Staking is going to be a huge part of crypto for a long time it helps increase the stability of the network if you are using them to run validators but also helps control volatility in the price if a large portion of the supply is staked. I would not be surprised if we start seeing more tokens go to a staked method but also include some sort of unlocking cooldown before they are all unstaked. That can help slow down an unstake/dump when news comes out.

The bull run has been occurring for well over 12 months now. We are either in the tail end of it or a consolidation period. I certainly hope the first 1-3 months are just a choppy consolidation period as we flirted with some serious key support levels the last 3 weeks and we were very close to breaking them and headed into what could have been the start of a bear market. A continued push up rapidly to start the year is not what we need. We need to see a sustained level of volume to build stronger support levels.

Shitcoins are really just a gamble at this point, especially grabbing ones that have already mooned last year and have since been doing nothing but bleeding out. Sure Elon could put a tweet out that spikes DOGE or FLOKI or something similar but until then unless you got in a day or two before by luck you are likely just going to watch your investment slowly bleed away. I think a better strategy would be to invest in some upcoming P2E gaming tokens or blockchains with some upside potential. The first ones that come to mind are IME, CRA, ALGO, and maybe some smaller projects like DPR and PLANETS that all have huge upside if roadmaps are met and actually have a solid team behind them all.

A total of 129,800 option contracts worth almost $6 billion are slated to expire on Friday, marking one of the largest Bitcoin options expiration of the year. Most of these contracts are call options with a maximum pain price for today's options expiration is $48,000, which is the strike price with the most open options contracts. In other words, $48,000 is a strike price that would cause losses for the majority of options holders at expiration. If we continue and make a break for 50k by the end of the day it would force a bunch of buying of Bitcoin and could spark a nice rally over the next few weeks. I would imagine though that market makers will try and hold the price between 47,700-49k to suck the last amount of premium out of these contracts and let them expire worthless.  Next week will truly be telling as new positions are established.

There is a ton of pressure now that institutions are holding large amounts of crypto and VCs are pumping money into projects. Combine that with there being options and futures available now on Bitcoin and you have a market that is a bit more manipulated. You have over $6 billion worth of options expiring today with a maximum pain price for Friday’s option expiration at $48,000, which is the strike price with the most open options contracts. In other words, $48,000 is a strike price that would cause losses for the majority of options holders at expiration.  Like clockwork, BTC is hovering right around 48k and will likely all day. Next week is when we can expect to see a move in one way or another.

I would also take a look at Crabada. The barrier to entry is higher but the earning potential is also much higher. There is also a ton of development and releases coming in 2022 that will likely continue to push it upward. Its still early on in the game and people are making a decent daily income from playing the game. With the recently introduced staking to earn CRAM it just helps keep the coin itself stable. I went in heavy on this a few weeks ago and its one I will continue on with into 2022.  IME is another P2E game I would keep a very close eye on.

Where were you 10 years ago? Bitcoin was volatile every single day and was a wild ride. If you wanted volatility you should have been in then. If you want volatility now there are thousands of cryptocurrencies out there that can give you the rush you are looking for. Bitcoin has finally appeared to take hold at the institution level so the swings will likely not be as drastic with the exception of regulation news that could still send it up or down 10-20% on any given day. At this point, I am happy to continue to hold and mine BTC while it slowly grinds up year over year.

If you are looking for a decent return without an insane amount of risk the second phase of Algorand's governance program opens up in a few days. You just have to sign up and leave them in your wallet. With the bonus it should yield around 20% if you continue to do it. You can find out more info below if interested.
https://algorand.foundation/governance

 I have to imagine that one of the big themes for 2022 will be P2E gaming. We have progressed in cycles over the last decade from PC games, consoles games, mobile games, microtransaction games and now the next evolution seems like a move away from burning your own cash to pay for every little thing into P2E. We are a still a long way to go but over the next 2 years I’d imagine some very accelerated growth

