Member Info for fleccy

It's about time they banned international stocks/ETF's from being bought and held in ISA's, why should someone receive a tax benefit for supporting other countries markets? If they restricted ISA's to only hold UK Stocks and FTSE ETF's, it would encourage more investment in the UK market from UK retail investors and possibly change some of the advice from UK Financial advisors. They could also give tax benefits for investment in UK stocks outside of ISA's, to encourage UK fund managers to direct investment into UK stocks. UK stocks have fallen into deep value territory and presents risks to the whole UK market, the Government needs to take drastic action; The Conservatives have been a huge let down when it comes to UK stock valuations.

A different point of view considering non dividend paying growth stocks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJOWwfOQ3Sc

"Fleccy, QabT haven’t said they will produce blocks 2.5x faster, they have said it’s 2.6x more probable"

I just used 2.6 times as a loose example, anything that speeds up the processing of blocks to more than 2016 blocks in 14 days will increase difficulty and therefore contribute to an increase in hashrate; Also the more blocks processed in a 24 hour period, above 144, will also contribute to increasing the hashrate figure.

Hexham, Bitcoin difficulty is based on the time taken to process 2016 Blocks.

Difficulty is calculated using:

New_difficulty = old_difficulty X (2016 blocks X 10 minutes) / (the time taken in minutes to mine the last 2016 blocks)

Bitcoin Hashrate = [(blocks solved over last 24 hrs/144) * difficulty * 2^32 ]/600

(144) With 10 minute block times, the total number of blocks expected in a 24-hour time frame is 144.

Difficulty * 2^32: When we multiply Bitcoin's difficulty by 2^32, this gives us the average amount of "work" (hashes) needed to solve a block.

(600) Hashpower is denominated in hashes per second and there are 600 seconds in a 10-minute block.

Since Difficulty is used as a multiplier in the hashrate calculation, it stands to reason that the higher the difficulty the higher the hashrate; Also the faster the blocks are processed in a 24 hour period, the higher the hashrate figure.

The difficulty algorithm is designed to limit block processing to 1 block every 10 minutes, 6 blocks per hour, 144 blocks in 24 hours and 2016 blocks in 14 days. If the network was processing blocks 2.6 times faster, you'd expect the difficulty algorithm to increase difficulty to bring the average back to 1 block every 10 minutes; The increase in difficulty would also show as an increase in hashrate, due to the way hashrate is calculated.

https://www.btcc.com/en-US/academy/crypto-basics/a-detailed-introduction-of-bitcoin-mining-difficulty

https://hashrateindex.com/blog/what-is-bitcoins-hashrate/

Suthy I do watch QBT and Bitcoin in general. To be honest Bitcoin fascinates me because I see it as an illusory investment vehicle aimed at fleecing suckers; QBT interests me because of their claim to have found a magic bullet when it comes to shortcutting sha256.

I'm firmly in the Jamie Dimon camp when it comes to Bitcoin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eneB3s9bCdI

The distance is really important, for every 100km between the miner and the server it adds an extra 1 millisecond Round Trip Delay. For a big miner it would make sense to co-locate QBT's server at the Bitcoin farm, but for small miners spread out across the US it might not be so easy. The distance between New York and Los Angeles is nearly 4000 Km, so the round trip delay just crossing the country could be as much as 40 milliseconds. Obviously there would be servers dotted around various locations, but I'm just using that example to show how distance counts, and that wouldn't include the processing time for QBT's server. This might be a problem in the case of a mining pool, where mining pool control software would have to find some way of efficiently working in conjunction with QBT's server and distributing the processed ranges to individual miners.

If QBT was super confident in their 2.6 times improvement claim, one way they might convince miners is by offering a free trial period and letting the miners publish the results. If you want to buy an expensive car, it makes sense to test drive it first.

"If the green lines had engaged in intelligent conversation with FG over the past 6 or 7 years and knew his academic background, then they may have realised that there is an alternative to brute force and it will blow your mind."

From what I've read QBT's algorithms aren't an alternative to brute force, the algorithm's are advertised as narrowing the nonce range to increase the probability of finding a target hash. Personally I have doubts QBT will be able to do what they're saying, especially using SaaS. Because of the network hash rate even millisecond latencies will make a difference, basically because of the number of nonces crunched in that time. The current network hash rate is over 500 Exahash per second, or more than 0.5 Exahash per millisecond; So in the case of SaaS, for every ms delay between a miner talking to a QBT server and receiving a response the BTC network will process over 500,000,000,000,000,000 nonces. The QBT server will therefore have to be very close to the miner and have the processing power to make superfast calculations in short order.

