Hey Loyce, if you host a new CSV like https://loyce.club/other/halab_2025/csv.txt again, I'll migrate my visualization script too!

Just saw this through the mention. I agree: everyone was super kind and welcoming and appreciated my posts when I first signed up here. But I did and still do put a lot of time and sometimes money (purchasing hardware wallets for review, server costs for the yearly altcoin portfolio competition, ...) into my posts.

It's clear to me from the very title of this thread that your posts very likely just aren't 'good quality'. Especially since you specifically created this thread to complain about not getting the reactions you expect for your 'good posts'. It all starts with spelling errors & grammar, which make some people's contributions just very hard to read, and ends with lack of self-reflection, critical thinking and common sense, which would answer the very question you're asking here.

Ultimately, I'd wager to say that the merit system does exactly what it's supposed to here, unless I'm shown high-quality posts and threads that went under the radar. We even have members specifically offering to help in this regard, like fillippone here: [Merit] Share your best posts/threads with Fillippone to be merit assessed

While I still love my Foundation Passport device(s), and it's my go-to recommendation for hardware wallets, I agree that there should be a 'Passport Lite' of some sorts, based on the Batch 2 device but with some cost cuttings. Some items come to mind like its premium finish (cast metal), color display, and SD card slot that could be eliminated. A plastic device with monochrome display and manual seed backup at a decent price would be welcome.
The codebase also already exists and runs on 2 different kinds of hardware, so little additional costs there, and there would be the option to base it on the existing founders edition PCB, too.

In recent news though, I do plan do get one of these Prime devices; not sure if I personally need it, but I'll buy it with my own money and review it here for you guys in depth, as always!

Thanks Loyce! Here's my entry:

SOL	25%	https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/solana	6
ADA	25%	https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/cardano	10
AKUMA	25%	https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/akuma-inu	450
GRIN	25%	https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/grin	2173

Crazy how after a year, only 6 out of 40 portfolios outperformed Bitcoin. It's not even a 50/50 gamble, when buying alts. Excited to see what happens next year!
Also next time someone skyrockets like Vispilio, I'll look into logarithmic scaling for my graphs.. ;-)

My 2 cents on this: I personally prefer weekly payments, as it's essentially a more fine-grained DCA approach compared to bi-weekly or even monthly payments. Especially when exchange rates are 'spikey', i.e. they change a lot (upwards / downwards) in a short amount of time, it could be beneficial to have a higher payout frequency.

However, there is this fun online calculator which indicates that these two strategies differ just barely, with bi-weekly being slightly superior; we're talking about single-digit or lower percentage differences. I think Bitcoin is just not volatile enough. On paper, whatever we'd save in fees by having bi-weekly payments, would be more significant than any potential gains from shorter payment intervals.

First graph is a weekly investment of $50 from the start of this year:

And here's $100 bi-weekly:

They're almost identical, netting 0.03983BTC vs. 0.04007BTC, i.e. just a 0.6% advantage for the bi-weekly strategy.
If we look at it for just the last 2 months though, it's a bit more significant, yielding 0.00717BTC (bi-weekly) instead of 0.00695BTC (weekly), an improvement of 3%. Do keep in mind that savings through less UTXOs come on top of those 0.6% / 3% gains.

Personally, I put my Nano 3 on the desk from time to time, pointed at my hands that might get a little chilly in autumn / winter. It's a nice warm breeze, but even at 125W it will mathematically just never significantly change an entire room's average temperature. Now on to replying to some more recent stuff.. sorry for jumping over more than 10 pages.

Yeah, I was very surprised when I opened my package. I had heard about some 'early bird thank you gift', but didn't know what to expect. This is just funny: a keychain to mess up your opsec and a fan that needs USB-A which is nowhere on either the PSU or the miner..

For what it's worth, I don't think the power supply really needs active cooling.

I just stumbled across your art through the BITCOIN FORUM METAVERSE thread and I really like this one, too. Sadly, the link is dead now. Would it be possible to get a high-resolution version for download and / or purchase the canvas version? Feel free to DM me.
And yes, to whoever reads this, this is my first post after my absence. I'm back! See you in Development & Technical Discussion.

My unit arrived a few weeks ago and I recently started testing it (just the way it comes out of the box); everything's very positive so far. I'll write one of my typical detailed reviews once I have enough information and experience with it, later this month probably.

In the meantime you can check those out if you haven't already:
[Review] Apollo BTC - Full Node + Miner in a box
[Review] GekkoScience Terminus R909 home miner

---

So far, I found out from the log files (and the GUI options) that unlike the other fully self-contained unit I tested (Apollo BTC), it doesn't seem to be based on a RaspberryPi / similar 'full' single-board computer, but instead it runs some light Linux distro on a microcontroller. There are mentions of RISC-V in the syslog and there is no 'shutdown' option in the web UI.
The system doesn't act up or have any issues just pulling the power and plugging it back in, which is quite convenient if you want to use it as a space heater in different parts of your home (e.g. shed, basement, anywhere you quickly and temporarily need some warm air). In fact, it boots up and reconnects to WiFi / resumes hashing astonishingly quickly; something that couldn't be said about the Apollo unit.

