Bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading thread

Cam019 said:

Ignore the funnymentals and talking heads. Follow price.

BTC/USD looking awesome here in my opinion. We finally have a structural shift to the upside - a reason to look at going long! My area of interest for longs would be the grey box. Keep an eye out! Don't fall for all the nonsense about crypto being more risky than any other asset class. More volatile - yes. But, volatility is not risk. If you buy anything at the wrong point - you're due for a bad time. Crypto's are just another tradable financial instrument.

Keep your risk low and have at it, if you so choose.

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Here’s a post for the ages.

This defines why so many lose money on nonsensical fads and why guys like Buffet and Munger are legends.

Tyre Kicker said:

Here’s a post for the ages.

This defines why so many lose money on nonsensical fads and why guys like Buffet and Munger are legends.

Click to expand...

I'd be interested to know what @Cam019 feels about BTC atm., as I have, like him, felt bullish about stocks and then when the stock falls have eventually had to bail.

I'm interested in his trading psychology and thinking.

I do also note that BTC charts posted never show volume, so one never knows whether the change is due to 50 or 5000 BTC being traded, and do BTC traders have access to real yime volume when trading.

gg

Garpal Gumnut said:

I'd be interested to know what @Cam019 feels about BTC atm., as I have, like him, felt bullish about stocks and then when the stock falls have eventually had to bail.

I'm interested in his trading psychology and thinking.

I do also note that BTC charts posted never show volume, so one never knows whether the change is due to 50 or 5000 BTC being traded, and do BTC traders have access to real yime volume when trading.

gg

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jog on
duc

I respect your thinking gg but I have little to no inclination investing in BTC.

We’ve all had losers but how so many have been sucked into the myriad of crypto astounds me.

However, it does show the power of the current information tech and social media use that the punishing push for all things crypto at a time of nearly free money has had on people who bought the hype ( and I assume most had NFI what they were buying) thinking they were going to buy houses and set themselves up for life in their early to mid 20s.

What’s the age old saying… if it sounds too good to be true…

It's just technical traders/maths heads thinking they know better than everyone else and getting burned. Maths and technicals can't predict black swans like the terra luna collapse.

There was a quant firm that actually went bust AFTER the pandemic lows. They are what they are.

Tyre Kicker said:

We’ve all had losers but how so many have been sucked into the myriad of crypto astounds me.

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What astounds me is this "how do you price nothing?"
The valuation of crypto is an illusion built on the enthusiasm of traders. If you are well informed & know the risk, trade it by all means. I believe those trading cryptocurrencies have freedom from effort, which is certainly appealing for many. Other forms of trading require skill & effort for better than average returns. Crypto is basically like stock in an empty company that doesn't do anything except promote the sale of its own stock. I'm just saying some traders have a clear concept of the differences between trading & speculation. Knowing the market price & underlying value places you in a position to be profitable.

Skate.

I also view crypto like a do nothing company with no hope ever of a dividend, to me making it worthless.

But, it seems large drug cartels and scammers etc need and use crypto to hide their money trails.

I think this caused a lot of demand for the crypto and then the rapid rise drew in the flying to the moon investors.

I don't know if the cartels store their money in crypto, but I hope so.

Garpal Gumnut said:

I do also note that BTC charts posted never show volume, so one never knows whether the change is due to 50 or 5000 BTC being traded, and do BTC traders have access to real yime volume when trading.

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Don't know if this is of any assistance to you gg.


PC: I know zilch about crypto. The link was sent to me with one of these whatever they are called

"Bitcoin slides below $20,000 to lowest level in 18 months"


How are you @over9k travelling in the mining of said beasts?
Does the switchable nature of being able to change which crypto is mined, help at all?
Do you still accept cash for mining or have you reverted to accepting crypto and doing the long hold thing?
Is ROI still around 12 months from a start up?
Are energy prices biting or did you lock in solar or fixed supply contract's?
Lastly, how is mining equipment availability currently?
Thanks in advance. ?

frugal.rock said:

"Bitcoin slides below $20,000 to lowest level in 18 months"

Bitcoin slides below $20,000 to lowest level in 18 months By Reuters

Bitcoin slides below $20,000 to lowest level in 18 months

au.investing.com

How are you @over9k travelling in the mining of said beasts?
Does the switchable nature of being able to change which crypto is mined, help at all?
Do you still accept cash for mining or have you reverted to accepting crypto and doing the long hold thing?
Is ROI still around 12 months from a start up?
Are energy prices biting or did you lock in solar or fixed supply contract's?
Lastly, how is mining equipment availability currently?
Thanks in advance. ?

