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Redditor up 25% after boldly taking out $59K worth of personal loans to buy BTC

So far, the trader has accrued 2.65 BTC at an average price well under the current level of around $30,000.

A Redditor and member of the r/CryptoCurrency community claims to be up 25% or $19,500 after taking out three personal loans worth a combined $59,000 to buy Bitcoin (BTC) over the past 18 months.

According to the Redditor, whose account is crudely named “Vaginosis-Psychosis,” they now have a total of 2.65 BTC, which is worth $80,400 at current prices, and are betting big on the price of BTC hitting $100,000 by early 2025.

In a June 30 post on r/CryptoCurrency, the user gave a run down on how they approached the highly risky method of getting their hands on BTC.

Post on r/CryptoCurrency. Source: Reddit.

The first two loans were taken out in February and June of 2022, totaling $15,000 and $20,000 apiece. They had a fixed annual percentage rate (APR) of 6% and 4.9% each, with monthly payments totaling $225 and $326.

The third loan worth $24,000 was then taken out in June this year, with a fixed APR of 8% and monthly payments of $405.

So far, the Redditor claims to have recently paid off the $15,000 loan in May, along with chipping down $3,500 on the second loan. From here, they plan to attack the most recent loan, as that has the highest APR.

They claim to have accrued BTC at an average price of $24,000 when including interest paid, or $22,264 when not including interest paid.

“The way I see it, the US dollar is rapidly declining in value and prestige. Therefore, I will take out loans to buy Bitcoin and pay back said loans with inflated dollars that I earn from my job.”

“I don’t expect Bitcoin to be trading in this range 18 months from now. I expect BTC to be ~$100K per coin by then, so I'll bite the bull of a short-term high APR for the long-term exponential price appreciation of Bitcoin,” they added.

Related: US SEC deems spot Bitcoin ETFs filings as inadequate: Report

The post has more than 500 comments at the time of writing, with some supportive of the idea, while many others have warned of the dangers of taking such an approach.

“Taking [a] loan for crypto investing sounds like a horror story to me,” the top comment with 457 upvotes from user “middlemangv” reads, with “NotAdoctor_but” adding: “Because it is. This is survivorship bias at its finest, also OP took a calculated risk, most won't.”

Comments on the post. Source: Reddit.

Giving further context, the Redditor stated that they are single with no kids and earn around $60,000 from their job annually. They also stated that they have an affordable renting situation, and are happy to invest 25-30% of their income into BTC each month.

As such, the major risks in this instance would primarily be around the price of BTC crashing heavily and not recovering over the next few years, or losing their holdings via a hack if they do keep them in a hot wallet.

Maintaining employment would also be vital to keep chipping the loans down.

“You seem able to pay this. A win here can change your life. A ‘loss’ i.e., BTC doesn’t go above $35K for three years +, would just mean another year of work. Worth the risk, congratulations OP,” wrote user “Kakoyiannaros.

Magazine: Home loans using crypto as collateral: Do the risks outweigh the reward?

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New year community advice: Check your smart contract approvals

A Reddit user has warned of the potential dangers of unchecked smart contracts, advising the community to revoke approvals on a regular basis.

On the back of the worst year for crypto hacks and exploits, the crypto community has given some advice to newbie investors going into 2023 — check your smart contract approvals and revoke access regularly.

Reddit user 4cademy posted their advice to the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit on Jan. 1, noting that they had approved a slew of smart contracts over a two-year period and “thought it was time to check my approved smart contracts.”

They found “nearly all” of their approvals were for “unlimited amounts," which spurred them to revoke approvals for all smart contracts in their wallet as it was “better safe than sorry,” and advised:

“You should at least check your approvals too and possibly revoke them.”

The reason to do this, the user said, is that some users of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) or nonfungible token (NFT) protocols could have mistakenly approved malicious smart contracts from phishing attempts that could be lying in wait to steal user funds.

Such ice phishing scams have been successful in the past, with one such elaborate month-long scam involving an offering from a fake film studio leading to 14 Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs stolen from a single wallet.

Even known “good-behaving” contracts should be revoked as hackers could find exploits to pilfer funds from connected wallets.

The 10 largest exploits in 2022 saw around $2.1 billion stolen mostly from DeFi protocols and cross-chain bridges where attackers found vulnerabilities in existing smart contracts to carry out their heists.

Related: Developers need to stop crypto hackers or face regulation in 2023

The user offered up further advice saying to “use different wallets for different purposes” such as having a wallet that only interacts with smart contracts and another that doesn’t which is used for the sole purpose of holding funds.