I really love how compact it is, while having a really respectable hashrate of over 4TH/s.

In order to be able to have something relatable / baseline, I did get the 'official' PSU as well, even though I have other high-power USB-C power supplies already. It's passively cooled, so heating up a bit is expected, but compared to USB-C laptop power supplies, I have the feeling that it gets warmer (lower efficiency) and last I checked, it was pulling about 138W from the wall, while showing me 126W on the device's built-in screen.
This results in a roughly estimated efficiency of 90%, which is not excellent, but decent for the price and not super out of norm. For reference, a high-quality ATX power supply like a Seasonic Prime 850W Platinum tops out at 95% efficiency, but it costs over 200 bucks - more than the price of the whole Avalon Nano 3.

It may be one of the biggest crowdfunding sites, but these are notorious for being used by scammer vaporware salesmen. I.e. they promise extraordinary products and never ship, and there's nothing you can do about it, because legally you're not a 'buyer', but just a 'backer' of a project who gets a 'reward' for your generous donation, in case the project succeeds.
This failed many times with 3D printer projects about half a decade ago and backers never got their printers.

I don't personally agree with big companies selling products via crowdfunding websites, because they are essentially just offloading their risk (of not being able to deliver) to buyers instead of taking it on themselves, while they clearly could.

That being said, you can trust such a company much more than a brand-new start-up to actually deliver and send you your 'reward'.

Looks really good, you did a great job with the modeling and I love your innovation that removes the need of an anvil!

I'd like to print the STL and try it for myself, to be honest, since I made my own open-source, customizable steel washer backup jig back in 2021:
n0nce's Steel Washer Backup jig (customisable)

It is much simpler than what you made, but people can get an STL for any washer size (metric, imperial, any size, any thickness).

Since I'm not sure exactly how this works on a technical level right now (might have slipped my memory): is the mining software / firmware used communicated through Stratum v2 and / or could it be spoofed? How do you make sure that someone pointing hashpower to your pool is running a tested / 'known working' software stack?

I strongly support BlackHatCoiner's list of resources.
For anything technical (especially since this is posted in Development & Technical Discussion), I usually refer people to https://learnmeabitcoin.com/ and https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page.

For anything 'meta' (forum-specific), this post by Lauda is very helpful: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1689727.0

Okay, but if they wanted to target individual UTXOs every now and then, that might be feasible, right?

From what I've heard so far, it seems to me that sybil-attacking from the coordinator side is still feasible, as long as it's not done on a massive scale.

That's a good last point, though; even if they weren't doing anything fishy, every Wasabi CoinJoin puts some extra money in blockchain analysis pockets. They might use that to fund more blockchain analysis research and development of new ways to deanonymize us.

I agree; never roll your own crypto / encoding schemes! Over the years, I myself had to re-check my seed backups to even remember which backup belonged to which wallet. And these are just regular old steel washer and steel plate backups of BIP39 seed phrases.

I'm going to stand by what I said: it was a bad practice from the side of ChipMixer, but it's not a flaw in the concept of centralized mixers, in itself.

If a service does everything correctly (including deleting private keys and any backups after handing them to the user), something like what happened to CM could simply not happen.

You guys make sure to report an issue here:
https://github.com/skot/ESP-Miner/issues

It's much more likely for the maintainers of the firmware to see it there.
Do include as many details as you can (e.g. after how much time exactly something happens, what happens, ...) to help them get it fixed.

Couldn't the coordinator just use own inputs and 'prioritize' them over real user inputs whenever they need to do a sybil attack? How would that be obvious to other users? It could easily be that those are not coordinator inputs but that it's real user demand that's simply higher than usual for a brief period of time, no?

I don't think users get something like a timestamped proof that they submitted inputs to a CoinJoin at a certain point in time (could be used to show that they entered the CoinJoin before the coordinator started to attack), right?

I don't see why Ordinals people would switch to Dogecoin, when they didn't even have to switch to Bitcoin in the first place; all of this functionality basically already existed on Ethereum and other cheaper blockchains, before.
But I guess with the popularity of Dogecoin, the fact these people are likely no hardcore Bitcoiners, and consistently high transaction fees lately, there's a chance they lose interest in using the Bitcoin blockchain. We can only hope!

I don't own the BitaxeUltra, but having worked with similar chips on stick and pod miners in the past, it's generally safe to run any voltage, as long as the chips stay cool enough.
In some cases, industrial miners run their chips at substantially higher voltages than the ranges we use on micro-miners, even when using the exact same chips, simply because they have better cooling solutions like high-flow, high-pressure - but very loud - industrial fans, or liquid cooling setups.

Do keep in mind that there's a point where your efficiency starts to decrease, simply because the increased power draw from the higher voltage stops yielding substantial improvements in hashpower, so have a look on that as well.