Very interesting article to read, unfortunately most of the stories are illegal and will probably end with us being in jail if we would attempt it. Was a funny read, just not really realistic in today's world. For a Hollywood movie it's a great story, but to do it now in real life I would advice against it. Even if we manage to get our hands on a lot of money like that, we won't be able to enjoy the money. What brings us all the money in the world if we are sitting in jail? I like story number 4 a lot, she won the jackpot but didn't get the money straight away. It always seems so weird that the first reply from the casino is it's was an error an the win is not legit. But why would they then offer her a lower payout? They are trying to cheat her out of the winnings and she fought for her right and got all the money in end. I also like the ending that she donated all the money to charity. At this point it's all about principals, she didn't need the money herself but wanted to make sure her rights are respected.

That is a great idea and congratulations for owning your first bitcoins. Don't worry so much about the short term price fluctuations, you did the first step of buying coins and now you need to wait for the next big bull run. Once the bitcoin market recovers you can take some profit and buy a new bicycles. In my opinion it's clever to sell physical things we don't need at the moment and invest the money in bitcoins. Back in 2016 I did the exact opposite, which was my biggest trading mistake. After making a lot of profits in CSGO skin trading, I cashed out all my money into bitcoins, but didn't keep them. I sold the bitcoins and bought a new bicycle for it. It's a great bicycle and still works fine today, but every time I use it I think about how much the bitcoins would be worth today. Not going to make the same mistake again and will always keep at least some bitcoins in my wallet.

Unfortunately yes, the wealth we humans amassed over the years is distributed very unequal across countries, and even more unequal within all the countries. To be honest I find it the number of 20% owning 80% of the wealth quite high, I expected it to much lower. Just look at the super rich for example - worldwide the 26 richest people held as much wealth as half of the global population (3.8 bn people). It's kind of insane that there are not more civil wars around the world and people are demanding change. The wealth of the 1%ers keeps increasing even during crisis times, whereas the wealth of the largest part of the population remains constant. I don't think that the government is going to change anything, because they are being funded by the rich families. There is a huge lobby industry behind the politicians that finance all their campaigns. Without the money of the rich, the politicians would never get into power. 

That's a really good comparison, when it comes to gambling there is no segregation between the average Joe and the high rollers, we all gamble at the same casinos. It makes no sense for the casino to only focus on one type of customer, it's best to appeal to the whole community. Personally I am a small average gambler, I try to stick to smaller sizes bets and prefer to gamble longer with my  bankroll than to place a few large bets and hope to get lucky. That's why I am biased for casinos to offer more smaller size games and promotions. Sure the casino should reward the high rollers differently and give them higher rake back, but it would be nice to have some promotions that are linked to the number of games played and don't focus only on the amount of money placed in the bets. Because any average gambler can become a high roller when he hits a winning streak, and any high roller can drop down to a smaller bankroll again after a losing streak.

I disagree with you, just because the casino has an edge over the player doesn't mean that there isn't a strategy. Even a losing strategy is a strategy. Everybody that plays at a casino should know that that the chances of the house to win at higher than the chance of the player to win and make a profit. This is of course only true on average, there will always be winners and lowers at a casino. If everybody would only be losing than nobody would be playing. With this in mind there is no strategy that is going to make a guaranteed profit for the player. Or said differently if we would play any gambling strategy infinite times we would go bankrupt. But life is not infinite, that's why there will be lucky gamblers who are winning big and on the other side unlucky gamblers who will lose big.

For me there are different concepts to saving money that I try to keep seperate as much as possible. First of all I have a long term savings account, which is also my emergency account. All the money I put in there is only to be used in emergencies and never for any things that is not really necessary. And then I have a savings account for ordinary things, like when I need a new mobile phone, laptop or clothes. And the last account is my daily checking account, where I also try to save at least the living expenses and utility bills for the next two months. Each of these accounts are at seperate banks and for my long term savings I don't even use online banking, this all helps me to not use money from one account for the purpose of another. In my opinion we shouldn't use all our money during our lifetime, most of the money in my long term savings account actually came from my grandparents who worked really hard for it. It's fine to take out the interest payments from time to time, but the principarl I will never touch for unnecessary purchases. Like I received money from my family, I also want to leave behind something for my children and grand children.

I fully agree with you, it makes no sense at all at the moment to save money in my country. Just yesterday I received an email from my bank that the increased the interest rate on my savings account to 0.6%, which is insane compared to the 8-10% inflation we have now for more than a year. You are losing at least 7-8% value each year for all the money that is not invested. Even for some high risk bonds where the repayment is not guaranteed the interest rate is only around 5%. In real terms you are losing money if you don't invest in stocks or bonds. That is why I kept buying more bitcoins every month for the last 12 months with the money that I would usually put in the savings account.        

I would say that there are not many people out there who can handle big losses multiple times without hurting. Any regular gambler should keep an eye on the risks he takes and make sure that it's within his comfort level. The longer we play in a gambling session the harder it keeps to stay on top of the risks we take, that is why it's good to take breaks in between and clear our head. Also risk is not a constant in our life, it will change the older we get. When we are young we might not feel how hard it is to earn money, so we will evaluate risks much lower than later in life. In our 30-40s risk becomes the main factor to look at as we trying to build a family, buy a house, nice car and good vacations. And once we get closer to retirement we might not need all our money anymore and can handle much more risk again. I would always recommend any gambler to evaluate the risks they can take based on their current life situation.

I would say that it's very similar to why people rarely go to the doctor. If they only have a little pain they don't want to go and will wait until things get better by themselves or worse. It's hard to realise that we have a problem and need help. Also these are stories of a few unlucky gamblers, there are millions of gamblers out there who don't share their stories online. Most of the gamblers I know only play from time to time and don't spend every day at casino. It's a recreational hobby that they only spend a little money on it and would never go so far to bet all their life savings. 

It's good to be financially independent as much as possible, but there can always be hard times around the corner. What if we become sick, get fried from our job, or face a lot of maintenance repairs in our apartment? From my point of view family is there to help each other in times of need. This doesn't mean that we should always rely on our parents to provide for us, but if we really need the help they will be there. Only when I got older I realised how hard the life for my parents was and they needed a lot of help from my grand parents. Without their support we could have never went on summer vacation, or get Christmas gifts. So if things are getting bad I am glad I can get at least some help from my parents. Who else would be there for us if we really need it?

Oh I wasn't aware that there are two different versions of the same casino, one for mobile users and one for desktop users. This makes me curious now, are these two versions the same, or are there advantages for the gamblers? It would be unfair if a casino offers different winning chances for the same type of game, only depending on the system you use. The easy accessibility of casinos with our mobile phones is definitely a big advantage for all the people who enjoy gambling on the move. Just yesterday I saw my cousin gamble a lot on his cell phone and he told me he tried multiple times to stop, but keeps falling back into his old pattern to quickly. For me it's easier to control my gambling habits on my desktop PC.

That seems like a good strategy to give yourself a beak when facing losing streaks. Having a fixed gambling strategy makes a lot of sense, I am using it myself. This helps to not think about every bet we place and keep a better focus on how much money we have already spent and how many bets we need to recover our losses. The losing streak of 5-7 rounds depends a bit on the type of game we play. If we mostly bet on Red or Black in roulette then this seems like a good strategy. Only thing we need to consider that if we follow a martingale strategy is that our losses accumulated quite a lot after 7 losses and we would only need one win to recover everything.

Same for me, I never played bingo online or would download a specific app only to play bingo. If there is some charity behind it than I would maybe consider it, but only to help others and not really with the motivation to make some money. Bingo for me is always the game that is being shown in Hollywood movies that old people play in the retirement homes. Maybe that is why I am not really finding the game exciting and a bit slow. In my country it's also not very popular to play Bingo. The most times I played it was in summer vacations when we were in these big family resorts and they always had a Bingo night per week. My mother used to enjoy the game a lot and forced all of us to play it as well, but the things we won were always some useless physical prices nobody really needed. 

A better question in my opinion should be "why are you selling bitcoins?". When it comes to saving money I don't really have a goal in mind, I mostly save money for bad times like important renovations in the apartment or when the car breaks down. For me bitcoins is a means to save money each month and I prefer to do in bitcoins and not in fiat money. I already have my monthly salary coming in fiat money, the same goes for my retirement money that will be paid out eventually in fiat money. Having the chance to save money in bitcoin is a good diversification that will payoff long term. Also with inflation rates of 10% in fiat money and banks paying 1-2% interest it makes absolutely no sense to save money in a bank account. Taking profit is not really a plan for me, because that would mean to go back into fiat money - which I am trying to escape.

Good luck with creating a new casino, the market is very competitive and you should not expect to make high returns very quickly. Any new casino has to overcome a lot of problems to compete with the older, well established casinos. Running only one game on a casino seems like a bit limitation to me and I am not sure if you are going to attract a lot of customers with it. First of all the question should be if you will bring anything new to the crypto gambling community. Like new games, better promotions or a higher payout ratio for the gamblers. It seems that you will buy all the scripts, so you will just copy the existing games that we already have at another casino. Maybe you have some good plans for a marketing campaign that is going to attract new gamblers. Also you need a decent bankroll to start your project, because in the first few month you will likely lose some money.

After G2 winning the IEM Katowice 2023 tournament I am really hyped for them to perform well this year. Next week the ESL Pro League Season 17 games are up again in Group A with G2 playing against Eternal Fire, unfortunately the odds are really bad with 1.02-1.05 for G2 to win, still worth it to make a small profit. Fnatic is going to face MIBR which is going to be a nice match and should be won by fnatic without much hassle. Also Cloud9 is playing against Evil Geniuses which is going to be a sure win for Cloud9. And the last match will be Outsiders vs IHC which is going to be won by Outsiders hopefully. G2 is clearly the strongest team this series and should win it, the second team to reach the upper bracket finals for Group A is likely Outsiders. Let's see if Heroic can get easily through group B and if there will be a final of G2 vs Heroic again.

Buying crypto currencies and stocks to HODL is a good investment strategy, but it is really a form of passive investing? It's true that we don't need to invest much time into our trading activities and can just forget about our holdings, but these investments won't create much passive income for us. When it comes to passive investing I always thought it's about finding assets that create us a steady passive income, instead of making money on the rise in price. That is why crypto currencies are not a good tool to make a passive income portfolio. Same goes for stocks, the majority of stocks don't have a lot of dividends they are paying out. We would need to focus on the stocks with a high regular cash flow and strong business model so that they keep paying out dividends each year. For me the best form of passive investing would be to buy an apartment and rent it out, receiving monthly rent payments would be very steady monthly income for which we can plan ahead many years. 

These were two young girls, of course they are going to take the cash. Such kind of videos on youtube always involve some kind of money the person gets to be in the videos. It's all about getting cute woman in your video and make a nice thumbnail as click bait. Even if this is fully legit, I would expect that any young girls in this case would always take the cash. The hundred dollar bill they see in front of their face and can touch it, bitcoin is something not physical to them and they might not trust that they actually get it. This video seems to be shot in the city center and the girls could use the money to go shopping straightaway, or buy some drinks with. Would be nice to see the same kind of video, but asking a wider range of people. If they would ask some older man I think the answers would be much different.

There isn't much information here and I would expect that most news about this are in Portuguese for the smaller Brazilian leagues. But since this scam must involve a lot of players who tried to get penalties, I wonder now how long this scam actually worked before it was found out. 150,000 Reais is a lot of money in the poorer regions of Brazil, in the big cities like Rio and Sao Paulo this is not that much again. Once this scam is being discovered the career is over and you will likely have to repay all your illegitimate gains. Maybe all the players involved managed to bet on the games themselves and increased their payouts like that. Otherwise this seems like too risky compared to the payoff. What I find most surprising is that betting fraud in football lately involves mostly players and not the referees. Isn't the risk too high to involve a large number of players in the fraud? The more people involved the higher the chance that someone will tell friends about it and the whole scam will be uncovered. Having a rigged match in sports betting is like winning the lottery, we can bet all our money on the most risky outcome and make a huge profit. The problem is only if we can trust the match is fixed or not.

The bitcoin price looks already pretty strong compared to the levels at the start of the year around 16-17,000 USD. In terms of inflation not much changed over the last 6 months, the central banks kept increasing the interest rates but prices are keep rising. Overall I think that a higher inflation is also going to lead to a higher bitcoin price. In the short term however investors are spooked and will be selling all types of risky assets including crypto currencies. Higher interest rates by the central banks will make all fixed income products more attractive, so that is what most investors are going to switch into. The problem is that even the high yield bonds are not going to yield returns as high as the inflation rate. So for investors to not lose value long term they have to come back to the crypto market.