Great news, new poker opportunities are always good to see. I agree, there is not enough poker happening with cryptos directly. Most of the big poker casinos allow us to withdraw money via cryptos, but it's something else when crypto casinos have their own poker rooms. Hopefully there will be some good bonuses at the start to attract a lot of new players. The main issue I see with poker rooms is that they don't attract enough players to get full tables outside of the rush hours. Poker is a scalable business that depends on the number of players. If gamblers have to wait too long to get a full table they might choose to play at a different site. That is why it might bet better at the start to only focus on one or two poker variants like NoLimit and PotLimit, so most players will play at the same tables. Having some sponsored weekly Sit'n'Go tournaments could be a good way to attract new players  and keep them engaged for a longer period of time.

I agree, don't celebrate too early if you can't deliver - Dortmund totally deserved to lose this championship and I am so glad to not have bet any money on the games yesterday. Most of my friends told me that it's a done deal and there is no way for BVB to not become champions. Being a bit more sceptical helped me to avoid a loss yesterday. It was definitely a very interesting last day and that is what it's all about for the fans. On paper BVB should have won easily against Mainz, same goes for Bayern vs Köln. It was kind of clear that Bayern wasn't going to lose and everything was in the hand from Dortmund to make it work. Being decided on the goal difference in the end is a bit sad, but also deserved for Bayern after managing to score the goal in 89th minute. At least it's not getting too dull in the Bundesliga with Bayern winning so many times in a row the championship several games before the end of the season.    

Sorry to hear from your negative experience at the casino, but it sounds to me that you decided against withdrawing the money because you wanted to gamble again. The question would be, would you have deposited new money if your withdrawal request went through? Just because you lost money that didn't leave the casino yet is not a real argument for me, because a deposits usually only takes a few minutes and you could have used fiat money for example to gamble more if you really want to. So it's more about if you able to control yourself with money that is at the casino or not at the casino. In theory any instant withdrawal would be a nice feature, but I can understand the perspective of the casino as well. It might not be so straight forward for the casino to accept your request. Many of the bonuses the casinos offer to us have some requirements to be met before we can actually withdraw that money. These requirements can be to have at least a certain number of minimum games played, a certain amount of money waged or to reach a certain threshold. Which means the casino might need to double check our accounts and if they don't have advanced IT systems it has to be done manual by the support staff which is going to take some time.

No it's definitely not safe to quit your job and become a full time crypto trader. Trading income is not guaranteed and is not going go be constant. That is a very difficult decision that   you should think about in detail and don't make it a hasty decision based on emotions. A successful trader needs two things, experience and capital to make a lot of money. You could always get around one or the other with some help, but if you are young without experience and no real starting capital, than it's really hard to make. To live of your trading income you need constant payouts to buy food and pay your bills. Before taking such a drastic step I would recommend you a crypto portfolio on the side and see how profitable you are. Quitting our job and losing our main source of income can be devastating.

Why exactly should central banks buy bitcoin? Their mandate is price stability in their respective fiat currency, issuing more debt to buy bitcoin is definitely part of their job. Central bankers can't do what they want, there are laws in place. The idea is a bit dumb, but let's run with it for the sake of the argument. So let's say the central bank starts buying bitcoin heavily. That would send the bitcoin price to the moon, all the HODL investors wouldn't be selling at current prices. The central bank might need to offer 1m USD per bitcoin for the long term holders to give up their coins. And even then it seems unlikely that one entity could aquire all coins. Let's say the central bank spend billions and managed to aquire all coins, then the price would drop to 0 because who wants to buy bitcoin if there are no in circulation. Seems like a bad deal for any central bank.

Personally I do think that inflation is going to keep rising this year. In my country Economicst predict a more slowly rising inflation and energy and food prices are evening dropping a bit in price this year. However I am very sceptical about such moves, why would any company that tries to maximise it's profits going to lower it's price considerably? Both food and energy are two sectors where people need to but regularly, there is no way to live without it. I expect prices to rise again later this year. Another big trend is that workers demand huge pay rises this year. In many sectors we saw strikes that were eventually settled with giving workers one time pay off payments and 10% salary rises. All these additional cost are going to make products more expensive and will be passed on to the consumers.

