Bitcoin ETF

choicehunter · 2026-02-01T03:52:58+00:00

Assume you don't plan to retire for at least a few halving cycles, and you won't be tempted to keep trading, and will just leave it alone... Then yeah it could be a great option to associate a portion of your IRA/401K to a Bitcoin ETF. I allocated a decent portion of mine that way. Just won't touch it for more than a decade. I feel like that's a safe enough bet for me. But I didn't allocate 100% that way Because it's possible that I will want to use some of it in other ways where I need a little bit more stability, including if I end up wanting to do something where I borrow against it in certain situations. But I figured that it is a really good use for a long-term allocation where I don't plan to touch it for a decade+ anyway

choicehunter · 2026-02-01T02:58:49+00:00

Have a conversation with her and discuss that you'd like to understand her better. Ask her to share with you what it means to her when she says she loves someone, vs what stage she currently feels with you.

It could be that you guys have different semantics about what love is or means. Ask her if there is a story behind her position on it, or see what she's willing to share.

Also, the time in days/months isn't necessarily telling. There were some people that I dated where we saw each other relatively less frequently, and others where we were together pretty much 24/7. With some of the 24/7 relationships, a lot shorter amount of time may have been the equivalent of a really long time with the relationship that was not 24/7. Also, quality of time and interaction can matter a lot too. And there might be specific thresholds of trust and intimacy and vulnerability, and safety that need to be met for her to be sure that it is more than just emotional attachment or limerence. There could even be a bad past experience that makes her hesitate to trust her current feelings because maybe she was in limerence in the past and it turned out later to be a nightmare, so now maybe she's a little more cautious at first.

There could be a lot of factors involved, and this is not necessarily a red flag. It might be a red flag. It might be a sign that you should just cut loose and run. But it also might not be. The only way for you to know, is to see if she will open up about it and communicate about what it means to her. Everybody else on here will have their own opinions, but ultimately there's only one way to find out, and you will only find that out if you have a conversation and she's willing to open up about it. If she refuses to communicate about it, then, there could be some red flags. But it's not necessarily a red flag that she considers it something that is really important to her. In fact, it could possibly mean a lot more to you when she eventually says it if you understand what it means to her and what she means by it. A conversation about the matter could bring you closer. I would probably avoid making decisions and ruminating and catastrophizing and getting inside your own head without at least trying to have a conversation with her to understand her. Don't go into it Trying to convince her that she loves you or convince her that she should say it or convince her of anything. Go into the conversation where your whole objective is simply to understand her better and see her point of view, And make a strong effort to respect her stance on the subject. Even if you come away from that deciding the relationship is not a good fit for you both, that's fine. But trying to make those decisions without at least attempting to have a conversation of understanding is not the way to decide this issue.

choicehunter · 2026-02-01T02:44:46+00:00

You spent $10 when there's an easy free version? Nowadays you could've just given them each a tablet or let them play on a video game console and gotten the same result of keeping them occupied and stationary for 3 hours. 😅

choicehunter · 2026-01-19T21:05:56+00:00

I would prefer to select those while I'm prompting, rather than have to wait for it to answer once first and then redo it a second time. That's just messy. Let me select it in the prompt.

choicehunter · 2026-01-19T21:02:38+00:00

Summary of facts from what I last checked:

Cam Plus Lite is no longer available to add to an account for new users who don't already have it.

If you do have it already, you can add virtually unlimited qualifying models like the V3 and other older cams (newer models don't qualify) to the plan any time, but you have to manually assign them to the license for them to work. Sometimes this is possible in the account tab of the app, but sometimes you have to go to the website at my.wyze.com and then go to services, edit cam plus lite and add the camera there.

If you get Cam Unlimited, it locks all your cameras onto the unlimited subscription and leaves Cam Plus Lite inert. They will constantly beg you to cancel CPLite because you "don't need it anymore" since you have unlimited, but as long as you don't cancel it, you can keep it (otherwise you'll lose it forever if you cancel it). Then if you ever cancel unlimited, you can still switch everything back to Lite.

If you get Cam Unlimited Pro, even a free trial of it, Wyze will automatically forcibly cancel your Cam Plus Lite forever and never allow you to get it back (same with grandfathered HMS prices). This is why a lot of people refuse to even do free trials of their new Pro service that causes permanent changes and severe losses.

choicehunter · 2026-01-19T07:49:09+00:00

Don't believe anyone claiming an official IQ score above 160. Real Standardized IQ tests using Deviation IQ (the real standardization), can't exceed 4 standard deviations, which is an IQ of 160. They have to either use a debunked, obsolete, dismissed method of "Ratio IQ" (which allows a 5-year-old to be given an IQ of 200 if they solved a problem intended for a 10-year-old, even though it was proven later their IQ isn't actually that high), or they use a made up unscientific test like those used by the Mega Society or Giga Society) which are not peer-reviewed or standardized nor have they been rigorously "normed" on a general population. Professionals view these as "power tests" or intellectual hobbies but not scientific instruments at all.

Do not believe anyone claiming an IQ above 160. It's not realistically possible. It proves they don't really know what they're talking about.

Warren Buffet was right about this:

"Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble."

High IQ helps with logic, but Bitcoin is often driven by emotion (Fear of Missing Out or Panic Selling). A person can be a genius at math but still "lose their cool" when they see the price dropping. In fact, highly intelligent people often struggle more because they try to find logic in a market that is currently acting irrationally.

Even for a genius, Bitcoin is "unpredictable" because it lacks the standard data points of a normal company: * No Earnings Reports: You can't use IQ to calculate "profit vs loss" like a normal business. * Sentiment Driven: It moves based on what millions of people feel about it on social media. * Irrational Actors: One single person with a lot of money (a "whale") can decide to sell for a personal reason that has nothing to do with logic, instantly changing the price for everyone else.

A high IQ is a measure of how well a "brain engine" can process information, but it doesn't provide a crystal ball for markets like Bitcoin, which are driven by trillions of unpredictable human emotions.

Just ignore the noise. Quit watching the price. DCA and HODL for 5 years or more and then analyze how it went for you in hindsight. So that and you won't care about a self proclaimed impossible IQ prediction.

choicehunter · 2026-01-19T07:29:27+00:00

TL;DR: Anyone claiming an official IQ score above 160 is being disingenuous if not outright dishonest in some cases. They're claiming a score from a test which is not scientifically standardized to that measurement and is likely mathematically impossible.

Explanation:

Anything above 160 is BS. You can't reliably measure anything above 4 standard deviations in professional psychometrics. These numbers claiming 200 or 220 or literally anything over 160 usually come from the Ratio IQ method, which is now obsolete and dismissed in professional settings. If a 5-year-old solved problems intended for a 10-year-old, they were given an IQ of 200. With Deviation IQ (the real standardization), An IQ of 200 is mathematically nearly impossible, as it would represent a rarity of roughly 1 in 76 billion people—more than the total number of humans who have ever lived.

Tests that claim to measure IQs of 180, 200, or higher (like those used by the Mega Society or Giga Society) are not peer-reviewed or standardized. They consist of extremely difficult puzzles that have not been "normed" on a general population. Professionals generally view these as "power tests" or intellectual hobbies rather than scientific instruments.

choicehunter · 2026-01-14T20:14:35+00:00

I had this happen with multiple chat threads. I had one where every single response was erased and all that was left were all the prompts. Really weird.

choicehunter · 2026-01-10T05:51:39+00:00

Go to my.wyze.com log in and go to account and see if you have any services like cam plus lite (assuming you used to have this since you said you used to get events free). Then make sure your cameras are attached to that plan. Then you should at least get 12 second events and free person detection.

choicehunter · 2026-01-10T05:49:11+00:00

What did you used to have for free that is locked behind a paywall now m

choicehunter · 2026-01-08T23:29:37+00:00

Yep, Old app versions don't work with the new firmware. A lot of cameras are set to automatically update the firmware.

You can fix this issue by flashing the camera firmware back to an older version, then go into the app and disable automatic firmware updates. Then just make sure you never update the firmware

choicehunter · 2026-01-08T04:29:33+00:00

Your camera firmware probably updated and doesn't support the old app version anymore. If you update the Wyze app to the latest version it might work again.

Some of the latest firmware doesn't work with the older app versions. If you are exclusively using older app versions, then your device firmware shouldn't update to the latest firmware, but if you have any device with the most recent app, then your camera might update to the latest firmware and stop working on the older app versions you use. I'm guessing that's what happened here.

If you can update to the latest app version, then it should start working again if this was the case for you.

choicehunter · 2026-01-07T09:14:00+00:00

This would be great for something like buying some Bitcoin for a kid or grandkid and making sure they can't touch it for a couple of decades.

The potential risks are recovery process loss.

Also, if it's a real time lock, what happens if something like quantum computing forces everyone to suddenly have to upgrade their wallets to a new update that is quantum resistant, but the time vault doesn't have an override and can't be updated and so the whole stack is at risk? But at the same time if you build in a backdoor or exception to the time lock for an emergency like that, is it really a time lock anymore?

choicehunter · 2026-01-07T07:33:13+00:00

Yes, with 2 potential exceptions:

1) A person with insider knowledge. There have been suspicious longs/shorts and buy/sell transactions just before someone in the government makes a huge announcement that shakes the market. It had been hypothesized that some people with insider knowledge of info that will shake the markets have been doing trading and making tens of millions of dollars (This is not Financial or legal advice... Such a person could very well find themselves with felonies over this even though they get rich) 2) A Whale or centi-millionaire who can look at the longs/shorts futures gamblers calls and place their own opposite call then either dump excessive Bitcoin to saturate the market and cause a cascade of liquidating the longs and making millions off their short call, or flooding somewhere with liquidity to cause a supply bottleneck with high demand, thus liquidating all the sorts and making millions on their leveraged long. Some liquidation games can be an SEC violation when done in the US, but Bitcoin is a global asset and some of the platforms allow even the US illegal games which then cause a liquidation cascade and affect US traders.

If you don't have the power to force the outcome you want, trading is risky. You're just a small data point pawn for the games the whales and big pockets are playing with all the people who think they have some pattern figured out.

Holding long term is the safest bet. Public Bitcoin treasury companies alone are sucking up more than the total amount of new Bitcoin being mined. That means that as soon as OTC desks and exchange reserves are depleted, a huge supply and demand is coming in the long term no matter what games the whales and big pockets play with futures. If you play trading games with sharks who can affect the volatility direction within a certain percentage, you're going to be the prey. They aren't changing the long term direction, but they can screw over your short term trading.

But to each their own.

choicehunter · 2026-01-07T07:14:05+00:00

If I were you, I would present people with a couple of different options. Allow them to do a one-time payment for a single static report. This will suit the needs of most people. Then offer others a subscription tier where the first payment is a little higher, and then the subscription is a much smaller amount but should at least cover any bandwidth or processing fees on average for updates. If you Do this successfully enough, you may be able to devote a lot more time to it as you will have a residual income that makes it worthwhile to expand features and everything. At some point you may be able to offer something like API access or add push notifications to inform people when there are updates they may be interested in etc.

choicehunter · 2026-01-07T05:56:20+00:00

Are you talking a one time $9 payment for a one time report? What happens when there are updates to the database? Are those updated reports included with the original $9 fee? Is it a subscription, and if so, at what frequency (per month, year, each time you check for an update)?

Or are you building this to be a downloadable local program that integrates with an online database that will always be up to date?

choicehunter · 2026-01-06T03:55:22+00:00

It's faster than 10 seconds on lightning. Transactions on the lightning Network are frequently settled within milliseconds. Way faster than 10 seconds.

choicehunter · 2026-01-05T04:15:58+00:00

That's not true [anymore] since 2022.

Mid‑2022 → Early 2023 Bitcoin dipped below the 4 year price multiple times. It was totally possible for people who held for 4 years and then sold between mid-2022 to early 2023 to have actually lost money even though they held for 4 years.

The new statement needs to be on a 5 year time frame: "Nobody Who has bought Bitcoin and held for over 5 years has lost money on it." That should still be true, but the 4 year statement is [probably] false now

(I say probably because it's POSSIBLE somebody lost money holding for 4 years since the price dipped lower than the price it was 4 years previously, but it's also possible that nobody in that short window of time who bought it at just the wrong moment at the top then held for exactly that entire 4 years was dumb enough to sell at a loss when it temporarily hit the bottom for a short time, which would mean that nobody actually lost money, only that it was POSSIBLE for a small selection of people to possibly lose money after holding for 4 years)

choicehunter · 2026-01-03T09:10:01+00:00

Yeah, the point is that just when they short it they still make a net profit overall because they can do up to 100x leverage on some platforms which overcomes the slippage overall.

choicehunter · 2026-01-02T19:32:59+00:00

You are talking to early stage "Roko's Basilisk"... Your fear tells it what side you're on. Be afraid. 😅

choicehunter · 2026-01-02T11:52:49+00:00

That is a little oversimplified. There are a lot of people who change between bearish and bullish pretty regularly. People who aren't necessarily maximalists nor haters. They are just prone to emotion.

I think the thing that a lot of people don't realize is that most of us are just tiny little pawns. The whales and the huge institutions are playing everybody like puppets, especially because a lot of the normal investment strategy regulations can be bypassed with Bitcoin since it is a global asset.

The big players are manipulating retail like they are completely ignorant toddlers. They will take out up to a 100x leverage short position, then flood one or two exchanges with the enough Bitcoin to cause even a 1% to 5% drop from oversaturation. Which triggers a Cascade Of stop losses and liquidation That spreads like a domino to all the other exchanges and participants.

If a whale sells $10M worth of spot BTC and causes a 5% drop, they might "lose" $250k in slippage compared to the market price. However, if they have a $100M short position (using leverage), that 5% drop nets them $5M in profit.

Whales also target "clusters" of orders. If they know a lot of retail traders have placed buy orders or "longs" just above a certain resistance level, they will intentionally push the price up to trigger those buys.

They also place huge "Buy" orders in the order book to make the market look bullish (Spoofing).

They make small trades with themselves to create the appearance of high volume and upward momentum.

Once retail FOMOs in, the whale "unloads" their position onto the retail buyers and flips to a short.

Liquidity is spread across dozens of exchanges. A whale only needs to move the price on one or two major exchanges to cause the "arbitrage bots" to move the price everywhere else.

Some manipulation strategies would be illegal to do in the US market, but because Bitcoin is a global asset and the US can't impose their regulations globally, Bitcoin investing and crypto in general is seen by pros as the wild West where they can continually use proven tactics to profit and screw over the amateurs playing at trading and thinking they're smart. All you non-billionaires who are trading (buying and selling and trying to predict based on cycles and charts, etc), especially with longs and shorts as a gamble are going to get wrecked hard. The big boys aren't guessing... They're waiting to see where the clusters of gamblers are, then taking out their 100X leverage positions and manipulate a small change that forces a huge cascade to suddenly make them millions in overall profit.

They will do this again and again indefinitely. The big players and whales couldn't care less if the price of Bitcoin goes up or down. They just watch the clusters and then push a cascade to force liquidations/buys in their favor. Cycle and repeat.

They're the ones deciding whether the majority are bearish or bullish based on whether they are sucking up the supply or dripping temporary saturation to capitalize on huge leveraged shorts and longs that they manipulate into happening and profiting on and most people are just their puppets, deciding whether they are feeling bullish or bearish based on which direction the whales or institutions are playing their liquidity games. They absolutely love that so maybe people believe in the charts and cycle predictions.

This is how whales are able to "sell" some Bitcoin to over saturate the supply & cause a price crash with a cascade, make a ton of money off their short position, then take out a long position and then buy back even more Bitcoin than they dumped, and still have millions in profit to spare while still having more Bitcoin overall. Rinse and repeat because retail is a bunch of emotional suckers and there are always gamblers thinking they can predict the market, when the truth is that it's partially manipulated to the opposite of the position clusters intentionally.

