QFT

On a non-market related note

I've picked up a new wallet, a Keystone. Works like an Elipal, fully air gapped and communicating only via QR.

It's a bit awkward to use compared to a Ledger.  It's one of the QR style wallets recommended by MetaMask and works well, but does require a camera. It works with some mobile wallets, still communicating only via QR.

It offers some transaction decoding displayed directly on the device, as opposed to blind signing on a Ledger.

While it is advertised as completely airgapped and updates only via Micro-SD, it does allow data transfer via USB, which is a bit of a letdown as this was not advertised. This can be disabled in settings.

Disassembly will erase the device, which is definitely not a feature Ledgers have, as I have had both of mine apart before without needing to reset them.

Wallet choices are far more limited with it than a Ledger or Trezor.

Their cold card (included in some bundles) is awkward to setup and the screws are too long, protruding slightly from the rear face of the cards, but still quite solid.  I would not pay full price for it though (which I don't have to, as Ledger owners get a discount store wide).

Apple is opening up their NFC chip for crypto transactions. Lightning Network?

If it's with Circle, probably USDC via Polygon, XLM, or a similar fast, cheap chain.

With talk of building a US bitcoin reserve. How does all the bitcoin not end up in the hands of .gov over time via seizure ?   How many generations do you think will be able to manage their funds before they are all lost due to mistakes or hardware failures?   The more I look at this I don't know how its sustainable long long term. Are bitcoin reserves and bitcoin market funds the antithesis of bitcoin?

Large reserves could end up being a huge problem for PoS chains as they could have a significant effect on governance.

With PoW, it's more an issue of market manipulation.  

Either way, the government owning large quantities is counter to the idea of decentralization. It's all about depriving them of their hegemonic control.

Does anyone know if XRP has an ETF?  Would like to get in on the next run up.

You can buy XRP direct on Coinbase

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What’s going on with TRX? Up a bunch today and still have some from 2017/2018.

bunch of solana shit coin whales are bridging over to tron gamble because there’s almost zero edge left on sol

Morgan Stanley Becomes First Wall Street Giant To Let Advisors Recommend Bitcoin ETFs

Everything going up

Mama I'm comin' home!

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That expense ratio is tough.  MSTR is zero and 2x Bitcoin most days when BTC is up.

Interesting, I have been buying bitcoin for about 8 years
So I have a couple of cold wallets, I would like to step up to airgapped

I don’t want a taxable event at this point, but the idea of continuing to invest through fidelity seems like a great idea, I thought about opening up a high yield savings/checking with them recently, would be nice to move a lot of my banking/investing under one roof

Micro you actually own no bitcoin right?  Also it makes no sense its up more. Just old people buying because they think it's safe.   Also I sure wished I bought mstr last summer.

Having everything at one place is awesome and Fidelity is awesome. Unless you have a reason to go somewhere else I would definitely use them.

You could get both - keep your coins and get a fidelity account.  If/when fidelity adds the capability to transfer coins in/out then you could always transfer in the coins you already have.  

If you’re a speculative investor in bitcoin for the purpose of profit, I think the ETFs make a lot more sense.  Simply removing the risk of losing your password is a huge benefit.  Add in the fact that you remove the single point of failure of the exchange you’re using and you get the ability to buy/sell from any type of account that allows you to buy stocks.  Additionally, from a tax perspective, there is no way to offload any significant amount of bitcoin without paying taxes unless you lie, which would be a huge risk.  Most of my bitcoin is ETFs in my Roth IRA, so when bitcoin goes to the moon it will be tax free for me.  

“Most of my bitcoin is ETFs in my Roth IRA, so when bitcoin goes to the moon it will be tax free for me.”

Hmm….that’s an angle I never thought about.

It makes sense if you realize it's a company that can do whatever it wants with Bitcoin.  They can sell for cash, loan it, use it for collateral, invest in a product, buy another company, or just watch their purse get fat.  If you're not going to outright own Bitcoin, but want the gains in your 401k or whatever, MSTR is where it's at.  Companies trade on multiples of what they're actually worth because people look to the future when investing.

