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Ask me any"Dumb questions" you have about crypto

Anything related to bitcoin, crypto, blockchain

TrillAmbition

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Ask me anything you were too afraid to ask about cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/ethereum/blockchain/security

I have been in the cryptocurrency space since 2015, since then, I have notice that during bull markets there is always an influx of new people interested in crypto do to the exposure new aths cause. Often new people have no place to ask their questions or are drowning in broinfluencers trying to sell them on some "rich quick" token.

So please, ask away!
 
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CivilianCone41

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Ask me anything you were too afraid to ask about cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/ethereum/blockchain/security

I have been in the cryptocurrency space since 2015, since then, I have notice that during bull markets there is always an influx of new people interested in crypto do to the exposure new aths cause. Often new people have no place to ask their questions or are drowning in broinfluencers trying to sell them on some "rich quick" token.

So please, ask away!
I'll bite. I am a BTC hodler with some Eth as well. What would you say are the best bets (gambles) one can take on the altcoins to make the biggest gains with throwaway money between say now and February?

I would say I have a moderate understanding as i've been in the space for a little. Curious to hear your opinion on which altcoins? thanks
 

Kevin88660

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Ask me anything you were too afraid to ask about cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/ethereum/blockchain/security

I have been in the cryptocurrency space since 2015, since then, I have notice that during bull markets there is always an influx of new people interested in crypto do to the exposure new aths cause. Often new people have no place to ask their questions or are drowning in broinfluencers trying to sell them on some "rich quick" token.

So please, ask away!
Are most coin’s parabolic rise due to whales and vested big players’s pumping?

There has been research about btc being pumped by tether printing in 2017.

There has been article writing about ten wallets owning 70 percent of shiba inu token.

If you look at most infrastructure layer one coins that rise to the top of the table today, these so called ether they have a gigantic market cap but relative much few address holders.

It seems like unlike regulated industry in which improved fundamental leads to price discovery, big crypto players seem to pump their coin price up as a form of marketing.
 

Devampre

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I'd like to hear a little more about your story and would like your opinion on something

1. Did you start with mining or trading?

2. What are you mostly focused on now?

3. Also, what are your thoughts on GameFi?
 
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100k

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I have $10, what coin should I buy to make $10,000 or more in less than 3 months. Go.
 

TrillAmbition

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I'll bite. I am a BTC hodler with some Eth as well. What would you say are the best bets (gambles) one can take on the altcoins to make the biggest gains with throwaway money between say now and February?

I would say I have a moderate understanding as i've been in the space for a little. Curious to hear your opinion on which altcoins? thanks
I really don't like to do the altcoin casino for price action since I tend to look for undervalued sectors that can survive multiple marketcycles. That said, here is my 3 cents:

I like to break down all the categories for different sub crypto use cases.

Boomer coins - OG coins that have survived different market cycles. Litecoin and BCH really should eventually have their own run. Historically they like to oscillate on the btc ratio. So historically their time will come.

Computer utility tokens- Think storage and computing. So Storj, sia, filecoin etc.

Privacy - I believe this is one of the most undervalued sectors. Monero's transactions are 10.4% of bitcoin's daily transactions but the matkercap is under 5 billion. There already are some problems with blacklisting of bitcoin addresses and UTXO taint.


I will add a bonus one since I think DEFI is really hot as a topic but it is really undervalued in the long term. AAVE has an institutional play that big players want to get into since there is such a need for liquidity in crypto and the big boys are getting fomo.



Are most coin’s parabolic rise due to whales and vested big players’s pumping?

There has been research about btc being pumped by tether printing in 2017.

There has been article writing about ten wallets owning 70 percent of shiba inu token.

If you look at most infrastructure layer one coins that rise to the top of the table today, these so called ether they have a gigantic market cap but relative much few address holders.

It seems like unlike regulated industry in which improved fundamental leads to price discovery, big crypto players seem to pump their coin price up as a form of marketing.

