer.

I remember those days. I was close to getting involved in some mining but didn't bother. I'd already previously spent time setting up a few servers searching for little green men, and (unfortunately) vowed to not waste any more time of stuff like that!

 (search for SETI@home, for those interested).

onomatopoeia99

MeteredOut said:

onomatopoeia99 said:

Scottex99 said:

How did you find out about BTC at the time?

Almost certainly "The Register" (IT news website), though at the end of 2013 / start of 2014 it was reaching the mainstream media.  In real life I'm a software engineer.

I remember those days. I was close to getting involved in some mining but didn't bother. I'd already previously spent time setting up a few servers searching for little green men, and (unfortunately) vowed to not waste any more time of stuff like that!

 (search for SETI@home, for those interested).

I used to run the SETI @ home client as well, before it moved to BOINC !

Scottex99

Lets call it $60k.

ETF inflow numbers are very good, which is the main narrative right now.

Paves the way for ETH versions too in the future, which can only be a good thing.

Surprisingly high prices across the board pre halvening. I'd expect they should drop down before that event and then a possible very big rally afterwards.

AND retail fomo hasn't really appeared from what I've seen either, they are always last in the door anyway

MeteredOut

MeteredOut said:

It used to be that we'd have to check a finance sites to see if BTC was trending down or up. Now I just need to check on those sites to see if its gone down, and know it's gone up if there's a notification of a post to this thread.

Such is the weird and wonderful world of crypto

 

Scottex99

Yeah funny, it’s a Bitcoin thread so maybe…. I can talk about the Bitcoin price? Hit 60k now 

originator

MeteredOut said:

MeteredOut said:

It used to be that we'd have to check a finance sites to see if BTC was trending down or up. Now I just need to check on those sites to see if its gone down, and know it's gone up if there's a notification of a post to this thread.

Such is the weird and wonderful world of crypto

 

curious, would bullion by post be classed as a finance site? That's where I have always checked the rise and fall of bitcoin and it appears to be in real time.....

MeteredOut

Scottex99 said:

Yeah funny, it’s a Bitcoin thread so maybe…. I can talk about the Bitcoin price? Hit 60k now 

I just find it amusing that in a world where the proponents of crypto tout it as a technology that is going to change the world, its the prices changes that drive so much of discussion.  

EDIT: Not scientific, but ChatGPT says this (based on a model that is a few years old).

You
If you were to review an online forum about bitcoin, what percentage of the chat would be about the price rather than anything else?

ChatGPT

It's difficult to provide an exact percentage without specific data, as the composition of discussions can vary widely depending on the forum, its members, and current events. However, in many online forums about Bitcoin, discussions about price tend to dominate, especially during periods of significant price fluctuations or when there is increased media attention on Bitcoin's price movements.

That said, there are usually still substantial discussions about the underlying technology, such as blockchain technology, mining, scalability, security, and various developments within the Bitcoin ecosystem. The proportion of price-related discussions versus technology-related discussions may vary from forum to forum and can also depend on factors like the overall sentiment of the market at any given time.

A rough estimate might be that discussions about price make up a significant portion, perhaps around 60-70%, while discussions about the underlying technology and other aspects of Bitcoin make up the remaining 30-40%. However, this is just a general estimate and could vary widely depending on the specific forum and circumstances.