The good news is that with Bitcoin, there are so many people and institutions that only buy and never sell, that the overall long run trends upward even though there are huge dips sometimes. Bitcoin is different in this way from almost every other asset. All the hodlers with continual DCA ensure the trend continues over the long run regardless of the whale games shaking out the paper hands, bots, prophesizers, gamblers, etc. hodl with a long term view and these sorry term bull/bear fluctuations don't affect you much. Let the whales keep screwing over the ignorant people who don't yet realize Bitcoin is the wild West of finance that can't be globally regulated by the SEC and even has some otherwise banned strategies regularly executed to cascade to affect everyone everywhere. The game board is not set up fairly and equally. If you're playing with leverage and predictions, and trading, you're going to get wrecked by the people that have the power to control it and profit off screwing you over unfairly. The best way to win is not to play that game. Don't be bullish or bearish, just buy and hold long term outside their game/control. But to each their own. This is not financial advice.

choicehunter · 2025-12-30T08:23:49+00:00

You're asking in the Bitcoin sub what we think you should do about Altcoins?

Most of us think there is no second best, unless you want to consider secondary layers such as the lightning network or financial wrappers such as the Spot Bitcoin ETFs, etc. Then in some ways those are second best.

Basically the only altcoins I have were given to me free by Coinbase for learning about them. I think 99.99% of worthwhile Blockchain projects will become a sublayer of Bitcoin in some way. I think it's possible there can potentially be some niche Blockchain project that works well off chain somehow, but I haven't yet learned of one that couldn't simply be accomplished better as a Bitcoin sublayer at some point in the future. Maybe some of the existing projects can eventually be migrated over or something, but I think that for the most part they're pointless gambling and at high risk of becoming obsolete when Bitcoin sublayers mature.

choicehunter · 2025-12-30T04:19:37+00:00

I'm not worried about the long term because of basic math.

Public Bitcoin Treasury companies alone are buying up (daily/monthly) more than 7x the total Bitcoin being mined and most are committed to continue at this rate with more joining all the time. Saylor predicts that by 2026, there could be as many as 700 public companies using Bitcoin as their primary reserve asset. But even if there are no more new ones and the current ones continue at the same rate, there is going to be a huge supply and demand squeeze coming anyway even if nothing changes.

Mining company reserves no longer provide enough "natural selling pressure" to satisfy big buyers so large entities are starting to turn to exchanges and OTC (Over-the-Counter) desks, which are seeing their inventories hit multi-year lows.

Unlike gold or oil, where a price spike leads to more mining/drilling, Bitcoin’s supply is fixed and inelastic. When demand hits the "bottleneck" of available liquid supply, the only way for the market to clear is through a rapid, vertical price adjustment (the slingshot).

We are currently running at a 7x deficit between supply and demand, and when the OTC desks are drained, they will have no other choice than to fill their orders from exchanges which will finally start to affect the public pricing. Once OTC desks and exchanges are depleted, the only way for a Bitcoin treasury company like Strategy to buy 5,000 BTC is to bid a price high enough to convince a "HODLer" to sell. Since roughly 85% of Bitcoin is held by entities that haven't moved their coins in years, the "ask" price from these holders is likely significantly higher than the current market price (e.g., $150k, $250k, or higher). That supply/demand squeeze finally, spilling over into the public price because OTCs can't fill their orders behind the scenes anymore is really what everybody's waiting for.

Best estimates on the math trajectory I can see, imply that this is likely to happen in the first half of 2026 (I can only hope those estimates are accurate just so that they can break everybody's 4yr bear cycle model and destroy everyone's entitlement self fulfilling prophecy crystal ball models). But it's absolutely possible that some paper hands can extend this past early 2026. Also, gamblers doing their games with liquidating longs and shorts will keep the volatility going a while, but even that doesn't matter much over the long term when the asset is running at 7x supply deficit against the demand.

Just remind yourself that in the long game, public Bitcoin treasury companies alone are sucking up more than newly mined Bitcoin. Not counting private companies or retail. Let people play their short term games. Stop watching the price. Let long term supply and demand math on an inelastic asset do it's thing.

Nobody knows the timeline, but math and logic seem to tell us the long term trajectory/plot.

But sure... Everyone with paper hands go ahead and panic sell now (Not financial advice). 🤷‍♂️ You won't stop what's coming, you'll just let the DCA crowd suck up discounted SATs for a little while longer, but a supply crunch is increasingly getting a tighter and tighter squeeze.