Users commenting on the post also suggested that one could schedule a reoccurring interval to revoke all smart contract approvals, such as on the 1st of every month or even at the start of every week.

Others suggested there were third-party services that could check and revoke smart contract approvals across a number of chains, including Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Ethereum and Polygon. 

One user responded that the “best” advice was to interact with as few smart contracts as possible saying “revoking permissions is good practice but not giving permissions in the first place is better.”

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New funding round sees Reddit gain $4B in valuation since February

Speaking on the latest funding round which sees Reddit at a valuation of $10 billion, Steve Huffman, co-founder and chief executive stated tentative plans for the firm to go public.

Popular social media platform Reddit has gained $4 billion in value since its last funding round earlier this year in February.

Six months ago the firm raised $250 million in Series E funding at a valuation of $6 billion.

In the latest move, Reddit announced a Series F funding round on Aug. 12 — which is being led by Fidelity Management and Research Company LLC and is expected to close at around $700 million with a post-money valuation of $10 billion.

According to the New York Times, investment in the funding round has reached $410 million so far, with Reddit stating that it expects further financing from existing investors to reach the $700 million target.

The true valuation of Reddit is hard to gauge as the firm is yet to go public. On that subject, Steve Huffman, Reddit’s co-founder and chief executive said to the Times:

“We are still planning on going public, but we don’t have a firm timeline there yet.”

“All good companies should go public when they can,” he added.

The company will use the latest funds to further international growth, simplify the user experience, improve website functionality, and roll out more video and audio features, along with developing a self-service advertising system.

The platform competes with ad-based social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter, with Huffman stating that “we’ve grown up in the shadow of Facebook and Google, and pretty much every dollar we make we’ve had to fight for.”

Unlike Facebook or Google however, Reddit has already launched its own cryptocurrencies in the form of Reddit Community Points.

The r/CryptoCurrency subreddit, which has 3.3 million members, has its own coin called r/CryptoCurrency Moons (MOON). In January, Cointelegraph reported that one user sold 14,000 Moons they acquired for free to pay their rent.

MOON currently has a higher price than Dogecoin (DOGE). At the time of writing, according to CoinGecko, DOGE is sitting at $0.27 while MOON sits slightly above at $0.29.

The r/FortNite subreddit launched a similar RCP called BRICK.

Reddit is home to the notorious memestock group r/wallstreetbets, which has had a significant impact on stock markets and crypto markets this year with its retail trading and pumping antics. The group’s popularity led to the creation of the crypto equivalent in r/SatoshiStreetBets, which now has a community of 480,000 Redditors.

Related: Reddit deploys layer-2 solution aimed at scaling Ethereum-based community points

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Hot DOGE nips at the heels of r/Bitcoin on Reddit

R/Dogecoin was the third-most active crypto group on Reddit behind r/CryptoCurrency and r/Bitcoin this week.

Despite Dogecoin under-performing this past week when compared to other leading crypto assets, DOGE’s community has been among the most active on Reddit.

According to data compiled by Skew and tweeted by Messari researcher Mira Christanto, r/dogecoin has been the third-most active crypto group on Reddit this week, with 33,822 new comments posted in seven days.

Dogecoin is the second-most active group coalescing around a single crypto asset, ranking behind r/Bitcoin’s 48,757 comments last week. Unsurprisingly, the wide-ranging r/CryptoCurrency attracted the most engagement of any crypto group on Reddit, with nearly 219,000 comments posted this past week.

After DOGE, Cardano was the next-most active with 15,735 comments, followed by Bitcoin Cash with 9,356. However, between them the subreddits r/EthTrader and r/ethereum represented nearly 10,200 comments combined.

Despite surging social activity surrounding DOGE, Dogecoin network usage is down compared to Bitcoin. It processed nearly 49,000 transactions over the past 24 hours, while Bitcoin processed 344,000 and Ethereum executed 1.37 million.

In price terms DOGE has under performed each of the 16 non-stablecoin assets ranked above it by market cap over the past seven days, gaining just 6% while most top assets have gained between 10% and 25%.

Social sentiment can be an inconsistent indicator of market action, with crypto data aggregator Santiment reporting that Etherum sentiment on Twitter had dropped to its lowest level for 2021 as Ether reclaimed the $1,800 range on March 31. 

Santiment noted the crypto crowd was “in disbelief” regarding Ether’s gains, asserting the “extreme level of crowd skepticism is historically bullish for crypto.” Ether has since rallied into the mid $1,900 range and is currently trading within 5% of its all-time highs.

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