My tops coins going into 2022

AVAX- Faster and cheaper transactions than ETH. Easy to use platform to develop off of. If anyone can overtake ETH I truly think AVAX has the best shot.
JOE- Of all the DEX tokens I believe the current price is severely undervalued and if AVAX does continue to rise the price will catch up and pass that of SUSHI and others. Solid team with strong marketing and partnerships.
ALGO- Underrated and undervalued blockchain that has some great projects already running. Being able to stay in the governance program alone through staking will yield 10-16% annually if not more.
IME- P2E game that had a strong funding round backed by 3AC as the lead. Expect to see some solid marketing and development ahead of the late Q1 launch.
TIME- Highest risk coin but the price is at a solid level and of all the insane high multiple projects Dani and his team are the ones I want to put my money behind. I have been holding since Sep and already taken out my initial investment. I am letting the rest go to 0 or make over a million in 9 months.
  

I have been going into the double rewards farms on Trader Joe and just building positions on projects that I like along with getting the added bonus of JOE. The two I am focused on right now is IME for the P2E game that is backed by 3AC and many others as well as CLY since they provide funding and access to so many other Avalanche projects. Every week or two I will harvest the gains from CLY and add it to my stake on CLY to increase the number of tokens I get per airdrop.

If they can pull off a successful execution of the roadmap I think that Deeper Network has the potential for some solid returns. Currently trading around .09/DPR and already spiked up to .33 back in April. I think with some solid partnership and marketing along with continued staking a mining through their DPN the returns towards the end of 2022 could be extremely high.

I 100% agree on needing to change thermal pads on 3080s and 3090s. My founders editions run so hot out of the box I could not even get the max hashrate without crashing the cards. Once I changed the thermal pads once (first time was nerve-racking) I felt much better about it and the cards run so much cooler. There are quite a few good guides out there to help you along the way as well as some have posted.  I used the one below to change the pads on my 3080s.

https://willmnorris.medium.com/guide-to-nvidia-3080-fe-thermal-pad-mod-cf378339f7ac

My strategy has always been that once I reach 100% size on a position I will usually dedicate about 50-70% of it to swing trading. I will start to scale out of my position once it hits a 25% gain and usually go out some at 25%, 50% 90% and then hold the remaining portion long term. I then likely use those profits to buy back in on any pullback that goes 15-20% below my original position or if it has surpassed 100% gain I will look to renter on pullbacks to any support levels that have held up.

Unless you are planning on swing trading your tokens in the short term it is almost always better to stake any tokens you have as at least then you will be getting rewards in most cases for doing so. There are not many cases where it would be a bad idea to stake unless it locks up your tokens for a longer period of time than you are comfortable with.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everyone as well. It is interesting to see that it has basically doubled every year despite all the volatility it goes through every day. Would be amazing if we see 100k next year. I would be happy at anything 70k or above.

Relying on play-to-earn games is a dangerous concept. While they are a nice way to earn passive income like anything in the cryptocurrency space it is very volatile and should not be relied upon to do anything but provide you an extra stream of income that would not put you at any financial risk if the project disappeared overnight. There are quite a few good ones out there that have been around for awhile but even those cannot be relied upon for anything more than a nice bonus.

The Metaverse term is being overused in most places now and many of these new offerings are just using it to get new investors to buy into the coin and have no real intention in developing a roadmap. While there may still be a few diamonds in the rough that pop up in the future I am still only looking at those that were around before this became such a hype term. I like projects like MANA, CRA, AXIE and SAND as my favorites in the space right now.

If I had 100k right now I would pre order the bundle of miners from Compass mining right now to lock in a pretty solid price and have them host my ASICs. With the remaining money, I would purchase a variety of other miners on different projects I believe in. I would keep roughly 20k in reserve if there was a pullback and more miners dropped in price so I would be able to DCA on the cost of my bitcoin miners down while generating revenue with the others.

It is still early in the DEX game to know which ones will remain or become the top coin for each chain but some of the strongest ones that I am looking at continuing to build a position in are JOE and SUSHI. The team behind both of them are the strongest in my opinion and will likely continue to lead on AVAX and ETH over the next year.