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Switched 'em off. If the power costs to mine the coins is more than they're worth then it's cheaper to buy (and then trade) them with cash. These guys out there mining whilst unprofitable on the idea that the coins will go back up are, well, indicative of just how stupid so many crypto bro's are because it's the wrong way to go about it even if the coins DO go back up.

Current ROI would obviously depend on your power costs but even if your power costs were 0 you're still looking at a ~2 year breakeven point. Don't get me wrong, 50% return is nothing to sneeze at but A: that's at current prices (and I don't think we've seen a bottom yet) and B: there ain't any free electricity out there.

I have a big solar array and it still doesn't make sense to mine 24/7 even with a ton of solar. The only even remotely sensible way to do it now is to run the machines on a timer sync'd with your solar panels to only run them when they can be powered by solar. Outside of those hours, your costs are actually higher than your revenue.

That then obviously extends the time until breakeven out even further so realistically, unless you have some other way of improving your power efficiency down to almost nothing (bigger solar arrays that charge a battery during the day that you can run of a night or something) mining is a complete fool's errand at this point.

But even doing that, you then have to add the costs of the panels, batteries etc etc to the mining rigs themselves and pool it all together to calculate your rate of return and once you do ALL that your numbers start to look very very different. Then we have to factor in depreciation of the gear just to really rub salt into the wound. Factoring in depreciation, much of this stuff (depending on what you own obviously) has been losing money since april.

And that's at current prices.

So yeah, realistically speaking, the only thing that will save miners now is some kind of price increase. If that doesn't happen, we're going to see a slow melt of miners just one by one admitting defeat and selling their gear off.

The only faint glimmer of hope is seasonality - crypto, like energy demand, fluctuates with the seasons, and midyear/northern hemisphere summer is usually when it dips. Whether this is simply because everyone are out actually doing stuff and not stuck indoors trying to find something to do/think about (like trade crypto) I don't know, but it is what it is.

So yeah, if we don't see a late year/winter rebound this year, crypto's pretty much done for IMHO.

you can't mine BTC directly, it's dominated by huge warehouses full of ASICs these days. you can however sell your processing power on a hashpower marketplace that pays out in BTC, which is what i'm doing at the moment. i could mine eth, flux, ergo etc. directly, but i don't want any of that stuff right now, just want to accumulate BTC in times like these, so the hashpower marketplace seems to make the most sense.

i built myself a PC with an RTX 3080 a couple months ago, not specifically for mining. but i figured since i have the hardware anyway, i might as well use it to start a slow trickle of BTC dripping into my wallet whenever i'm not using it for other stuff, just in case crypto takes off again in a few years. i have no idea whether it will soar again or die out completely, but can't hurt to get a small amount of exposure in case it does shoot up dramatically again at some point, as it's done in the past.

IMHO at this point GPU mining is totally not worth it if you're regularly exchanging the coins for fiat to pay your expenses and/or building a new rig specifically to mine crypto and nothing else. under current conditions a single RTX 3080 essentially "mines" ~40 USD worth of BTC, costing ~40 SGD in electricity every month. it was much more viable a few months ago when an RTX 3080 was capable of generating ~200 USD worth of BTC every month, but those days are gone now.

but if you already own the hardware and intend to hodl the mined coins and gamble (yes i do view it as a straight up gamble) on future price appreciation, then any margin above zero is potentially still viable. if nothing else, you can use your PC as a heater during winter. it also avoids having to go thru an exchange, a potential point of failure in times like these. i mean i still go thru the hashpower marketplace, which is also a potential point of failure, but those who are pool mining can have the coins go straight into self-custody.

i'm mostly doing it for the learning experience and glacial acquisition of a small stack of coins, in case crypto takes off again and GPU mining becomes more viable. i don't need to sell the coins to pay my expenses, and i don't need to worry about ROI, as i primarily built this PC for doing other things, the fact that it can mine while i'm sleeping or otherwise not using it is just a side benefit.

But if your power costs to mine it are higher than the coin is worth then you're better off just buying it with cash - spend $1 to buy a coin in cash vs $1.01 in electricity to mine it... doesn't make sense.