The fear that that exchanges have been operating at a fractional reserve has been an ongoing fear since before mt gox. For good reason since there have been many exchanges that have operated at a fractional reserve and that leads to users losing funds when their scheme collapses. Tether has been a lot more transparent with their proof of funds. They hold cash equivalent hodlings for their cash reserves which worry me since this adds systemic risk if the real world market outside of crypto also has issues (they hold commercial paper, junk bonds , cd blah blah. ) It isn't as bad in my opinion as it is portrayed. I believe that they are secretive on some parts since they enable liquidity to a lot of exchanges when bank accounts would close and nobody would give exchanges a bank account. So they operate as a shadowy middle layer.

I am not a fan of a lot of the meme tokens. I had doge way back in the day. I got tired of keeping up with a lot of the random projects last market cycle. There has always been coins that come and go during market cycles. Back in 2015 there were a lot of random altcoins which where just heavy marketing and nothing added forks that didn't survive the bear market. There were masternode coins that never survived. There were NFTs on top of bitcoin back in the day. There is a lot of "history doesn't repeat itself but sure rhymes" to a lot of crypto.
I will tell you that since most coins are on public chains the distribution is really easy to follow.

I honestly missed out on a lot of the "ethereum" killer projects. I was around during the early ethereum days and saw the project grow really big. I saw the DAO hack and fork that created ETC. I don't find a lot of the solutions out there interesting. Many like BSC are centralized and only have 21 nodes. I am interested in a couple of chains like xdai chain and polygon (matic) since they offer a right now solution for lower txs cost in a more "decentralized" way. But at the end of the day, most of these chains are really just offloading what ethereum does into their own smaller used chain which is cheaper or more centralized. Ethereum's virtual machine (EVM) is the goto world standard for smart contracts. Every chain seems to be compatible with it. The world of tomorrow will have many chains but I am biased and believe ETH will be the top dog for a long time to come. You can easily bridge assets from one chain to another now.So all chains win.

I will say that the biggest industry innovation in smart contracts would be a trustless private smart contract platform.

The industry is way more regulated now. I miss the real wild west days. There was a time that you could launch revolutionary tech, crowd fund it and create an exchange and nobody would bother you.Now people go to jail or get fined for not adhering to outdated regulation that has been retrofitted for technology which does not play well with borders when the internet has no borders.
There will always be pump and dumps, there will always be marketers selling shit. Same as "buy my course" bro marketers etc. The more popular a technology gets the more you will have scammers and snake oil salesmen. Don't be a money chaser and look for building value


I'd like to hear a little more about your story and would like your opinion on something

1. Did you start with mining or trading?

2. What are you mostly focused on now?

3. Also, what are your thoughts on GameFi?

I started with developing. I wasn't interested in the money for dollars. I was dumbfounded that there finally was open source money and it allowed digital wealth in a way that nobody could stop. I have a pretty big bias to free markets and believe that Keynesian economics create more problems as evident by 2008. I think austrian economics has more merits and the markets need to let themselves be the real force behind growth and decay. Bitcoin has those economic politics hard coded in its existence. Many of those early bitcoiners were liberterian for a reason. They saw bitcoin as a power dynamic shifting technology which could take power away from centralized money printers. This is what drew a lot of the early folks.

I think the market is ready to finally bridge digital ownership to physical objects. I have had some ideas for real estate on ethereum since 2016 but the market was just not there yet and there was some less than clear words coming from the sec (I had lawyers look into it). NFTs have their real power in digital titles and reits and that is soemething that I have been waiting to get back to building. Another thing that I am curious on is public chain analysis for trading / data. There already is trading quants who analyse bitcoin in/out flows to exchanges to predict short term price volatility. Facebook built billion dollar business on your user data. There is way more valuable data on public chains. I think privacy coins are really important for those reasons .