I have no idea how QBT's software works, in respect of the transaction data within individual blocks, and whether QBT's software produces its nonce range based solely on the header portion of the block, or processes the range against the entire block including the transaction portion of the block. If QBT's software just processes the header, and produces its target range from that alone, it would suggest that QBT will send out the same range of nonces to every miner subscribing to the service, irrespective of the transaction data inserted into each individual miners block.

Just because I'm sceptical doesn't mean QBT haven't found something special, It's just that I haven't seen any evidence to suggest they've achieved their 2.6 times improvement at the current network hash rates and difficulty levels. Until I've seen real world independent reviews with results backing up the improvement claims, I'll remain sceptical.

"Since the end of 2022, Vodafone has been supplying almost 100% of motorways via LTE with at least 100 Mbps. More than 3,600 cell phone stations along the highways already provide drivers with 5G technology. The carrier also said it operates more than 6,000 mobile phone sites that serve to cover motorway routes and tunnels.

Vodafone Germany’s 5G network reached 91% of the country’s population as of the end of 2023. The operator’s 5G Standalone network (SA) currently serves nearly 45% of the German population. Vodafone previously said that 5G SA technology will reach nationwide coverage by 2025"

https://www.rcrwireless.com/20240119/5g/vodafone-inks-deal-boost-mobile-coverage-german-highways

Whatever any of us may think, the market commentators keep bashing Telecoms companies over their debt, so its clear Vodafone need to reduce their debt.

Going off Vodafone's Bond list:

I think the Hybrid Bond for €2 Billion with a next call date of 3rd Oct 2023 has now gone and I also suspect they've already paid off the $3 Billion worth of US Bonds maturing on the 16th Jan 2024. There's also a €750,000,000 Bond maturing on the 30th Jan 2024 and I'm assuming all three of those will disappear after the 5th Feb Q3 results. The total debt maturing for the 2024 calendar year, including the two US Bonds that matured on the 16th Jan, comes to €5.066 Billion. 2025 has €4.326 Billion worth of Bonds maturing.

Mole_man the 2023 figure had a relatively high Spectrum cost, coming in at €2.467 Billion, which dragged the year FCF down. Vodafone's FCF figure is affected by many things.

Alphaspread get a base case of 108.58

https://www.alphaspread.com/security/lse/vod/dcf-valuation/base-case

Value investing get:

"DCF (Growth Exit 5Y) 156.58 - 512.01 269.98 309.6%

DCF (Growth Exit 10Y) 183.54 - 551.49 301.68 357.7%

DCF (EBITDA Exit 5Y) 138.43 - 292.47 198.73 201.5%

DCF (EBITDA Exit 10Y) 173.55 - 374.7 252.18 282.6%"

https://valueinvesting.io/VOD.L/valuation/intrinsic-value

Simplywallst get a fair value of 202p using a DCF model:

https://simplywall.st/stocks/gb/telecom/lse-vod/vodafone-group-shares/valuation

Mole_man, can you post the discounted cash flow figures returning the 45p figure?

"Has all the hallmarks of requiring a cash raise. Let us hope not"

What are the hallmarks of a cash raise Buglet?

I'm interested in your analysis causing you to draw that conclusion.

Depends on your other income. If you have no other income, like my wife, you can currently earn £13,750 tax free from dividends, but the dividend allowance drops to £500 from April so a non earner can earn £13,250 dividend income tax free in the next tax year, if the Government doesn't increase the income tax allowance in the meantime.

Good find Seany. More to the point, why are all UK shares undervalued? It's about time we had a Government that actually supports UK business. It's about time the Government encouraged UK investment internally, I'd get rid of any tax benefits for investing abroad for both retail and institutional investors.

A better example:

https://images.app.goo.gl/mgHmb9hev6UxfGT77

It's something Lawyers drive.

https://gifdb.com/gif/these-clowns-on-a-car-0evzya2lr5febc3x.html

Mole AI is currently super hyped and it's not clear who the winners and losers will be. Trying to compete with the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Google is a losing game, since they appear to have unlimited funds. The tech is evolving very fast and processors are currently very expensive, so it's probably sensible to pay for access to the AI hardware and software tools of the deep pocketed tech giants, rather than investing in your own hardware at this early stage.

Many 5G IOT applications are going to need edge computing to reduce latency to an absolute minimum, so it makes sense for Telecom companies to move out of the highly competitive Data Centre space and invest more at the Edge. Things may change in the future, but AI products/applications based around Microsoft Azure seem to be current winner; A lot of resource and money is currently being thrown at AI, Telecom companies don't have the firepower to compete so they're probably right to take a backseat.

I wish there was a way of filtering the green boxes too, I have 38 filtered messages out of the last 100 messages. I don't know how many are Mandy and how many are Porsche.

He's building his brand, as long as it doesn't affect his personal finances.