Yes for sure, during every Worldcup I am betting against my country. In my opinion it's the perfect strategy to bet your club and has nothing to do with loyalty. Some people might not understand it, but it has pretty easy idea behind. You basically use sports betting to hedge your emotions. So when your team wins you feel happy and don't worry about the small loss. As a real fan the win is always more important than the money. And when your team losses you feel bad, but at least can be happy about some money you won. After a devastating loss you can buy drinks from your bet. It's like getting drunk for free after a big loss. That is why I always place 4-5 bets on the top favorites at the start of the world cup and not bet on my own country. Only during some later matches I bet on them if it makes sense and they have a good chance of winning.

Obviously 1 million dollars, education is not so important for that kind of money. With 1m you can already get a decent asset manager that is well educated and will setup a good portfolio for you. Once you have a portfolio that plays regular dividends then you can just sit back and enjoy the side money. If you would pick the education instead it means that you paid 1m for the education which is way too much. The problem for even the best financial education is that if you have no capital to start with than it's really hard to make big profits. Reaching the first million is the hardest with and without education. Another thing is that if you are well educated than you are able to get a good paying job, still reaching 1m USD with a good salary is going too take a long time.

I am glad Vitality managed to win the Paris Major and remains the top CSGO team in the world. It's such a pleasure to watch them play and with a very one sided final it was also a nice way to make some profit. The next big CSGO tournament coming up is the IEM Dallas 2023 with the grand final next weekend. On Monday the group stage starts with a lot of good games coming up. For the first round I will stick to matches with a clear favourite to keep building up my bankroll again. Heroic vs 9z is one of the these matches, where I don't see any chance for Heroic to lose the game. The same goes for G2 vs Nouns, where G2 is going to win easily. FaZe vs Evil Geniuses is also very one sided and should be no issue to win for Faze. In my opinion it's always better to find a couple of these low risk / low payout matches to bet on instead of putting all the money just on one match. There is always the tiny chance that the clear favourite is going to underperform and lose the match with the best of 1 games. The closest match of the day is going to be Team Liquid vs Astralis, two very similar skilled teams. In March the two teams played each other and Team Liquid won 2-0, that is why I am going with a small bet on them for higher payouts.

No so far nobody has threatened me to stop gambling, I don't think this a very healthy way to end the relationship immediately because of it. On one side I can understand the wife, she feels betrayed by your friend that he his keeping such a huge secret from her and that he is losing a lot of money with it.   However, threatening to end a marriage over it seems a bit extreme to me.No idea how they run their household, in case they have separate accounts and both of them are working full time, then it seems fine to have some spare money to gamble with. But if they are low on cash and have bigger plans in life than it could be a huge issue to lose larger amounts of money. There will always be issues in a marriage and ending it all because of it seems wrong. A healthy relationship is realising there are issues talking openly about them. For me trust is one of the most important things in a relationship, that is also why I don't want to keep my gambling habit a secret. My advice would be to talk open about the topics in the future and don't keep big secrets from your wife.

That is an interesting idea, but I think that sitting 12h a day investing or grinding a video game is not a healthy situation. Any person above 30 is going to struggle with such a lifestyle for a longer period of time. In high school or university we have a lot of spare time, that's why so many teenagers and young adults spend countless hours in video games. But the human body is not made to sit in a chair for 12 hours, or stare at a screen for so long. When it comes to making money we need to find something that we can do for a long period of time and with a good reward/salary. Most jobs only are 8 hours a day. And if we want to trade for a living, so we really need 12 hours a day? It's hard to keep concentration up for so long. Maybe 6 hours well spent are enough for a decent profit and the other 6 hours only give a small additional bonus.

For the bull market season is definitely preferred over the bear market. When all prices are falling across the board it's hard to find good opportunities to invest in. In many cases it makes more sense to sell everything and switch into cash during a bear market. And once prices hit the bottom we can rebuy all our previous coins at a lower price. For long only investors like me, I don't really like the risk of short selling, a bull market offers so many more opportunities. But cycles can be quite long and always selling everything during a bear market can have risks by itself. When we are not invested we can always have the problem of missing out on short term price gains. That's why HODL investing is so attractive, you don't worry about the current season and only focus on the longterm trends. It's also a great way to reduce the time we need to spend on analysing and worrying about the market.

Sorry to hear about your family trouble, it's not fair how your uncle reacted and I hope you will learn from it for the future. My family is a bit different, we see each other regularly and are very close. Everybody in my family knows that I invest in crypto currencies for several years now and they don't really judge me for it. In the beginning they were worried that I would lose all my money. And after the big crypto hype they wanted me to sell all my coins. It took quite a long time to make them understand that I am in for the long run and not going to react to short-term price movements. By now they are all fine with my choices and accept them. For me it's all about being honest within the family and not getting judged by them. In case my uncle would react the same way like yours I would probably reduce the contact to a minimum.

Utopia Review by Mauser



Initial thoughts
I am happy to share my review of the Utopia P2P Ecosystem here with everybody. From this forum I heard for the first time of Utopia and their all-in-one program to include cryptos, communication, online browsing and shopping with secure payments. Any new software that offers anonymity and security in the online space is interesting to me and has a huge potential to attract a lot of customers. From the website I got a good initial overview of Utopia and what is all included in their program. They have a very easy to access and get around website, with the download button in the top right corner. The layout reminds me a bit of some older computer games and makes you interested to explore what they are offering.



Installation
The installation was straight forward, via the website you download their program in a few seconds which was around 200MB. I always prefer to download the whole file at once, and not have to wait during the installation because there are many more files being downloaded in the background. With Utopia it's not the case, you only need one file and installing it goes really quickly too. At the end it asks you if you want to open the program when the PC starts, which is nice because most other software just goes straight into startup without notification. After the installation you need to setup your profile in the App, where it directly asks for the location of the backups that will be used to store all the information secured by a password. That is a great way to already add a layer of security for our personal data.



Software
The Utopia software has a very intuitive design that doesn’t require a lot of time to get used to it. You can jump between the different sections at the top of the program and all information will be stored in its own windows. It’s a great way to combine a lot of different functions into one overall software. The first windows are the Channels & Chats windows, where you can talk to support and other users. The chat reminds me of the good old days of IRC chats, you see all other user that are online at the right side and can easily send private messages to each other. On average there were 100-200 online users whenever I was in the channel. The third window is the uMail where you can send longer messages to other people, here it helps to create different contacts and folders first to keep everything organised and stay on top of things. The next window is the All Channel window that shows us 3900 available channels we can join to contact other people. There are a variety of different channels, for special topics like mining or music and also language specific channels if people want to communicate in their own languages. The most important window is probably the Wallet channel where we see our Cryptons CRP holdings, which you can use to pay and transfer money around. The program also offers us the chance to convert CRP directly to the Utopia USD (UUSD) coins which seem to be a stable coin. And then there are two games on the platform itself Chess & Poker that we can play against other users. Chess I didn’t manage to test yet as I had no other person to play with. The Poker room was more interesting for me, there was one table open which had buyins above my league so I couldn’t join. To still test the features, I opened my own room with my own rules and could choose much lower limits. It took 3-4 minutes for some other player to show up and we managed to play for half hour. It’s nice to see so many different things being combined into one single platform.



Improvements/Open Issues
The software seems to be already running quite smoothly and I am not sure how much it can be improved more. One thing I noticed however was that the internet traffic is quite high when it idles the software, this might be the case due to some mining in the background. But for some people like me that only have a limited internet access sometimes that can lead to some problem. Maybe it could be nice to give the option for the users to allocate a certain bandwidth limit for the App itself, so that it doesn't slow down other internet usage. Another issue that I found when going through the large number of merchants working together with Utopia was that some website where not active anymore and others where blocked by my antivirus program. With such a large number like 1856 different merchants being available on the Utopia network, there can always be some companies that stop existing. But maybe you could make periodical checks on the companies to exclude all the ones not active. Especially when on the first two pages of stores in the sub categories websites are not working it feels a bit strange. One way could be that sort your merchants based on the number of clicks they receive, so that the most popular ones are always on top. That would also let everybody see where the other spend their coins. Also, another thing is that some merchants are only available in certain countries, so maybe it could be worth it to add a filter to only show merchants that work in countries we live in.