I'm not saying to not buy Bitcoin, but it's a good alternative for the other Bitcoin investments if you can't buy Bitcoin outright.

when is this shit going to blow past $100k

Don't forget to own some in an HSA. Money goes in pretax, can be spent on medical stuff tax free, once you turn 65, you can use it like an IRA if you don't need to use it for medical expenses.

ETFs can be convenient for accounting purposes, but do realize that they go against the original Bitcoin ethos of being decentralized and unconfiscatable and easily transferable P2P and easily portable across borders if SHTF.

IMO, the only reason to own an ETF is for tax benefits or existing plan restrictions (Roth, IRA, HSA, etc).

Beyond that, I highly recommend learning to self-custody.

"Not your keys, not your coins"

Get both

This. I hold BTC as well as FBTC and BITX in my Roth IRA.

Why do you hold both FBTC and BITX? One has a .25 exp rat and the other 1.90.

Just curious as I haven’t really researched any of these.

Gold is $2515

You can't buy it for under $2600 given premiums.

I initially bought FBTC earlier this year because there were no fees through Fidelity until this month. Then I threw some loose cash in there at BITX to kinda swing trade. I barely know what I’m doing so do your own DD of course.

I have an good percent in my 401k

I'm doing ok.

No early retirement moon Lambos though

yet

BITX is a leveraged return fund.  FBTC is a straight return fund.

If you're investing for profit you don't care about the "ethos" of bitcoin.  The "ethos" is great, but investing in it ties you to an exchange and carries risk of the exchange collapsing or you losing your passwords.  

In fact I would contend that the "ethos" of bitcoin will never be realized unless it becomes widely accepted in lieu of currency.  Say I buy a pile of bitcoin on an exchange and flee my home country, how can I turn my life savings in bitcoin back into currency?  The answer is that you can't feasibly do that without an exchange.  You'd be better off swallowing gold nuggets and digging them out of your shit once you arrive somewhere - gold is easy to convert to currency without giving up your identity.


BITX is leveraged 2x, so if bitcoin goes up/down 20% BITX goes up/down 40%.  It's a much more efficient way to capitalize on the volatility of bitcoin.  Or to go to the moon twice rather than just once.

Saylor touts the value of bitcoin as “digital property” versus the more common “digital currency” designation and holds it up as an excellent store of value — the “apex property,” in fact, as he told Yahoo Finance in a video interview yesterday.

Certainly it looks like a much better store of value now, near record highs, than it did during the most recent crypto winter, but Saylor remained steadfast all the way down and back up again.

And it sounds like he has no plans to sell — ever.

Maybe he would leverage mstr  btc but that's not why people are buying mstr. Leveraging btc to buy another company is risky.  

Still makes no sense to me if the value of mstr is it's btc then it should be priced accordingly.  

"The bitcoin price implied by MicroStrategy’s share price is $177K, two and a half times the spot price of the cryptocurrency, "

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/03/28/microstrategy-trades-at-an-unjustifiable-premium-to-bitcoin-kerrisdale-capital/

I AGREE it's a great alternative
If you're afraid to buy btc I wish I had bought as much mstr as I could when they first started buying btc.  If I had I might be selling it and buying btc now.

wat

Why would it tie you to an exchange?  You can buy it and self-custody it.


Last time I looked at selling PMs, the stealership had a 20% spread.  Bitcoin is about 1.25% at any normal exchange.  If you find someone to trade with you P2P you don't even have to lose that much.  You can also load it into a LN wallet and use it for direct purchases at some businesses, e.g., if you're living in El Salvador you can buy your groceries and pay your bar tab and get breakfast at McDonald's.

Not even to mention that you don't have to cash it out all in one shot, and can split it across multiple addresses so that if your new government is hostile to your possession of it, you can give up a small address and then flee again with most of your stash.  I guess with the gold you could swallow it all again, preferably after rinsing it off well.

Sounds like a fantastic short -- or buy longterm puts.

You can bring your BTC across borders by memorizing 12-24 words. Once you're in your new location you can "recover" your BTC by using those words on any wallet. You can then spend it directly (many places and websites offer this), or change it to local currency (many apps allow this), or send it to a NEW local exchange, or transfer it peer-to-peer. You're not "tied" to the exchange you bought it from. Part of the "ethos" of bitcoin is that you shouldn't need to trust a third party. ETFs are 3rd parties you need to trust. THEY have your keys. YOU don't have control of your bitcoin while it's in their possession and you can't exchange it 24/7 with whoever you want. When you have to trust those ETF brokers, you also have to additionally trust the government that oversees them; the same government that confiscated and criminalized gold possession from 1933-1975.

Yeah, the ethos is kinda important.

WTF?

A day of nuttin but red.

Binance seized pali crypto for Israel

Not your keys, not your cheese.  The exchanges will cuck out and sell you down the river in a heartbeat.

Can you move btc off an exchange without paying taxes?

It is not a taxable event. You will pay fees though.

True, but I think the fee's for this transaction was less than a dollar.  Think of that less than a dollar for billions......

The more BTC you move the bigger the fee.

I'm no expert, but is it the more BTC you move, or the more UTXOs you move that relate to increased fees?  I've been doing some research on UTXO management, and it appears that if you have 1 wallet address containing 1 BTC spread across 20 UTXOs the fee will be much higher to move that single BTC than it would be to move that same single BTC if it was contained within a single UTXO.

Like most in this thread I have been accumulating smaller amounts before moving to my cold storage.  Everyone of those movements created a new UTXO.  In that instance, if I move a large amount right now, it will have to use multiple UTXOs resulting in more fees making your statement correct.

Trying to figure out if I should consolidate my UTXOs now while the fees are relatively low compared to what they will be down the road when mining is way more difficult resulting in higher fees.

Yes.  Take advantage of low fees right now and consolidate at 2-4sat/vB if you have control of fee rate.  Even if you don't have that control to set fee rate and your exchange sets the parameter for you, it will still be far cheaper right now than when things get wild down the line.  Consolidate the UTXOs for lesser fees for presumed cheaper transactions in the future.

No, the more UTXOs you move, the bigger the amount of in-block data needed, therefore the bigger the fee.


I don't think there are many people who store thousands of BTC in just a few UTXO.  Even exchanges have to consolidate from time to time.



The simplest 1 UTXO SegWit to non-SegWit (because that's what my exchange used) runs either 110 or 111 vB.  Two UTXOs being moved bumps that up to about 170 vB.  The amount of BTC stored at those UTXOs is irrelevant;  it could be dust or it could be hundreds of BTC.  Miners now require a minimum mining fee of 1 sat/vB to forward your unconfirmed transaction around the network to other miners.  Any transfer below about 60 sats is basically stuck forever because it will cost more in fees than any miner will demand to process it (unless you luck into some miner that altruistically includes a zero-fee transaction just for funsies).

For your 20 UTXOs you're probably looking at around 1200 vB (CHECK WHAT YOUR WALLET SYSTEM SAYS FOR THE SIZE, don't go by my guesstimate), so you can spend 3 sats/vB (3600 sats by my guesstimate) now (which would likely be included in the next block) or hope that something changes to reduce fees in the future.  I wouldn't try spending just 2 sats/vB because there are 27MB of transactions at or above that, and the mempool hasn't cleared the 2 sats/vB level since last November.  You could try shaving it to 3000 sats (2.5 sats/vB) but if there's another flood of those stupid NFT transactions or if a lot of the existing ones are already at 2.7, you might end up stuck for a looooong time.  Seems like every week there's someone on /r/Bitcoin whining that his transaction has been stuck for months and his wallet software refuses to allow him to make a new transaction with those UTXOs.  (Some wallets like Electrum will allow RBF -- "replace by fee" -- to overwrite the old one, but I've never used it and don't know how it works, plus you have to turn the option on in the first place;  and if you didn't enable that option, you're fucked.)

My rule of thumb nowadays is to put together a transaction, check Jochen Hoenicke's site for the current fee rate, immediately select the next highest whole-digit fee, and immediately send it.  Otherwise you never know when someone will spam the network with a hundred thousand transactions and drive fees into the stratosphere.

I sent some money to someone in Ukraine a couple of years ago, and exactly as I sent it, the mempool blew up.  Apparently some exchange decided to consolidate its UTXOs right fucking then.  Luckily it cleared in a week, but that was before the NFT stupidity found a way to fuck up the Bitcoin network.

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,1y,weight

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,2h,weight

How does one consolidate utxos ?

BTC Sessions UTXO Consolidation Tutorial