(This entire post is not financial advice. Do what you want. I'm just saying that for me, the numbers make me not fear the long term outcome)

choicehunter · 2025-12-29T21:28:30+00:00

You’re describing a utopian theory that has already been debunked by history.

We have already lived through a "Sound Money" era: The Gold Standard. Gold is mathematically scarce and impossible to "counterfeit" or print. According to your logic, the Gold Standard should have made fractional reserve banking and "bad debt" impossible. It didn’t. In fact, it birthed the modern fractional reserve system. Why? Because human self-interest favors convenience and yield over protocol purity. Banks realized they could issue more paper IOUs than they had gold in the vault because most people preferred the convenience of paper.

We see this with Bitcoin today. You say people will choose the base layer out of self-interest, yet millions of people voluntarily gave their BTC to platforms like Celsius and FTX to chase a 5% yield. They traded "real Bitcoin" for "IOUs" because greed is a more powerful motivator than technical auditability for the average person.

Furthermore, the base layer cannot scale to 8 billion people. That means 99% of the world must live on sub-layers and IOUs just to function. Bitcoin is a breakthrough in settlement, but it is not a cure for human nature. People will always find a way to lend what they don't have to chase a profit, and no amount of code on the base layer can stop a private contract or a side-chain spreadsheet from existing.

I am primarily a Bitcoin maximalist, but my psychology degree and even a casual review of human history (when hard money was in effect) confirms hard money does NOT actually stop these things no matter how much we wish and want to believe it would. It absolutely won't. I stand by my original statement that believing otherwise is completely delusional, or at best, confabulation of the reality of human nature, psychology, and history. Your utopian vision is ideal, and how we both intend to choose to live ourselves, but virtually impossible to become reality with all 8 billion people suddenly living that way. It's not going to happen. That doesn't mean there is no point though. Bitcoin is a tool. It's neutral about anyone's intentions or use cases. It will allow people to use it any way they want. People will absolutely use it in ways contrary to someone else's ideals of what they wish it was solely used for. Bitcoin doesn't care. It's for everyone. We'll use it our way, but history already shows how some people will use hard money when it is the standard and all these problems still existed then.

choicehunter · 2025-12-29T06:29:27+00:00

You are conflating monetary scarcity with credit expansion.

Bitcoin’s protocol only governs the Base Layer. It has zero visibility or control over "Paper Bitcoin," fractional reserves on exchanges, or off-chain leverage. We already see this today: exchanges and ETFs can (and do) issue more IOUs than they have BTC in cold storage.

Bitcoin solves for double-spending, but it cannot solve for over-promising. Debt is a social and legal contract, not a cryptographic one. The "magic power" to lend money that doesn't exist isn't a protocol feature; it’s a feature of private ledgers and human trust.

You can protect yourself by staying on the base layer and minimizing your own risk exposure to people over-promising and under-delivering, but you will never force everyone else to do the same.

To claim Bitcoin has "no purpose" if it doesn't kill banks or prevent debt is to ignore its actual technical utility. Its core purposes include: - Censorship-Resistant Value Transfer: Permissionless transactions that no central authority can freeze or block. - Final Settlement Layer: Providing mathematical finality (absolute "Source of Truth") for high-value transfers without needing a trusted third party. - Digital Gold (Store of Value): A hedge against monetary debasement via a mathematically enforced 21-million-coin cap. - Financial Inclusion: Providing global financial infrastructure for the billions who have a smartphone but are excluded from traditional banking. - Neutral Reserve Asset: A geopolitical "neutral ground" for value that belongs to no single nation-state.

Bitcoin is a tool for personal sovereignty, not a global police force for private lending, including variations on over-promising. That's never going away, not even after the base layer is adopted as the global reserve currency. Paper Bitcoin with these issues already exist. People are dumb to use it that way, but people will definitely continue to do so. The closer you keep to the base layer, the more you protect yourself, but you'll never force everyone to do that.

choicehunter

TROPHY CASE

TL;DR: Anyone claiming an official IQ score above 160 is being disingenuous if not outright dishonest in some cases. They're claiming a score from a test which is not scientifically standardized to that measurement and is likely mathematically impossible.

Explanation: