Someone step in if I’m missing the point here.

If a person buys 70,000$ in btc etf from MicroStrategy.

And he (they), then take that as collateral. And buy 7M in btc. Using the 10% as a collateralized asset.

And he/they then own 10x the deposit amount in btc. Which then accumulates. And this happens on the billions of dollars scale.

(Aside: this assumes 10% deposit. Some multi-billion $ companies get 2.5% deposits)

Would people not be paying him to be a self custodian, actually owning the referenced btc. Whilst the “investor” in the etf owns only the etf fund share ? (Risk claims vary)

I feel like I get exactly how this works. And the etf share purchasers miss the absolute entire point of this. . . .

Please sort me out if I’m missing something.

Other than the leverage, exponential gains, and actual custody. Not including the fact that they can then future borrow against the capital they have already borrowed to get. Leveraged again.

I have unfortunately used gemini to purchase cryptocurrency, which worked for a while. Without explanation they deactivated my account and I had to give them another KYC (picture of my face next to my license with a verification number and the date) it’s been two weeks since they so gratuitously thanked me for providing that information and they haven’t responded to me asking for updates since. The fees on their platform are also worse than PayPal’s so there is literally no reason to use Gemini anyways… that is unless you feel the need to take the chance of a specific currency being held by them for an indefinite amount of time, perhaps forever -I mean im not gonna get into a legal battle over the amount I have in there. Such a regrettable experience, and should they ever decide to so kindly grant me access to my own funds once again im not making the mistake of using their services again.

Hello everyone,

Can anyone tell me how to understand this and what would be different when I actually found and solved a block?

{ "hashrate1m": "1.34T", "hashrate5m": "1.35T", "hashrate1hr": "1.42T", "hashrate1d": "1.42T", "hashrate7d": "631G", "lastshare": 1730461947, "workers": 3, "shares": 116814011, "bestshare": 280291202.024783, "bestever": 280291202, "authorised": hidden, "worker": [ { "workername": "*hidden", "hashrate1m": "1.34T", "hashrate5m": "1.35T", "hashrate1hr": "1.42T", "hashrate1d": "1.42T", "hashrate7d": "631G", "lastshare": 1730461947, "shares": 116814011, "bestshare": 280291202.024783, "bestever": 280291202 } ] }

October has been a busy month for NanoGPT. We've added a lot of new features and improvements. Here's an overview of everything that's happened.

NanoGPT October Update

(Also, read the blog in original format on our blog)

New Text Models

A lot of text models have been added. Grok, the model that Twitter/X uses, was a much-requested model and we've now got access to it. The Claude 3.5 Sonnet upgrade was a surprise but a welcome one, most of our users report it being a large improvement particularly in terms of coding skills. Meta released Llama 3.2 Medium which significantly improves on Llama 3.1 while being cheaper at the same time.

Following many requests for roleplaying and storytelling models we added a whole range of models that are less censored and more tailored towards this specific purpose. WizardLM, Lumimaid, Magnum and EVA Qwen 2.5 are all models that are more open to generating content that is more creative and quite uncensored, and these along with a few more have been added to a new "Roleplay/Storytelling" category.

Roleplaying models

New Image Models

It was a good month for image models. Ideogram V2 and Ideogram V2 Turbo scored very high on the image model rankings and we were requested to add these particularly for how good they are at putting text in images.

That said, Ideogram, according to most, got overtaken by Flux Pro V1.1 Pro when it came out. Flux Pro V1.1 is an upgrade over Flux Pro which was already a great model, and now generates faster, at lower cost, with better quality. It topped the leaderboards for a few days and it's a model that we had a lot of fun with right away.

The original Stable Diffusion models saw a big upgrade as well with the release of Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large and Stable Diffusion 3.5 Turbo . These are Stability's strongest models yet and are very efficient, but frankly are not the models we would recommend most use.

This became even more true with the release of Recraft V3. Recraft V3 crushed the leaderboards and is now our default and recommended image model. It does text in images perfectly most of the times, has a lot of variety in styles to use, is very fast and priced the same as Flux Pro V1.1. All the images in this post were generated with Recraft V3 with zero manual edits.

Recraft V3 now supported

All in all we're constantly impressed with the quality of image models that are being released, we're happy to support them all on NanoGPT and we're looking forward to seeing what comes next. It really feels as if we're reaching a point where these image models are perfect, but we're also half expecting to see even better models next month again.

New Payment Methods

Our aim has always been to provide access to AI text and image models to everyone, and we're happy to say that we've now added support for a lot of different payment methods to make this a reality.

The majority of the world uses credit cards for online payments, and we now support them for all those that don't have crypto. Previously it used to be the case that our users would invite friends and family to NanoGPT using crypto, but then those friends and family would be unable to add funds after that initial gift. We're happy to open up to more people this way, though we offer a discount in crypto since we believe it's a better payment method.

We've also expanded our support for crypto payment methods. A privacy-oriented service like ours is a natural match for Monero, and Monero was the most requested coin to be added to NanoGPT. We've added Monero via BTCPayServer which we want to give a shout out to, they're a great service and make it very easy to implement more crypto payment methods.

In the same vein we've added Litecoin. Litecoin is the most used payment method on many services as BitPay often reports, and it's an OG in terms of doing payments in crypto.

Finally we've added Dash. Dash is focused on making payments in crypto easy with instant confirmations and low fees, and the community truly cares about it being used as a payment method rather than just speculation.

Starting next month we intend to release usage statistics similar to what BitPay does so that users can see how much the different cryptocurrencies are used. If other services are interested in details on how we implemented these different coins and on how they can do the same we're happy to share. The end-goal is a circular economy where more people can earn crypto and spend crypto without having to go through centralized providers, and we can only get there together.

XMR Dash LTC

Media

We released our blog this month, with an article about why we prefer payments in Nano and an article about why we use Nano as our store of value.

We also started doing podcasts since we believe they're a great way for people to get to know about nano and NanoGPT. We joined Keyword Crypto (Youtube, Spotify) to talk about Nano, NanoGPT, Bitcoin's issues and central banks. We joined Litecoin Underground to talk about us adding Litecoin, about crypto decentralization, trying out NanoGPT with Litecoin and much more. Finally we talked to Joel Valenzuela (Youtube, Twitter) about NanoGPT, privacy and censorship, CBDCs and crypto adoption.

There's also a podcast with someone from BCH coming up - would love to talk more to the BCH community so if there's some place we can chat I'd love to hear.

Podcasting wizards

Other

Last but not least, we added a bunch of small improvements.

Our Earn page has been expanded with more options. We've added Get-XNO, KarmaCall, XMRChat, Moneromarket.io, XMRBazaar, and Monezon. Suggestions for more options are always welcome, especially for BCH related ways to earn since we don't really have those yet - reach out to us.

Our image model selection has been simplified. We now rank image models by their scoring on independent leaderboards and have moved some of the models into a "more" section to keep the overview clear but still give you access to all models.

Since we've seen so much usage of image generation we added more image generation features. It's now possible to customize your prompting through advanced settings, the icon next to the resolution setting. This allows you to for example set a specific style to use on Recraft V3, to add "negative prompts" ("avoid this") to many models, or to decide how much freedom to give the model in what it will create for you.

In a similar vein we simplified the text model selection. We're constantly balancing between wanting to give you access to all the models and on the other hand wanting to keep model choice simple. We're therefore now showing fewer models in the dropdown, and have moved a lot of extra models into the "roleplaying" and "more" sections. We've also added the ability to determine the visibility and categories of text models for yourself in "Settings", so that if you prefer to see Claude 3.5 Sonnet but not ChatGPT you can now easily do so.

As a final update we've made our API fully OpenAI compatible. This means that you can now swap out OpenAI for NanoGPT as your LLM provider without having to change any of your code. You keep the functionality you're used to from OpenAI, but get access to a lot of extra models.

Thanks for reading our update, thanks for using NanoGPT and for your support, and as always: more is coming.

As always, more coming

Had this thought:

Full nodes already re-assemble blocks based mostly on transactions they already have (with protocols like CB, XThin or Graphene).

If miners were to prioritize including older transactions, then the efficiency of these protocols would increase, because they would've already seen almost all the transactions, even under high network load.

It would also be a policy which is good for the users of the network because the longer your transaction has been around, the more likely it would be included in the next block, if miners were to adopt such a common approach.

It would have a cost to nodes in terms of tracking when a transaction has first been seen by them. This might become large if the mempool is big, but so far the mempool and block sizes are very small compared to the memory sizes of commodity computers.

EDIT: It would be a simple thing to get rid of such a policy again if the implementation costs on memory were to become too big, but I personally don't think that will ever become the case - transactions are already a couple hundred bytes by themselves, and a node-internal timestamp for bookkeeping wouldn't add much mempool overhead. Max 4 bytes/tx, maybe even less if implemented cleverly.

EDIT2: Some current node software (like BCHN) already maintains the timestamp of when a transaction entered the mempool. I think this lends itself nicely to an experiment!

Of course these are all speculative assets though as with anything, some (usually the loudest voices) have unshakable opinions on these matters and will claim their stance is the “truth” by a landslide. I’m not here to try provoking anyone’s beliefs, nor am I here to get “anything”-pilled. I just want to hear from people in an un-censored and chill type of way. Below is my own answer to my own question with a bit of an explanation of where I’ve been at in the crypto space.

I went back and forth for quite a while on whether or not I better liked the idea of Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash being the dominant iteration. For one reason or another (mostly due to me buying into Monero instead which I still love), I never invested in Bitcoin Cash until recently. In my mind, to be the store of value by which all others are measured it has to be the one most everyone agrees on, which unfortunately is by far and away Bitcoin Core. I believe Bitcoin Core is becoming more and more of an abhorrence to Satoshi’s vision, and correspondingly more the new unit for banks and institutions to deal in and rule. That being said, the majority of my crypto holdings by dollar amount are in it… I don’t really like it, but the common folk is so reluctant to learn anything about how any of this works and the very same big names that relied on that line of thinking before are catering to it all the more by pretending you’re like a rebel or something by purchasing Bitcoin Core. As time goes on I see it more as my responsibility to help in furthering the narrative away from institutional control, and I know this community hasn’t given up either.
I’ve seen the bitcore narrative change from “sound digital money” to “store of value” and the small steps in between. Currently they’re still saying “not your keys not your coins” but I believe it’s only a matter of time until that changes to “you’re an extremist if you don’t trust your bank with your coins”. I don’t know what the future holds, but I have hope that we can somehow display the superiority in using Bitcoin Cash over Bitcoin Core. Even though I am invested with a higher dollar amount in Bitcore, I would love to see it trade market caps with Bcash not only because I own proportionally more of it but because we will have won against the pretend opposition of financial oppression.

Idk if this happens but it was confirmed but not received. I’m very sick and my cognitive functioning is way down. I need help to figure out what’s happening

Hello all,

I’m trying to learn about BTC privacy solutions and have heard about mixers, but it’s tough to know what’s safe and actually works well. I've read that some can be risky, and I’d rather avoid any potential issues with shady services.

Does anyone here have insights into secure BTC mixing options or best practices for enhancing transaction privacy? Open to any suggestions or resources you might have.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge!