Putin never sleeps


Right, nothing is going to change

But I have been telling essentially the same since at least 2015. Back then, there was a lot of noise on the forum and in the Internet about Russian ministers openly threatening people with severe criminal prosecution and even imprisonment for just holding cryptocurrencies. I told you guys at once that it was nothing but empty threats

And what d'ya think? A couple years later the Russian tax service announces that government officials are exempt from paying the income tax on profits coming from cryptocurrency operations (read, speculation) and that they don't even have to declare such earnings. So much for criminal prosecution, huh. It's all smoke and mirrors

But isn't it what happens in real life?

If you are an experienced gambler, you already know all ins and outs of this activity (well, at least some). So after you try out some service (gambling or something else), it won't take you long to get the hang of it -- faster than most other users. In this manner, you would be able to help the fellow gamblers out if they are experiencing some difficulty using the service and asking for an advice here. Will you?

И кто там был манипулятором?

Я это к тому, что если цена свалилась на килобакс за считанные минуты, то это не обязательно какой-то хитрый злодей-манипулятор забавляется. Чем выше ценник, тем больше волатильность, а это значит, что любой более-менее крупный держатель битков может легко обрушить монету на десятки процентов за раз просто потому, что ему надоело сидеть в крипте и он решил выйти в кеш. Ну мало ли, деньги дочке на свадьбу понадобились или теще на похороны

Banks are not allowed to print their own currency

But they don't need to in the first place. In the modern economy money exists in many forms, and only a small part of it (so-called base money) exists as circulating bank notes and coins as well as cash in the vaults of commercial banks and the central bank. The rest of what goes as money in the economy (remember, money is what money does) is created directly by commercial banks. Really, why would any bank want to create its own currency if it is officially allowed and encouraged to create what is considered legal tender by the state itself?

You don't get it

You already lost in the first few bets as this is what your snapshots reveal. If you were betting for real and aiming high, you would have already lost your balance even before you managed to get into the green territory eventually. Bad luck is just that, you want to win big but instead, kind of unexpectedly, lose all right at the outset, game over

The setup you stick to allows you to last long enough to offset the destructive impact of bad luck, but this is not about the house edge at all. More technically, what you are trying to prove here is beyond the scope of the discussion, which is about house edge taking over luck after so many rolls, any luck for that matter, good or bad

Fractional reserve banking is a massive misnomer for any fiat system in existence today

The modern banking system is not based on "fractional reserve banking" anymore as it operates in an environment where money can be created on demand, "out of thin air" as they say, not from deposits. What is written in textbooks, and what people tend to thoughtlessly repeat here and elsewhere has little relevance to how the present-day banking system works in practice. Banks don't need deposits to create credit because they "create" credit (so-called endogenous money) from collateral provided by the borrowers, so there's no "fractional reserve banking" as it is commonly understood

First off, we should specify the specific variety of stablecoins we are discussing here

Basically, there are two major types of stablecoins. The first variety are centralized stablecoins (e.g. Tether), the second decentralized ones (e.g. DAI). The centralized stablecoins are (allegedly) backed up by real assets and currencies, e.g. the American dollar, and as long as you can successfully redeem them for the underlying asset (in most cases the dollar), their peg should be maintained without any issue

The decentralized stablecoins are more tricky in this regard since their peg is maintained by market means, not direct exchange. If we take the DAI stablecoin as an example, its peg to the US dollar is maintained via the required amount of Ethereum which serves as a collateral. So, when the price of Ethereum goes down, more of that currency is required to maintain the peg to the dollar. And that is how it is done with decentralized stablecoins in general

You should look at things from a proper perspective

The fact that Ethereum has grown 2 times in the last couple months doesn't tell us anything about its past performance. But if you were to go deeper into its historical prices, you would see that before this rise, it crashed a lot more than that. Should I tell you that in January 2018 this coin reached an ATH of $1,448, and while Bitcoin is only down like 50% from its ATH of $20k at the moment, Ethereum is down more than 80%. Put differently, its price today is only one fifth of what it had been a little more than two years ago. So much for the recent 100% rise, huh

But what's the point?

There are thousands, if not millions, obsessive gamblers around the world, and some of them have successfully quit, with or without the professional help. What is in your story so amazing as well as enlightening that would make it different from a multitude of other such stories and worth publishing? If you really were one of a kind, you would already be famous in some form. Then, there would be no need to hide your identity, right?

It is not the only issue

However, personally, I think the advantages and benefits still massively outweigh possible drawbacks and hiccups. If we take your example (as an example), handing over the keys could unleash all sorts of potential problems for the management of that company (as well as their staff who agreed to give up their keys) once it becomes known

But in essence it is not particularly different from just telling or hinting how your employees should vote. So even in this "use case", or rather misuse and abuse, blockchain proves to be a step forward as it allows to catch these influencers red-handed

I think the relationship is more complex and intricate

Advertisers, in this case gambling sites, want people wearing their signatures to be genuinely interested in what they are doing. Hence the requirement to be actively engaged in the gambling discussions. But if you are truly interested in gambling beyond posting for money for an online casino, it is kinda expected that you are going to try out these things for yourself. So it is more about your own interests and curiosity rather than promoting some service. In other words, no one asks you to be part of the support team

I think it goes well beyond that

Personally, I'm more inclined to think that it has more to do with the amount of satisfaction and pleasure experienced in the process itself rather than the number of zeroes and whether it looks or feels better on its own. If you are looking for excitement and fun, with doges, you can get more of that per buck gambled specifically because doges are cheap as dirt. But since they are still worth something, it is not the same as gambling in a demo mode, where you are not expected to lose anything. Put simply, doges hit it where it benefits the player best

I don't need to make 10k rolls

Because I have already made, let me see, right, 31M rolls by now. And I know it from my own experience that with higher payouts I'm going to see a burst in variance. I can even tell the exact figure. With a win chance less than 37%, the martingale strategy I employ becomes unstable. In other words, it is not the house edge that is going to dispatch you, but variance itself (otherwise known as bad luck)

Remember, we are talking about the house edge beating luck, but not about luck itself turning sour and going against you. However, this is what happens with higher payouts (multipliers). In our scenario (i.e. going for big wins and betting high), you will fall victim to bad luck even before the house edge kicks in and catches up with you and your plethora of rolls. But once you are done, you are done, end of story (very romantic, yeah)

But that defies the very definition of norm

It is normal to be in love with somebody, so how can something be a "mental disorder" if it is a common thing? Moreover, you need some form of love just to procreate. Well, technically, you can procreate without feeling anything but with love involved it makes the whole process so much funnier (while the result better, a scientific fact)

And I'm not even speaking about the fact that it is typically men which end up being manipulated by women through love. Women have it in them, by nature, just accept this as an immutable, eternal truth. There is even a Russian saying (kind of common wisdom) that says a man chases a woman until she catches him

Money is what money does

Put differently, it is not enough to have all the prerequisites and meet all the requirements to be money in practice and real life. In this manner, if Bitcoin is to be considered money in the truest sense of the word, it should be used as money, no more and no less (well, not sure about no more, given the competition in the field)

The sad truth is (whether you like or not), Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are not money. At best, they are payment systems and can thus be loosely considered money tokens for fiat currencies. To take one example, when people are paid in bitcoins, they still price their services in dollars. So much for Bitcoin as a fully fledged currency, huh

We already know that

But this topic is not about such people. It is about people who are specifically gambling for reasons other than purely financial or economic in general. It is about exploring the depths of human mind, so to speak, the motives that are driving people to gamble if money is not an issue for them, and they may even want to lose some as a sort of payment at that. In the most mundane of terms, people are looking for gambling because they want to feel alive again, and they mostly gamble in order to run away from boredom

First off, we can't control luck since if we could that would mean something else, something other than luck, the opposite of luck, i.e. a rational calculation or informed decision. Then, if we proceed from this, luck can be defined as anything beyond our control (this would be an indirect definition, but it is still a definition)

With that said, however, we could still affect our chances in an indirect way, by dealing with luck at another level. Even if we can't control luck, we may still be able to control the environment. In practice, it means setting or changing the environment in such a way that your chances of doing something or getting something become higher

Then you wait patiently, adjusting a variable here and there as situation progresses and your knowledge expands

Indeed, it may be too late to cry (over spilt milk). But it was a conscious choice in the sense no one had been forcing him to gamble in the first place, well, at least, not directly. As the saying goes, prevention is better than cure, so understanding how addiction works and what consequences a certain form of it causes leaves enough room for maneuver in framing one's passions and obsessions

First, everyone should understand that being addicted is in fact normal as this is just how life goes in general. I could even say that not being addicted to something is a pathology rather than the norm. Second, and to repeat, it is the consequences, not the addiction itself that counts. But being fully aware of that allows one to control the whole gamut of his addictions, and how far they can go

The lesson to take home is that choose your addictions wisely

People don't see the forest for the trees

For those who are not familiar with the phrase, it means, according to some Internet dictionary, being "too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole” (no offense, no pun, no plagiarism intended). More specifically, the problem is not with the addiction as such (compulsive gambling, compulsive trading, or compulsive whatever). Put shortly, it is the consequences that matter

It is in human nature to be addicted to, or be passionate about, or be obsessed with, something or somebody. The truth is, without being truly addicted to something in a positive sense (as far as consequences are concerned), it is impossible to reach any meaningful level of success in virtually anything. So if you are addicted to gambling or trading, and it pays off handsomely, go for it and enjoy the ride. If it doesn't, get addicted to something that does

Well, that's not what I meant

I was actually referring to people who are not only well aware of Bitcoin but who can also pay with it (in simple terms, Bitcoin holders). These folks are deliberately not paying with cryptocurrencies because they don't think it a rational economic behavior, choosing to pay with fiat instead. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink

Further, given how many cryptocurrency payment processors are out there nowadays (e.g. BitPay and similar providers), adding a cryptocurrency payment option is not a rocket science either, so the problem doubtlessly lies with the consumers, not their merchants