I am not much of a gamer so will tell you this is one sector I am not super firsthand on. But I do have some out the box view on the metaverse in general. The last 2 years has seen an explosion in money printing. So this is unlimited liquidity. Inflation is about to get a lot worse and CPI does not accurately reflect that. "Income inequality" really should be "Inflation ruined the standard of living". I see that as the biggest asset buble for everything of all time. So if you own real estate it will go to the moon. But there are many people who will never get to own it now and will be priced out from a lot of what people used to be able to get. So there will be a large influx of life long renters who will spend most of their income since they have no point to saving or investing (in their eyes). Stuck in a lifelong hourly job with no outlook in romantic partner, families or home ownerhsip they will become the ultimate consumer.

Enter the metaverse. With VR the escapism that virtual worlds will bring will be huge. Crammed in a tiny apartment they will spend real world money to own digital real estate in a video game.

I know that is a depressing view but I really do think there will be a new class of ultimate consumers that have been left behind by the explosive changes in the world of tomorrow.
 

TrillAmbition

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I have $10, what coin should I buy to make $10,000 or more in less than 3 months. Go.
I don't like short term plays unless I am looking at a trading opportunity. I know I sound like I am fathering people when I say this but I really rather throw $1,000 at a project which has a good value proposition that I know I can walk away from for 5 years and it will still be there. Than a $10 BSC dog coin that might make me $10,000 if [INSERT BUNCH OF THINGS OUT OF MY CONTROL] happen and I [Time THE PUMP AND GET OUT AT THE EXACT TIME TO NOT BE CAUGHT HOLDIGN THE BAG]

Part of the reason I don't like short gambles like that is that my first market cycle I was also eyeing all these random coins that were going up and down like crazy. It just takes a couple of market cycles to realize chasing hype can end up getting less returns than "blue chips"

I get made fun for my boomer take in some degen crypto circles but many of them haven't been through enough cycles.
 
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StrikingViper69

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Where is the data stored?

So with crypto, there is a ledger. That ledger has to exist as 1s and 0s on a computer, or multiple computers, somewhere.

I understand that miners validate the ledger, but the ledger itself, is this a text file on several miners computers, is it in the RAM of several miners as a file... where is it?
 

OleksiyRybakov

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Do you have any experience with crypto lending? If so, what is your opinion on KuCoin?
 

TrillAmbition

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Where is the data stored?

So with crypto, there is a ledger. That ledger has to exist as 1s and 0s on a computer, or multiple computers, somewhere.

I understand that miners validate the ledger, but the ledger itself, is this a text file on several miners computers, is it in the RAM of several miners as a file... where is it?
Short answer: A copy of the full blockchain is stored on every node.

Long answer:
Imagine you, me and 8 other people are going to have a spreadsheet we use to keep track of who owes money to whom in our friend's group. Prior to stuff like google docs we might each have a copy of the file on our computers and we would each need to update it when an event happens and someone owes or pays back money. Eventually that spread sheet might look different on different people's machine. Say you were out sick for a couple of weeks, which spreadsheet do you copy from and how do you prove that the information on it is correct if you don't trust that friend?

Imagine if there was a way to verify mathematically that anything added to the spread sheet was agreed upon by most people in the friend group. All you would have to do is add up the check and they would equal 0 which meant everything was legit. So you know can copy that file from any of your friends and verify the check buy adding the math yourself.

Proof of work used in bitcoin helps to create a cryptographically proven chain of validity that helps anyone reconstruct the history of all bitcoin transactions in a way that you don't have to trust one specific person. Proof of work means there was a mathematically proven computational work to calculate each verification. This proof builds upon the prior proof and ends up creating a proof chain which would be impossible to recreate from scratch as it would require infinitely more computing power than the bitcoin network has in miners. This gives you reassurance that the longest chain couldn't have possibly been a recreated chain since it is not realistic to recompute all those proofs and end up having a longer chain that bticoin as bitcoin's chain keeps getting longer and longer as more proofs are created (proofs are just the nonce that solves the proof of work in new blocks). This is one reason that proof of work is seen as more secure that proof of stake when it comes to bootstrapping a network.

The blockchain file is that master list of all bitcoin transactions ever. If you are on windows it would live in
%APPDATA%\Bitcoin\blocks\

Inside of this directory you have a bunch of files with the naming convention blkNNNNN.dat
Each of these are bitcoin blocks in raw netowork format which are seperated into 128 MiB per file. These files are recalculated from the original block all the way to the latest block to have the "most up to date" version of the blockchain state (so think the most up to date version of that spread sheet from earlier). This state has every UTXO transaction (every coin people can spend ) and what addresses they belong to (and who those coins belong to). This is stored in a database called chainstate database which makes indexing easier and faster. That way you can just start using bitcoin from the last time you updated the chain instead of recalculating the chain from scratch every time.
Note: When you verify the chain proofs the math is a lot easier and faster than generating the proofs in the first place. So mining a new block is super computationally intensive but verify that the solved block is valid is super easy and can be done on any machine with no real computational cost.

Originally every node was a validating node (So node that verifies the new transactions and makes sure they are valid ) and had a full copy of the blockchain. This takes up a lot of space so now you have light nodes (they rely on remote full nodes with the actual file) and pruned nodes (usually pruned to they trim the blockchain db to only the parts relevant to your coins).
So when you use a light wallet like on your phone there are three ways to interact with a blcokchain when you might not have it.
1. SPV (simple payment verification). This is a way to get the short version of the proofs we talked about earlier from a ton of different nodes (by asking them for block 125,321 for example) and then calculating all the verification of those proofs to make sure they are legit. This uses a special filter called a bloom filter which let's you only have to ask for specific blocks which might affect your coins. This cuts down on the time needed to ask everyone for blocks and to recalculate the verification of the proofs.
2. Remote nodes
You have your mobile app connect to a remote computer which has the full blockchain. You have to trust this machine to give you the real answers since it can trick you by providing you fake data and you would not be aware. It used to be that most users ran their own remote nodes but as bitcoin got more popular a lot of the newer users would put trust in remote nodes and not run their own nodes.
3. Letting someone else hold your coins
This is what a lot of users are doing. They buy coins on coinbase for example. So they are not interacting with the blockchain at all and they have to trust coinbase to hold their funds, verify new balances and to send transactions both on chain (throught he bitcoin network) and offchain (moving their amounts on their internal database without interacting through bitcoin)

if this isn't clear enough I can elaborate more and try to explain it in a different way.
Do you have any experience with crypto lending? If so, what is your opinion on KuCoin?
I have not used KuCoin but have heard of people I know using it. I personally am more interested in the trustless lending platforms that are common in ethereum. I am very biased when it comes to "Not your keys not your coins". That said I think that there will be a lot more offerings for cashflow generating yields out of crypto and while I might not like the idea of trusting a third party I think that market will be huge in the future.
 
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StrikingViper69

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Short answer: A copy of the full blockchain is stored on every node.

Long answer:
Imagine you, me and 8 other people are going to have a spreadsheet we use to keep track of who owes money to whom in our friend's group. Prior to stuff like google docs we might each have a copy of the file on our computers and we would each need to update it when an event happens and someone owes or pays back money. Eventually that spread sheet might look different on different people's machine. Say you were out sick for a couple of weeks, which spreadsheet do you copy from and how do you prove that the information on it is correct if you don't trust that friend?

Imagine if there was a way to verify mathematically that anything added to the spread sheet was agreed upon by most people in the friend group. All you would have to do is add up the check and they would equal 0 which meant everything was legit. So you know can copy that file from any of your friends and verify the check buy adding the math yourself.

Proof of work used in bitcoin helps to create a cryptographically proven chain of validity that helps anyone reconstruct the history of all bitcoin transactions in a way that you don't have to trust one specific person. Proof of work means there was a mathematically proven computational work to calculate each verification. This proof builds upon the prior proof and ends up creating a proof chain which would be impossible to recreate from scratch as it would require infinitely more computing power than the bitcoin network has in miners. This gives you reassurance that the longest chain couldn't have possibly been a recreated chain since it is not realistic to recompute all those proofs and end up having a longer chain that bticoin as bitcoin's chain keeps getting longer and longer as more proofs are created (proofs are just the nonce that solves the proof of work in new blocks). This is one reason that proof of work is seen as more secure that proof of stake when it comes to bootstrapping a network.

The blockchain file is that master list of all bitcoin transactions ever. If you are on windows it would live in
%APPDATA%\Bitcoin\blocks\

Inside of this directory you have a bunch of files with the naming convention blkNNNNN.dat
Each of these are bitcoin blocks in raw netowork format which are seperated into 128 MiB per file. These files are recalculated from the original block all the way to the latest block to have the "most up to date" version of the blockchain state (so think the most up to date version of that spread sheet from earlier). This state has every UTXO transaction (every coin people can spend ) and what addresses they belong to (and who those coins belong to). This is stored in a database called chainstate database which makes indexing easier and faster. That way you can just start using bitcoin from the last time you updated the chain instead of recalculating the chain from scratch every time.
Note: When you verify the chain proofs the math is a lot easier and faster than generating the proofs in the first place. So mining a new block is super computationally intensive but verify that the solved block is valid is super easy and can be done on any machine with no real computational cost.

Originally every node was a validating node (So node that verifies the new transactions and makes sure they are valid ) and had a full copy of the blockchain. This takes up a lot of space so now you have light nodes (they rely on remote full nodes with the actual file) and pruned nodes (usually pruned to they trim the blockchain db to only the parts relevant to your coins).
So when you use a light wallet like on your phone there are three ways to interact with a blcokchain when you might not have it.
1. SPV (simple payment verification). This is a way to get the short version of the proofs we talked about earlier from a ton of different nodes (by asking them for block 125,321 for example) and then calculating all the verification of those proofs to make sure they are legit. This uses a special filter called a bloom filter which let's you only have to ask for specific blocks which might affect your coins. This cuts down on the time needed to ask everyone for blocks and to recalculate the verification of the proofs.
2. Remote nodes
You have your mobile app connect to a remote computer which has the full blockchain. You have to trust this machine to give you the real answers since it can trick you by providing you fake data and you would not be aware. It used to be that most users ran their own remote nodes but as bitcoin got more popular a lot of the newer users would put trust in remote nodes and not run their own nodes.
3. Letting someone else hold your coins
This is what a lot of users are doing. They buy coins on coinbase for example. So they are not interacting with the blockchain at all and they have to trust coinbase to hold their funds, verify new balances and to send transactions both on chain (throught he bitcoin network) and offchain (moving their amounts on their internal database without interacting through bitcoin)

if this isn't clear enough I can elaborate more and try to explain it in a different way.

I have not used KuCoin but have heard of people I know using it. I personally am more interested in the trustless lending platforms that are common in ethereum. I am very biased when it comes to "Not your keys not your coins". That said I think that there will be a lot more offerings for cashflow generating yields out of crypto and while I might not like the idea of trusting a third party I think that market will be huge in the future.

That is an awesome answer, thank you!

My next question... these files exist in some format on someone's computer.

Let's say, theoretically, I own a bitcoin mine/farm that is 75% (or some other percentage) of a network.

A lot of those files for the ledger are on my machines.

Is it possible in someway for me to spoof, or change data, to mess with the ledger?
 

mksa22

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I have been in the crypto world for a short time and I need advice from those of you who are mining cryptocurrencies.



I am going to sell a business soon, I was thinking of buying ASIC machines to mine ... some of the most important factors that affect profitability that I have seen are


- Cost of electricity: I live in a place where electricity would not be expensive.

- Taxes : I live in a fairly friendly country and would not pay taxes on either mining or selling.


But I have also seen that bitcoin miners do not seem to be very profitable and the only one that makes sense would be the E9 that mines coins with the etereum protocol.



Imagine that you have a budget of $600.000 and the options are


- 50 Antminer S19 XP (140TH/S) machines making $40 a day


- Invest the money in bitcoin and hold it.


- The last option which I think is the most profitable would be to mine solo.... What chance would I have with these machines to mine bitcoin solo?
 

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