It seems that most people here on the forum would prefer the reward to review your casino be in bitcoins, which isn't a bad option at all. It gives everybody the highest flexibility as they can choose to do whatever with their money. It would also be my choice of reward if I can choose freely. But given that you are operating a casino and will likely have to offer free games and a certain balance for anybody to review all your games, you are already giving out a lot of bonuses. Another approach could be that you only focus on giving every reviewer a higher starting balance. Instead of paying out a fixed bitcoin amount you could just let everybody keep his balance he has on his account after the review. For example, if you start with giving everybody 30 USD as an initial bankroll for people to check all your games, then people could withdraw the money they manage to keep in the end. This makes the payouts a bit more random, but offers the best way for people to check out all the games on your casino.

That's an interesting take on live roulette gambling and the user seems to have really investigated the topic. I have heard about it in the past that the roulette ball and wheel can be  manipulated to give one party an advantage. The question is would you risk your whole reputation to scam a few customers? I know from some physical casinos that also run online live roulette tables and they use the exact same tables as in their physical casino. If news come out the tables are not legit than the casino could close it's doors, nobody would visit again. I don't think the risk pays of for the casino, because roulette is already a profitable game by itself. The green numbers 0 and 00 ensure that long term the casino will make money with their tables. Hopefully this was a minor incident and won't be discovered at other casinos too.

For me it's the other way round, I introduced much more people to crypto currencies than to online gambling. Which is probably the case due to most of my friends already interested in online gambling before the crypto boom. Back in 2007/8 I heard for the first time of online poker, and during my university time 5 years later I spent a lot of time playing poker online. All of my friends had accounts at the big websites and since then we still play from time to time in the same tournaments. And now most of my friends have families where the wife would not allow them to gamble again. So there is strict split between guys that have been gambling for 10 years and still do so today, and more family orientated who had to stop and are only allowed to visit a physical casino one night in a year. It's kind of hard now to find new people who have no experience in online gambling, but would like to give it a go. As for crypto investing, there are many more people that have heard about it but have no experience and would like to try it. It's true that it involves a longer conversation as they want to know all the risks involved, but so far I didn't get any complains from friends I introduced to bitcoins.

I fully agree with you, gambling can't be looked at as a secure, constant and guaranteed way of income. By nature randomness is involved in gambling, and even with the best possible strategy we won't be able to always win. The professional Black Jack players only manage to shift the expected values from slightly below 50 percent to above 50. It's not like they are going to win now every session they play, it's only the more they play the higher their chances of making a profit. That is why it's so important to look at gambling as form of entertainment and not a form of income. Gambling is only a business for the casino and it's a job for the people working for them. When we only use the money we can afford to lose and don't rely on making a profit it's not going to be an issue.   

I noticed the same over the last few weeks and thought that it was due to me being categorized differently by the YouTube algorithm. Lately I watched more gambling related videos, like top slot winners by streamers and the laat big poker tournaments. Also because of the death of Doyle Brunson there were a lot of new best of videos from his long poker career. After watching all these videos I see now 1 out 3 ads are for gambling. But if other people here have similar experiences than it might be that the gambling industry is focusing more on video advertising on YouTube than on other social media. It's not a bad sign to see the gambling companies be more profitable and have more money for advertising. The only issue I have is if the companies take away the money from bonuses and focus more on new customers and not the existing ones.

So you mean that your friend told you become very rich by investing in bitcoin? I am sorry to tell you but the times where you can become very rich in a short period of time with bitcoin is over. Everybody in the world has heard of bitcoin by now, it's not a secret anymore. The times where you could mine a lot of coins or buy them cheaply is also over. Which doesn't mean that bitcoin isn't a bad investment, compared to other asset classes bitcoin offers a lot of advantage and should be part of any portfolio these days. It's important to have realistic expectations about the returns of bitcoin. If you are fine with making solid returns over longer period of time then you should definitely buy bitcoin, but if you are looking for a way to get rich overnight than you should be looking at the alt coin market and take more risky coins.