PaulCa

Yea, for those purposes, crypto isn't really suitable. That's the problem, people getting scammed into thinking it's a sure thing investment. It just a "cash" holding, all people are hoping for is that demand continues to outstrip the supply of bitcoin, et. al and the prices rise. They can also completely crash the next week, which leads to problem no. 2. Dumping at a 2% loss in panic and watching it recover 10% a week later while you have no holdings. Gambling, speculating and "playing the lottery" are more suited to crypto. Betting on the market. Buying coins when the media is harrassing them, selling when they are celebrating them. Flipping coins back and forth across a pair while the market is unstable. Buying £5 worth of lots of different "new" coins. It only takes one to take off and go from £0.0001 to £1000. About as likely as winning £1000 on the lottery.

Yep. But people do scams with real money too, I mean, if you are a scammer, why not scam people in crypto? It's as anonymous as "Gift cards" so less laundry. It asks the question, if people are dumb enough to hand over a fortune on a bet from a YT video... or on a shady call with an random phone call.... especially if they want to "fix your pc"... how in hell did they make a fortune in the first place? A small part of me is not sympathetic. I see crypto like the matrix screen. I have no idea what those numbers really mean, but I understand ratios, trends and predicting human behaviour. Seems it would also be handy if you wanted to pay someone "off the radar" for work done without lifting a basket of cash. I follow a local chap who plays their game better than them. NOTE: This has nothing to do with trading anything. It's about scams. https://www.youtube.com/c/JimBrowning

I found this funny. I haven't looked at his other content, but I found this as I hope it's intended, as satire and funny. The loch ness monster on the options strategy chart is hilarious.

I suppose it's only fair to mention the original ethos or purpose of crypto-currency, in contrast to it's current hype and media attention on exchanges. The thing is, regardless of where you put your cash, it's cash. It itself has a perceived value too. Not only can that fluctuate in real terms, it is stacked against cash, as our western economies are all standard inflationary economies, that inflation is controlled, in part by the central bank and interest rates, etc. So cash WILL lose value over time. Unless we start into deflation and negative interest rabbit hole. Banks don't even offer covering rates of interest on cash these days. So even in a cash deposit account it will lose money. I'm not going to tell you where to put your cash, i'm only highlighting that Sterling, Dollars or Yen are all worthless bits of paper and the coins are usually not worth their value. Pennies and coppers are now made of copper plated steal. Becuase copped is worth more or likely to be worth more than 1p per 5 grams. The notes are literally worthless IOU's. They have no inherent value and you can't eat them. If people don't want to take pounds in international trade tomorrow, the value of the pound will plummet. So bit coin, et. al. are pretty much the same on those terms. The real motivation behind crypto is in creating a reliable, trustable, private, anonymous mechanism of exchanging value without a centralised middle man, like a bank. There is no central control, nobody can manipulate the value without getting in on it too. If two freedom of speech lobbyists need to exchange money in Saudi Arabia they might not want to do it via a bank. Granted this allows criminals to do the same. Adding to BitCoin's shadey image. On the grander scheme of things, if the USA's latest economical experiment with printing money en mass goes tits up as we expect, bit coin will not necessarily be effected by the same inflation. Nobody can simply "print" bitcoin to cause inflation. When the 6.2% inflation report for 20/21 was reported on Tues/Weds?, bit coin and Ethereum soared as more and more people moved their cash out of the dollar into BTC.

The thing is. To me, it provides a vehicle to play with real markets and real strategies. As I said I've been "in the industry" for a while. So for example, I have been involved in writing software which created the resilient shared memory for an exchange matching engine's order book. I've been involved in writing an order book simulator, trade simulator and exchange simulators. I've analysed giga bytes of trading logs for exchanges to extract sequences of trades and verify thousands and thousands of trades against the customer spreadsheet to uncover a bug in calculations. Yet I've never sat at a market terminal and never been able to actually trade. Of course doing so on the actual markets is heavily restricted for me, for obvious reasons. I'm playing with £20. Already I can see how easy it is to make mistakes and how unforgiving it is when you do. The value of ETH was falling, so I moved slowly into everything in BTC. Then, basically while I was still slightly at a loss for not selling fast enough, ETH started to shoot up and by the time I noticed it (real life and all), it would be a loss to buy back in. However in my head I remember the advice that if you wait for when to get in on a rising market, you are already too late. So I switched 100% back to ETH at a loss.... hoping it would continue to rise. It didn't, it dropped all last night and now I hold ETH I bought for 0.07322 BTC, when it's trading down at 0.7202 and I don't have anymore BTC to buy in on the bounce. So... Without upping the stakes, all I can do is hold the ETH until it recovers to more than I bought it for. Ironically, yesterdays trades turned out to be exactly right, but about 180* out of phase with the markets, so on record the trades look like the exactly opposite of what you should do. Need to learn more analysis techniques and get faster with the timing. That or put more in and spread it out more and systematically place wide orders to take advantage or stop loss. Alternatively I could switch over to ETH and another coin for a while, but the lesser coins have less real margins on their volatility and are far more dice rolls long term. So I'm not investing. I'm gambling. I'm moving my tiny pot around to try and take advantage of both sides of the market. It's not easy and there is a lot to learn. I have sat through umpteen lectures on trading strategies and markets quantitively analysis, but without actually being able to try it, I forgot it all. Maybe now I can go back, understand more, try things out, make mistakes and lose my £20. Or, I could keep playing, get good at it and turn that £20 into £200 and see from there. Trading back and forward between pairs of cryptos is safer for me, as I'm not allowed to play with Forex.

Fair, fair. Remember the story of the guy who got into bit coin mining right at the start when it was easy. He had managed to mine 100 coins of something. Of course they were worth a tiny fraction of a penny each. A number of years later, when BitCoin was exchanging at over $10k each, he realised he had long ago dumped the bit coin wallet with a box of household garbage. Over a millions worth in a landfill. Today it's 40k-50k per bitcoin. Investors even fronted cash to excavate the dump, but never found the wallet.

Some of them yes. They are just ponzi schemes. The larger ones are different though. There is just too much volume and too much liquidity for anyone, really, to force it to go much of one way or the other. Thought they are subject to trends and syndicate short term manupulations and persistent curves up or down caused by "the herd's" momentum. I'm sure investment banks milk small time "investors" as they have the trade volumes to move the price about hour to hour in small amounts to algo trade off the volatility. The adage that, for every person that makes £100, 10 people lose £10.... doesn't really work. It's easier to explain with things with inherent value. Like a motorcycle. If you early adapt an electric bike for example. You might pay £10k for it. A few years later when you want to sell it, you are disappointed to find they are selling brand new for £5k now. So your asset has lost value, not just through depreciation, but through it's inherent value to the market falling, most likely driven by great adoption in manufacturing and production scaling up, increasing supply. So you sulk for a while. Luckily however you don't sell the bike when it's worth much less than you expected, but you just sulk. A year later, new restrictions come into play regarding fees and tax on petrol vehicles, including bikes and the demand for electric motorcycles goes straight towards the moon. The market price for an electric bike rapidly rises as demand out strips stock piles and shops are emptied. Suddenly the market value rises to £15k and your second hand bike can be sold for the same price you bought it. Now, nobody lost money, but you just netted the whole depreciation drop on your asset. Where did that money come from? The answer is people. They increased the value of the asset you had, because it became more appealing to own one. You could agrue that the guy who bought your SH bike for £10k lost money, but from his perspective he paid market value for it. If when supply catches up it drops to £5k again, he loses out. Antique collectors and car restorers have been doing this for many decades. With crypto, there is no inherent value, it's worthless "bits" of information. The entire value of the items in it's subjective extrinsic value.... ie. Simple what people will pay for it, or accept for it.

What appears to be happening though is that UK run crypto exchanges are becoming regulated. Banks are rejecting transactions to and from crypto exchanges. This is fine to try and lower the number of fools coming out with a handful of change on their life's savings. I say, if you are that dumb, just give me your money and I'll save you the hassle of wasting it. That does not stop you getting money into an off-shore crypto exchange, or buying some with regulations in a UK exchange and shifting the crypto out of the country to the caiman isles to an exchange there. Nor does it stop "Real" crypto peer to peer transactions. These are extremely risky for scams, as someone with savings in BTC could be scammed to pay a £10 bill with a round number of bitcoins or even a single digit error in the amount making it a £300 bill and no come back.

Yep. There are no guarantees. Some of the newer coins and NFTs are pure junk which is nothing more than a ponzi/pyramid scheme, pump and dump scam. They put out a huge amount of social media content, big it up, suggest everyone will make money. Lots of people come along and throw money at it and it rises and rises and all the founders are early adapters who bought it with it cost £0.0000001 in it's hundreds of thousands, dump it all when it's worth £2, make a million or so and leg it. That's the plan anyway. It would be illegal on the "open" market, but crypto isn't regulated.... yet.

Technically.... it's a cryptographic mathematical approach to enforcing trackability and trust with anonymous transactions. Ledgers entries are produced, encrypted using "trap door mathematics" which are relatively easy to make, but next to impossible to modify without detection. When a transaction takes place, new entries are encrypted into the ledgers. However the ledgers are not private, they are public, via various mechanisms each ledger entry is effectively broadcast around other ledgers. So at a later date, if someone were to attempt to modify a transaction to commit fraud, they can't just modify their own ledger and try and spend their money twice. Well, they can, but very, very quickly red flags will light up as the invalid blocks try to reconcile in other peoples ledger copies. The fake transaction will be voided/deleted. Of course if this happens to you, because a scammer did it, there is little to no recourse.

Oh, make no doubt, Crypto is pure faith / hype. They talk about "FIAT" currencies like they are evil, but fail to understand that crypto is more fiat than anything, depending on how you look at it. They say move your money to crypto because your gubberment can devalue your money by printing more. I'd roll that one around your mouth while watching the 5m interval candle stick chart for BTC. The currency is up and down faster than a premier Paris hooker's knickers. It's 100% speculation, gambling and 0% investing. Yet they continue to call it "investing". They aren't "investing" in anything, except the next bubble and when to buy in or get out. True crypto does have purposes in a movement to free money from the hands of the states and their main banks, but not only does that come at similar risk to using cash, it's unregulated and mostly unsupervised, so scams are common, but a large percentage of people cannot handle gambling/risk/speculation without getting over excited, over comitted and losing a lot of their money. This guy rips into the new crypto unicorn, Subhi Inu or some crap.

Thread necromance... I had been looking at a way to get into trading. But my job in a bank puts me in a regulatory category and so I have to pre-declare anything other than buying into mutuals and broad etfs. However, I discovered that crypto is mostly fair game. I tried Binance and that went ok until I tried to buy ETH and my bank said, "Nope." They specifically block binance. Granted it does give a lot of very dangerous instruments to complete newbies that can and does result in them going bankrupt or getting scammed. So, Coinbase. Opened an account, bought some BTC and ETH (on-ramp). Got stung really badly, if I actually cared as they not only charge a 99p fee, but they give you what is basically a call option to cover the volatility given the delay in a card transaction. So they set a future fixed price which is in their favour and well, that was off by the 4th decimal place. Total rip off. Immediately I knew this was not going to be suitable for day trading/margin trading as, well, the price they give you is well off the spot rates. Even if you are buying crypto with another crypto. Thankfully I discovered that Coinbase PRO is free to use if you have a coinbase account. At least now I get real pricing, and the fees are much, much smaller, like 0.5%. So even trading a few hundred quid around, you could make day trading profits. Even though day trading doesn't expectly make sense for a market that has no "day". I started with £20. By the time I got that into the market it was worth £17.50. 50% ETH, 50% BTC. So I amused myself for a few hours trading on the BTC-ETH pair. I still have to stop myself, stick the tounge in the corner of my mouth, make a face and remember which way up the pair is. Its primary BTC to secondary ETH. Anyway, it's a bit obvious if you accidentally l raise a limit order on the wrong side of the book for the price as it warns you that would be a "Take Order" ie, straight match off the book. That usually means you are about to sell something below the bid or buy something above the ask. I knew that fees would eat up most of my profits at such a small volume but I proceeded anyway. Ended up trading about £50 of volume over a few hours and looking at the trade ledgers, the fees where not that bad. A penny or two per trade. So I really need to work out, or find a calculator for ... determining the round-trip volume minimum to cover fees. ie. If I move 0.001 ETH back and forwards across a 0.1% spread on both sides, how much of that do a lose to fees and what minimum trade profit do I need to have to make more than I pay in fees. Anyway. ETH was falling against BTC, so my spread limit orders just moved me to 100% BTC. I popped a really optimistic buy order in for ETH in case it fell more and went to bed. Turns out, I missed out by a tiny fraction and must have been right at the tip of the Buy side when it started to go up again. Meh. 0.070 to 0.076 I think. The plan is to play with no more than £20 a month until I can make a profit with it. Any profit, even 1p. Then maybe try £50 a month until I can make a profit on it. So total losses are fixed (assuming no leverage, naked options or exotics). After last night, including a few mistakes. I still have £17 in real terms. Definitely worth 50p for the fun.

I had my Christmas holidays approved in June. I think across my whole 15 year career I have only had to "work" over the 2 weeks of christmas once and that was to attend a 2 day training course on over Christmas week, 28/29th. Although I did once get the experience of Cairo on the 22nd of December, eating outdoors in a short sleeved shirt at 23*C. But back the next day for xmas holidays, 2 weeks. In fact, the current contract, they lock off the code release process first week in December and don't unfreeze it until the 2nd week in January. Do nobody plans releases over xmas. Unless you are unlucky enough to end up in a production support role, on call.

One thing springs to mind, probably irrelevant, but my Honda CG125 had Honda's secondary air system. There were gubbins injecting fresh air into the exhaust port and things.

What happens if you turn it over slowly with the rocker cover off. Not enough to get oil pressure and paint the workshop, but maybe a slow drill. If you can get it to do the tick with the lid open it might reveal something. I assume you inspected the cam chain and sprockets the whole way around for damage? The link in the photo which looks different to the others, different colour, is it expected?