I think a 10x is a pretty good conclusion to any bet. That's pretty generous for a cashout option given by a bookie in my view.

Having two further matches down the line is a huge risk even with low multipliers and betting on the safe side. So I think it's reasonable to cash out if you're satisfied with the pay.

But it also comes down to each person's preferences. I see that 1m naira is like 750 USD. Probably very few people in Nigeria are comfortable losing that amount every day, so I'd say it's reasonable to cash out at this point. But if the person making this bet is rich for Nigerian standards and doesn't mind losing 750 USD in value, then go ahead keep it till the end.  

Who would you blame in that case? Given how ferocious feds have been I wouldn't blame the developers.
As stated above, Tornado.cash developers also did their best to cover their ass and avoid having their lives ruined by federal indictments, and yet for the feds it wasn't enough. And as we saw with Samourai devs, one of them was even arrested in Portugal. Even if he doesn't get extradited, he's going to face charged difficult to combat for sure. Prison is never an unlikely scenario when the U.S. goes against you and you're in a western country.

So I'd argue that developers also have an obligation to themselves to try and do their best not to get rekt by feds. If someone else wants to take the risk they could always fork the software.

I think that we have to be understanding of Wasabi's position before such conclusions. Developers that know how to develop bitcoin could apply to 10 positions today and have a very high acceptance rate for new job opportunities. Plus, when you make a piece of software free and open source, revenue avenues are kinda limited because it can't realistically be sold or licensed.

The devs somehow need to get paid or they won't develop FOSS at all.
So when it comes to developing a wallet solution that offers additional features on top of the bitcoin stack, the voluntary-funded model hasn't proven to work yet. Bitcoin-core developers might get external sponsors because it's a very knowledge intensive task and people need to pay their bills too if they spend tons of time doing something they've spent a large part of their life learning (without getting paid) to do.

But who would fund a privacy wallet? Even with bitcoin, nearly all of the dev funding comes from corporations and from the occasional well-meaning tech billionaire. Would these corporations and billionaires want to risk seeming as defying U.S. authorities and regulations though? I think most definitely not.

We can't realistically expect any software development to happen from developers operating without salaries and/or without knowing each other's person, operating in a rogue manner. Feature-packed privacy wallets are vast and can't be developed without any organization. So whoever is organizing things also could face liability against state entities.

The alternative to external pressure for a software project is always to give up and find jobs elsewhere. But instead Wasabi devs built offices in Budapest, found a team of professionals in the space, found ways to LEGALLY pay them a stable salary to continue development, and to this day offers a feature-packed bitcoin wallet with additional privacy services on top. They already do so much to develop the software and keep their operation sustainable.

After seeing what happened to Samourai devs, we just have to be glad that Wasabi is still standing and the devs behind it are still willing to provide the software, albeit with limitations. The software existing and being developed is what matters. If anyone wants to use it in whatever ways it should be on them and not in the developers. But if the US gov doesn't see it that way, what can be done?

Maybe we could try crowd-fund the development of a privacy coordinator and development team to operate out of Russia or Iran or at least anonymously and not have to worry about them being sent to a U.S. jail. But to my knowledge, no one has taken up to that endeavor and secondly I've seen overall nearly non-existent willingness of users to crowd-fund bitcoin privacy wallets. Let alone the fact that operating our of a non-western state and/or being anonymous doesn't guarantee that developers of such a project will be left alone.

To make a long story short, Wasabi is one of the best things we have for bitcoin privacy as of now. It's not perfect but it's they're operating with certain limitations that are very hard to overcome. We have to appreciate their efforts and recent developments with Samourai shows that they're dedicated for wanting to continue and more prepared overall.

I think the Oscars are even more biased than the Eurovision song contest. Oscars are even more biased and ideologically seclined.

Oscars are made by the so called academy and they pick nearly exclusively American film. At least with the Eurovision people can be heard in the vote and the result isn't so much about showcasing a nationally superior image above everyone else as American films do so one sided in their world view.

Advice such as not to use a large percentage of your bankroll per vet makes sense if as a bankroll you count the total bankroll you have set aside for each month. So if you earn 1000$ a month and your expenses are 600$ then maybe you can save 450$ and play with the rest. But that's a highly subjective thing. If you earn more then the percentage could easily be smaller because you don't realistically need to bet huge amounts to have the same level of fun.


But to think that you can make the most of any amount is not a very good mindset. The more you set to win, the slimmer the chances. So it's better to just play for fun and only with what you can afford to lose.

Probably video blackjack as it can have the lowest house edge but that also depends on the rules. If the casino you are playing at is fair they will give you the house edge rate so you know.

The video blackjack on stake for example has a house edge even below $1. As far as I know it's one of the few major casino games remaining with an edge as low. Of course house edge of any positive number means the casino has an advantage, but if you are careful what you play and do everything perfectly it's very low. The thing with blackjack is that you have to have so many things inind that often you will make small mistakes making your chances a little worse.

I'll start. I'd like to offer my sincere apologies and take back any statements I had made against Wasabi wallet and the people behind it, including you personally.

My understanding at the time was limited and based on falsehoods and misunderstandings perpetuated by other people as well. I regret having been one of such people at a time.
I think I now have a better understanding of what each proponent in bitcoin's privacy space represent and Really do understand where the Wassabi team are coming from.
In my view, Wassabi is a net-positive proponent for bitcoin's privacy uses and have started greatly appreciating the team for their efforts.

And to anyone else in this thread, I think that we should all acknowledge that Kruw personally has been offering level headed fact-based answers here for so long in spite of so many attacks he and the project have been receiving. Wassabi is offering one of the best bitcoin privacy solutions that can realistically be provided now, and we have to recognize and appreciate that.

Let's discuss if the parties who were arrested were transferring funds on behalf of others.

If they were in fact not doing that, then how do we justify them receiving a fee for transfers done through the wallet? What was this fee for, paid by who and for what exactly? What was Samurai's purpose, why did they set up a company etc.

If Samurai was 100% decentralized and there were no owners weren't established through an official company, maybe there would be plausible deniability. FEDs could go as far as to order a code repo shut down, but who would they go after? An expansive open source dev community? Pseudonymous code authors? Decentralized network node-runners?

Certainly users who were running the Samourai software weren't receiving it from a vague or decentralized source. And in the process of running the software, they were exchanging information and financial transactions with Samourai's company directly. So I think the defense would be pretty weak in terms of the liability part.

Of course here we're always judging this based on the current network. Other jurisdictions may be affording more freedoms to open source devs to develop whatever apps however they want.
Honestly certain rulings the U.S. justice system has delivered are pretty tyrannical and more often than not when an individual or a corporation is set to fight in court against the government it's a guaranteed loss for them. Like the case of the Developer traveling to NK I mentioned in the OP, he was nearly forced to plead guilty to avoid a huge sentence.

I'll recognize that Samourai and Wassabi aren't the same and have many differences, but also people considered them competitors.
Having your competing product's founders arrested and their services shutdown sounds pretty alarming.

Are Wassabi devs still feel safe and confident? Would be nice to have this reassurance from them in a statement perhaps.
Although they might chose to follow the silent route (whatever you say may be used against you), which is also respectable.

I think that following the arrest of founders and seizure of Samourai assets, we as a community should do our best to assess the situation in order to better understand privacy's future.

In the last few years we've seen intense international crackdowns on known privacy methods for bitcoin transactions. International police operations were organized against mixers, bitcoins were seized, founders were arrested and on many cases services were shut down completely.

But in the case of Samourai wallet, there's something new. While Samourai wallet's developers also made it explicitly clear that their software and services were provided with the intent of hiding the origin of funds, the difference of their services is that unlike mixers, what Samourai did it was largely decentralized, and also open-source.

So what really went wrong for Samourai?
I'll put some of my own thoughts into this but really the more input the better.

Being too cocky
Samourai wallet appeared to have lots of fans on social media. Not only that, but the wallet's founders also would often bite into it and post provoking comments on social media. Here's a small example below:
Note: The connection between the approach U.S. authorities had and the above screenshot isn't just speculation, it's taken directly from the DOJ's report on the crackdown.

Providing services
Samourai devs didn't stop at just being devs. It was a company, a service and a community. They were earning from fees, selling items, providing advice and doing it all very publicly.
Also from the DOJ's report:

There's a chance, albeit a slim one, that if Samourai was just open source wallet software provided as is, without a company behind it, and without the developers offering for-profit services within their software, that they could have avoided prosecution. Moreover, running a community and having such a pompous social media presence surely attracted a lot of attention.

Being U.S. based
Well, aside of just offering services, Samourai also operated as a U.S. company and openly provided services and sold items to U.S. individuals. Since they decided to go the for-profit route, they could have at least attempted to block U.S. individuals instead of openly advocating them to become clients.

Is there anything that could have been done at all?
Worth noting that if in the U.S. something is seen as a domestic threat politically, feds are known for really throwing the book at someone. For example Ross Ulbricht was jailed for life for operating the Silk Road even though he had never touched the items sold on the marketplace. And even though there was a lot of corruption within his prosecution in terms of what the agents did. The courts didn't care. On another instance, a developer got arrested and sentenced to prison for simply intending to attend a North Korean crypto conference. He didn't even profit or offer services to North Korea, he just wanted to go there and give a speech. And more recently a person that is said to have helped him go to North Korea was also indicted in Spain, just because he's suspect through a "Korean Friendship Association"...

The grasp of U.S. authorities is very far reaching throughout the western world. If they want to silence someone they'll just slap him with unfair charges that will be very hard to fight in court since they're coming from a very high level authority, and the courts are also subservient to the same governments and interests groups.

But even for people running services the US doesn't like while living outside of what we'd consider the western sphere of influence, we've seen them arrested in the past. For example two Russians had been arrested in Argentina for running z-library, a free book download service. This is even though they didn't operate under an official company and hadn't published their names.

So a question that arises, is what can privacy tool developers do realistically?
Try to operate in anonymity, to their best effort remain outside of western countries, not offer any services at an official capacity or establish any companies... And even that probably isn't enough sometimes.
Well under this pretense, it seems like privacy tools for crypto would have to be operated in a very rogue way if they'd want to survive the current U.S. regime. What do you think?

In Greece there's been a viral reddit post going around where the author claimed to have cracked the code about what our entry's song actually means.

At first Zari sounds like a lovesong but when you look at the video and also then go back to the lyrics it makes more sense. Basically the video is kitsch depictions of recent Greek events that were overproduced such as the euro 2004 Greece win. Past glories in Short. All these are in proud display in the video and a tourist is shown in a rally car touring Greece.

According to that poster's analysis basically the meaning of the song is that while tourists come here to have fun, and we kinda depend on them because it's become our biggest industry, also we're suffering because of very high rent, low wages and even drinking water shortages due to tourism. Where the song says "I pretend I forget your aroma" it's an analogy to what we could achieve if we break from certain boundaries set on us by forgetting what we know, which is symbolic also because it's impossible to erase the memory of a smell as the human mind holds it forever. But if Marina can forget an aroma, maybe a country could overcome its burdens too.

It's a very weird discourse but the supposed hidden meaning of the song. But it has overall increased the popularity of the song locally. Not sure if this local vitality can translate to success in the competition also though.

Very true, now AEK is leading with a 4 point difference and only 3 matches for them to go. The hopes other teams have for the first place have become slim. It was also surprising to see Olympiakos not winning against Aris. Congrats for Aris being able to put up such a fight but I just wonder, how's Olympiakos going to contest Aston Villa later in the conference league final four if they can't even get a win from Aris on the local league? Best of luck to Olympiakos because they'll need it hehe...

Well anyway, for the next matchday I think a reasonable bet would be the over 1.75 on PAOK vs AEK.


Looking over their head to head history, most of their matches had at least 2 goals scored, so I think the odds are also not that bad.

It's crazy that PAOK would get a draw against Lamia. They really shot themselves on the foot with this one, slashing their chances to earn the title this year to nearly 0.

What is the assessment here? Are Wassabi developers comfortable continuing to operate their company and develop their projects as they currently do given the developments regarding Samurai wallet? Hopefully it through reduced to no US ties they will have no problems.

Anyone that has ever been on the twitters will know that Samurai was very popular there. Yes their main account was cocky but on the other hand, if you said anything non positive about the wallet, myriads of fan accounts would swarm at you seeking to inflict harm at you and your image for simply criticizing samurai and/or supporting one of their rivals.

If not suspicious, to me it's certainly odd that a purported privacy solution for Bitcoin transactions would have so vocal supporters in public. I always pondered as to why. Why be so public in the first place? What did they have to gain as a FOSS tool from attracting users through viral campaigns and attacking their competitors?

For real this is a very big issue. More and more conflic and controversy keeps coming from these people and eventually I feel like it's going to bite all of us back. People need to understand that if casinos keep allowing heir streamers being so cocky eventually the negative attention is just going to result in a blanket ban for online gambling that's going to be more strict than before. And we've seen governments increasing authoritarianism so it's not too unlikely.

Just for once I want to see a casino endorse streamers that spread knowledge and positivity. It would be ideal to see more variety in casino sponsored streams other than just controversy driven views.

Yup, card counting is legal and the way blackjack runs on online casinos it seems like the risk to them is just not there. Through the video I mentioned the player also mentions a terms I didn't know previously, risk of ruin. We'll, this means chances of going bust after a certain number of hands. And with on-line casino rule sets, it's quite high. You have to take big risks to lower it and can still lose because the house edge also protects the casino. So maybe even online casinos would like to have punters under the illusion that they can best the system just so they go bust.

Petter Todd gave a 50% chance Samurai Wallet was run by feds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPNFdhZUGmk

I guess the chance is now 100%

RIP indeed, I hope the tech continues being used via open source anon development though

Any blockchain where it's easy to copy and paste some lines of code to create your own shitcoin is going to have such consequences.
Solana is cheap and fast at the expense of decentralization. People that want to gamble on shitcoins obviously won't give a damn about fundamentals and therefore Solana has become the primary chain for shit quality tokens. Of course nearly all of them will end up going to 0 in the span of a few months.

Surprising? No. This overall gives the whole chain a less serious outlook to outsiders. You go to any solana charting site and all you'll see is catdog jizzlord coin all day every day. I guess this so far has proven the most popular use of token blockchains, which is very unsurprising considering that they can't seem to compete in finding much if any real utility.

Any "token" built on top of bitcoin's current on-chain infrastructure will eventually be worthless.
It's well established that these types of tokens are exploiting certain features that Taproot and SegWit have to upload data on the blockchain that wasn't meant to be there. It's fitting to the definition of a bug because this is very far from intended functionality.

If from a certain point on this gets addressed, transacting these types of "tokens" will be deprecated. Just having them sit on-chain without being able to move them would be very odd, but it's a realistic scenario. With more and more people getting fed up with transaction fees especially, core developers have also gotten up to the task of discussing to find a solution to this issue. Hopefully we see some resolution soon and the fools looking to upload PNGs on-chain will have to move on uploading their files to a shitcoin's "blockchain".

Ok, sometimes people overreact. Religious people will often consider gambling equal to the devil himself so sometimes it's best to hide some things from them for their own sake of wellbeing.

But still, if you have to lie about how much you put in gambling and how much grief you're going through, or even hiding addiction, then it's a problematic situation. It should be embraced and treated normally without remorse. Personally I haven't needed to lie about gambling. I'm very comfortable admitting to anyone that every now and then I'll play a hand of blackjack online or make a sportsbet. When I play though, I make sure to only handle amounts I can afford to lose. And surely I've lost plenty of times but it's not a problem if it's not important.

I just think that if you establish that with your peers, and if they have common sense, you will no longer need to project lies about gambling to them.