10x more seems a bit excessive and I really hope this is not going to be the case. In Germany usually there is a fixed payment at the start of the year to the electricity company. The advancement is based on the consumption of the last year with current prices. This also works with the property managers who usually make their plan for the year during spring/summer to calculate the new utility bills for each year. I haven't received any bill for this year yet, which worries me a bit on how much electricity prices actually increased. The problem with the system in Germany is that it can take up to a year in the worst case for the new cost to be transferred to the customer. From a friend of mine who already received all documents for this year and they adjusted their new budget for this year, the only have a 15% increase in electricity cost. From a colleague who lives a bit further away he told me his bill is up 20% this year.

I am not sure if this works, you want to borrow Fiat money against Bitcoins. Will you over the bank bitcoins as collateral or the apartment you are buying? If the property is the collateral it might work, because I don't think the bank would accept bitcoins at the moment, the price dropped to much this year. Taking out a loan to buy a property is a good idea if you can afford it. I am assuming you are planning on living in the property yourself, or do you want to rent it out? If you live in it yourself then you need to make sure you have a steady income each months to cover the expenses and the interest payments on the loan. Another factor is that we have very high inflation right now, all the new loans will be much more expensive. And if the loan needs to be refinanced in the future you need to expect much higher payments.

People like to believe in things that give them luck. Who hasn't used a token in any form with the hope that it brings luck. Like bringing a small in your pocket to a big exam. As a kid I got some small crystal from my aunt from Africa, she told me that it has a lot of positive energy and I kept it with my pens through high school and university. Only the believe in it actually working helped me calm my nerves before important exams. The same thing is with Feng Shui, as long people believe in it it's helpful. A question I would have here is, if casinos build their casinos with a Feng Shui approach, are they doing so for the gambler or themselves? The gambler might look at it as better luck for his chance of winning. But isn't it also better luck for the casino owners to make more money? Or are these two cancelling  each other out and in the end nobody has a benefit.

While you are right that it's in our hands to become rich, I think that's its very hard to gain financial independence when you come from nothing. All the super rich we have now had a lot of help in achieving that wealth. Bill Gates,  Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, they all had help and didn't start from 0. Without having people behind you that help with knowledge and money it's nearly impossible. I think we shouldn't only look at the world and divide between rich and poor in monetary terms. Having a lot of money is nice, but shouldn't be the main goal in life. Having a healthy family is more important.

I agree with you, without real money in gambling the games like poker or blackjack become very different. I used to play some poker only with play money to try some new strategies and found that people play more aggressive if it's not there own money they lose. There were so many more All ins happening that it became not realistic to keep trying out new strategies. To me the excitement in gambling comes not only from winning or losing, but also from the chance to win a big jackpot. Without the chances of winning real money the thrill is not there. It would be nice to have a casino where you can only win, unfortunately that is not realistic. For us to have the chance to win a jackpot, we must also face the chance to lose money. The only real alternative I see to money would be to gamble with things. For example, you could gamble with your PS4 and if you win you get another one. I did that in the past with CSGO skins, it was a nice way to build up my inventory.

Why would I leave the bitcoin market at the worst possible timing? I don't think that there is any real chance for bitcoins to ever reach $1,000 again, but if that would happen than I would buy as many coins as possible. I made the mistake one time in the past to turn my back on bitcoins and that was the biggest investment mistake I ever made, not going to repeat it. The crypto market always move in cycles, it's only a matter of time for BTC to bounce back. So in case BTC would drops so low than I would sell all my stocks and buy only bitcoins, move them into a secure wallet and forget about it. Take a break from cryptos for a year and come back to hopefully find the prices to be on normal levels again. 

I agree with you that it's very hard to identify fake from true reviews. There is no quality control when it comes to the Internet, everybody can post what he wants online, true or false will be hard to distinguish. That is why I stopped trusting in random review websites which show too many positive reviews. Sometimes it's easy to spot fakes if the wording of reviews all is very similar, but most of the time it's not. This is also why longstanding forums like this one are so important. When you have trustful members who have been around for 5+ years issue an accusation that I will give it much more wait. Relying on our fellow gamblers is what gives me trust in a sportbook. If other member have a good experience than I trust the same will happen to me too.

Bitcoins are more valuable to me than gold, whereas my parents would pick Gold over bitcoins. I think it's mostly a generation thing, for us today is bitcoins what was gold for our parents and grandparents back in the day. The volatility is what put some people off crypto currencies, but that is just part of the price finding process. Crypto currencies are still fairly new and need to find their place in the world. Eventually bitcoins and other coins will be more stable. And as long as you don't sell you didn't lose anything. In a few years the prices will be much higher again and gold will look poorly compared to bitcoins. Also how could I store large amounts of gold securely? At home no way, at bank also no way. Banks already have to much influence into our life.

Very good summary of benefits people have through gambling. I agree with all the points of your list, except the stress reduction part. Losing money can be a very stressful experience that can affect us for a long period of time. Gambling is a very exciting experience that leads for me to a lot of what if thoughts. Whenever I lose a big bet my brain keeps asking me why I didn't stop at the right time. And I am trying to look at ways how I could have prevented that loss. Losing is part of gambling and we need to learn to deal with it. Learning new skills is a very important part for me in gambling, I would put it on top of your list. Through gambling I learned to take better care of my money, keep track of my income and expenses and have fixed budgets. It also helped me to deal with emotions and evaluate risks better and more quickly.

Hätte ich beinahe übersehen dein Gewinnspiel hier im subforum. Vielen Dank. Ist noch etwas hin bis 2026, aber in 3.5 Jahren werden wir auf jeden Fall neue Allzeithochs sehen. Spätestens vor dem nächsten halving sollte der Preis 6 stellig werden, und wenn erst einmal die goldene 100k Linie durchbrochen ist geht's weiter bergauf.

Mein Tipp:   239,999 USD - Mauser

Vielen Glück an Alle

Some scientist say that with the advancement in AI and automation of production cycles, more and more workers become obsolete. I read somewhere that within 30 years 50% of the current workforce won't be required anymore. The question is then what to do with all these people. Firing them or waiting for retirement age to come and not replacing them could be one way. But politicians need to address that issue, it can't be that that 50% of the population is without a job and without money. At the next election they would vote for some radical party and everything would change. One approach would be to give a basic income to everybody without working. Like that the money will stay in circulation and the companies that save more money through less workers need to be taxed more.

The woman's final is going to kick off on 1 hour. I haven't really followed the tournament that much, not sure why but for me it's too boring to watch a full game of woman's football. Maybe it's because I watched all my life only men play. The games feel too slow and it doesn't look as exciting as the top male teams playing. The final however should be more interesting, I am going to watch it and want to put a last minute bet on it. With my limited knowledge about the teams I would expect the strength of the two to be more or less equal. But since the final is in the Wembley stadium I think England has an edge, I will bet on them.

Okay this unbelievable, how did the game actually count after such an action? Did the goalkeeper stand still during every penalty kick? After quickly googling the issue it seems that there was a penalty shootout after 90 minutes of game time. Why isn't there overtime before it goes to penalties, usually games are 90 minutes, plus 30 minutes overtime . Maybe it's something different in the Nigerian leagues. Also both teams seem to already have qualified for the state cup finals, so there was not a lot of pressure on the match. But still this is no excuse to act like that during a professional football match.  Also it seems that they can choose to stream or not the actual match which makes me wonder about the legitimacy of the results. What is not fully clearly is if there is any betting scene for the Nigerian cup games. For international bookmakers the scene is probably too small, so it would only be local betting on the matches. I hope the people who lost got their money back.

I made the exact same mistake like, moving to quickly from the spot to the future market and lost a lot of money. Back in university I was trading stocks with friends for 1.5 years. During our autumn break we decided to try out future day trading, within a couple of days we lost all the money we made before. It was a very terrible experience and I learned a lot. Future trading involves a lot of leverage, so when you use all your money you can lose a multiple of it. The market moves much faster and our problem was we didn't have enough capital to start with. At least the losses give a tax benefit for future winnings, so the money wasn't completely lost. And still it took many years for me to try the future market again.

I am very sceptical when it comes to streamers from the gambling section. There are at any time quite a lot of people on twitch streaming and it seems they are much luckier than I am. I don't mind them winning large amounts, but somehow I always question myself if this is real. In the past I followed a few of the big poker streamers playing tournaments and noticed that there performance is not exceptional good. Sure they had some good days making decent money, there were also terrible days. In the end it seemed that a lot of the money they make comes twitch rather than gambling. It was more about their personality and engaging with the chat and viewers than about making money. That's why when I see large winnings from a streamer I worry about them having a promotion deal with the casino that gives them free money to gamble more reckless.

Back in 2016 and the beginning of 2017 I was trading a lot with CSGO skins, I bought and sold knifes with prices from 50-250$. During the time the average bitcoin price was 10,000 USD and I always converted my winnings back to fiat money. It was my biggest investing mistake not to keep some coins and save them long term. I am trying to not look to closely at that time and don't want to calculate how much money I missed out on if I had saved the coins until the ATH. We can't always make the right decision, the best thing is to learn from the mistakes and don't repeat them. My biggest purchase from bitcoins was a new bicycle that I bought for 850 Euros with 0.1 btc. Today I would get 2 bicycles for that.

A stable bitcoin price would be good for people who are using bitcoins on a daily basis for their business. Paying bills with bitcoins, or receiving bitcoins as a form of payment becomes easier when the price is stable. On other side are investors who are using bitcoins for long term investments, I think they would be less happy about stable prices. Less volatility in the bitcoin market also means lower rising prices. The question is also at which price should bitcoins stop rising or falling, 20k, 60k, 100k USD? All the initial investors probably ask for the highest price possible whereas the investors would want the lowest possible price. As long as there is such a large discrepancy between the valuation of different investor will I not expect a stable price. Most other assets like stocks or commodities tend to fluctuate heavily, it's part of the game

No I don't think we are witnessing the End of the crypto currency era right now. You are right that most coins fell a lot this year, but so did the other major asset classes like stocks. Nasdaq is down more than 20% YTD, Euro Stoxx 50 is down more than 15%. Cryptos are down more than stocks given their higher volalitity, which also means they will rise more when prices are recovering. How can Bitcoins come to end when there is still a lot of demand for it? As long as there are investors who are looking to buy new coins and investors who are unwilling to sell theirs the market will continue. For bitcoins do be declared dead the price would need to drop down to 0.1$, and I don't see any chance of this happening any time soon. It took so long for bitcoins to become mainstream and be accepted all around the world, it would be wrong to give it all up now.

Martingale is a valid strategy when it comes to gambling, it's not a guaranteed win but it helps to recover all previous losses with winning one game. In Blackjack the most basic strategy has a winning chances of around 42%, with more advanced strategies this can be increased to 45% and higher. But even the best strategy will remain below 50%, only card counting is a valid strategy that will bring our winning chances to above 50% consistently. So the more Blackjack we play the closer our results will be to the average numbers. With that in mind we can run a martingale strategy on top of any advanced Blackjack strategy. The drawbacks of martingale strategies are they require a lot of time to make a decent profit, because of fairly small bet sizes and you need a large bankroll to cover a losing streak. As long as we can avoid a losing streak that is so long that it wipes us out we will be fine. The important thing is to not look at martingale as a strategy that will work 100%, there can be outlier and tail events that will be very costly.

 

That is an very interesting chart, I had no idea that betting on football is so unprofitable for most people. The number of people betting per country seems pretty equals around 35%, but the number of people who make is profit is very different. It seems strange to see that only 17% of people in Italy make money with betting, while in France it 37%. I can't believe that there should be such a big difference per country. With more than 13,000 people being asked it's quite a big survey, but I am not sure how representative it is. They don't give any information on how they contacted the participants and if all age groups are represented equally. Standing in front of a stadium and only asking family dads with their sons might be a bit misleading, same goes for only contacting people online. It would also be nice to get some more information on how much these people actually bet, are they regulars or do they only bet a few times per season. If the people only bet 2-3 times in a season than it's much harder to make a profit.