Skate said:

What astounds me is this "how do you price nothing?"
The valuation of crypto is an illusion built on the enthusiasm of traders. If you are well informed & know the risk, trade it by all means. I believe those trading cryptocurrencies have freedom from effort, which is certainly appealing for many. Other forms of trading require skill & effort for better than average returns. Crypto is basically like stock in an empty company that doesn't do anything except promote the sale of its own stock. I'm just saying some traders have a clear concept of the differences between trading & speculation. Knowing the market price & underlying value places you in a position to be profitable.

Skate.

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Or to put this in layman's terms, it's purely narrative (confidence) driven. Hence why that terra luna run and then collapse has wrecked the whole "sector" because crypto depends on confidence and the ability of a hedge fund to collapse a currency is a hell of a blow to confidence.

So yeah, if there is going to be a recovery, it's going to be a very very long and slow one now. This kind of blow to confidence does not simply get reversed overnight.

Musing:

Energy has dropped precipitously in the last 10ish days. I wonder how much of this has been due to mining rigs being turned off after crypto dropped in the same way and is therefore a huge amount of electricity demand dropping literally instantly. It currently just looks like coincidence but it may not be.

over9k said:

But if your power costs to mine it are higher than the coin is worth then you're better off just buying it with cash - spend $1 to buy a coin in cash vs $1.01 in electricity to mine it... doesn't make sense.

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at the moment it's still profitable for me (though only barely) - it basically boils down to swapping 40 SGD (=~29 USD) of electricity for 40 USD of BTC per month at current levels (realistically probably something like 30 and 30 since i don't mine 24 hours a day). i'm not including the cost of the hardware itself since i built it for doing other things. obviously with only a single RTX 3080 the numbers are tiny, so it's more about knowledge acquisition than BTC acquisition at this point, in case it becomes viable again in a few years, as i only just got into mining a couple months ago.

if i stopped doing it then due to lack of involvement i'd probably end up stopping reading/watching what more experienced miners have to say and learning how they go about doing the math, how they select components and build rigs etc. (i do consider myself proficient at building regular PCs, but an out and out mining rig is not quite the same thing), leaving me unprepared to scale up if/when there is some inkling of a recovery. and if it ends up dying out, no biggie, it'll have cost me a dollar a day in electricity, i won't even notice.

Sharkman said:

if i stopped doing it then due to lack of involvement i'd probably end up stopping reading/watching what more experienced miners have to say and learning how they go about doing the math, how they select components and build rigs etc.

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Found an interesting article that discusses BTC mining economics. The modelling used includes cost, network and ASIC assumptions with the final calculation showing one Bitcoin mined with one ASIC miner costs roughly $32,000 over the course of five years. $0.05kwh for electricity would be a challenge for most. With Bitcoin currently trading at $18,400 as of this moment, imagine the cost and scale required for a mining operation to just break even.

"The model, then, looks like this:

Hashes required to mine one Bitcoin:

= Network hash rate * Seconds per day / Bitcoin mined per day (including fee)

= 175 EH/s * 86,400 seconds / 918 BTC = ~16,471 EH / BTC

Time taken for an ASIC miner to mine one Bitcoin:

= ~16,471 EH * 10^6 / (100 TH/s * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365 days) = ~5.22 years

Capital expenses (Capex):

• Bitcoin mined per ASIC lifetime = 2.5 years / ~5.22 years = ~0.48 BTC
• Effective price per Bitcoin = Price of ASIC miner / Bitcoins mined in its lifetime

= $10,858 / ~0.48 BTC = ~$22,684

Operational expenses (Opex):

• Electricity cost per Bitcoin = Time required to mine one Bitcoin * Energy consumption * Cost = ~5.22 years * 365 days * 24 hours * 3,400 * $0.05 / 1,000 = ~$7,778
• Cooling and other overheads per Bitcoin = 20% of electricity cost = ~$1,556

Total cost of production per Bitcoin: = Capex + electricity + other Opex per Bitcoin

= ~$22,684 + ~$7,778 + ~$1,556

= ~$32,018

Note: Totals have been rounded. Figures are approximate.

Thus, in our hypothetical operation, we produced one Bitcoin with one ASIC miner at a cost of roughly $32,000 over the course of five years."

GPU prices are supposedly down, which may be an indication of the state of the mining market?

Trader X said:

Found an interesting article that discusses BTC mining economics. The modelling used includes cost, network and ASIC assumptions with the final calculation showing one Bitcoin mined with one ASIC miner costs roughly $32,000 over the course of five years. $0.05kwh for electricity would be a challenge for most. With Bitcoin currently trading at $18,400 as of this moment, imagine the cost and scale required for a mining operation to just break even.

"The model, then, looks like this:

Hashes required to mine one Bitcoin:

= Network hash rate * Seconds per day / Bitcoin mined per day (including fee)

= 175 EH/s * 86,400 seconds / 918 BTC = ~16,471 EH / BTC

Time taken for an ASIC miner to mine one Bitcoin:

= ~16,471 EH * 10^6 / (100 TH/s * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365 days) = ~5.22 years

Capital expenses (Capex):

• Bitcoin mined per ASIC lifetime = 2.5 years / ~5.22 years = ~0.48 BTC
• Effective price per Bitcoin = Price of ASIC miner / Bitcoins mined in its lifetime

= $10,858 / ~0.48 BTC = ~$22,684

Operational expenses (Opex):

• Electricity cost per Bitcoin = Time required to mine one Bitcoin * Energy consumption * Cost = ~5.22 years * 365 days * 24 hours * 3,400 * $0.05 / 1,000 = ~$7,778
• Cooling and other overheads per Bitcoin = 20% of electricity cost = ~$1,556

Total cost of production per Bitcoin: = Capex + electricity + other Opex per Bitcoin

= ~$22,684 + ~$7,778 + ~$1,556

= ~$32,018

Note: Totals have been rounded. Figures are approximate.

Thus, in our hypothetical operation, we produced one Bitcoin with one ASIC miner at a cost of roughly $32,000 over the course of five years."

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just out of curiosity (and also for the mental practice i guess, since i'm fairly new to the mining scene) i did some rough sums for selling hashpower in exchange for BTC as a comparison.

the going rate for hashpower on average over the past month is ~0.75 BTC/TH/day (ethash), so to generate 1 BTC in a day requires ~1.33 TH.

now a single RTX 3080 is rather inefficient for mining purposes so take a rack of 6x RTX 3060 Ti, which i've heard is one of the more efficient mining setups.

such a rack generates about 360 MH and each one sucks down about 120W, add another 100W for overheads (mobo, CPU, fans etc.) and * 1.2 (lost in the AC -> DC conversion) so call it around 1 KW.

a new 3060 Ti is ~500 USD these days, if it's a dedicated mining rig then you're probably using the cheapest mobo, CPU, storage etc. you can find (you do want a good PSU though), so call it ~3500 USD for the whole rig (again i've only ever built regular PCs myself, not dedicated mining rigs, so i could be out here).

that rack will take 1.33 TH/360 MH =~3700 days to generate 1 BTC, but a GPU isn't going to last 10 years. i've seen experienced miners do their calcs based on a 4 year lifespan and assume they can sell it used for ~100 USD afterwards. if you assume the other components are totally worthless after 4 years (which shouldn't be the case, mining doesn't really need latest gen mobo/CPU/storage and those generally last quite a while) that's 6 * (500 - 100) + 500 = 2900 USD to generate ~0.4 BTC over 4 years.

365 * 4 * 24 = ~35000 KWh of electricity, at the same 0.05c/KWh used in the article, that's 1750 USD in power costs, 4650 USD total to generate 0.4 BTC over 4 years, or 11,625 USD to generate 1.

of course there are a lot of unknowns and moving variables here, eth mining going away at some point would be the big one. but who's to say another coin won't rise up and take its place. if you're selling hashpower the buyers will figure out which coins are the most profitable, direct the hashpower there, and the going BTC rate for purchasing hashpower should reflect that more or less.

could be some inaccuracies in the above though. still fairly new to this stuff.

Sharkman said:

now a single RTX 3080 is rather inefficient for mining purposes so take a rack of 6x RTX 3060 Ti, which i've heard is one of the more efficient mining setups.

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actually the difference isn't quite as pronounced as i first thought. my single RTX 3080 pulls about 300W (from the wall, measured using a wattmeter) for ~100 MH. i do have a highly efficient platinum plus PSU though, when building PCs for personal use/enjoyment i always chuck in top quality components. so that 6x 3060 Ti rack might be pulling somewhat less power than i factored in above, especially if whoever built the rig used a good quality PSU (which should last way longer than a GPU). not sure, never built such a rig myself.