It would be awesome if the US decides to do that, but I don't think it's very realistic right now. The volatility in the bitcoin market is still too high for it to be a good store of value for everybody. Historically the Gold price has kept it's value for a long period of time, we haven't seen a price drop of 50% in a few months before with it. That is why it's so attractive for the older generation as an investment to store value. With the high volatility in bitcoins I would also not recommend my grandmother to invest in it. She is above 90 and at her age I advice against investing in stocks or cryptos, she still holds a bit of gold but the most she invest in is short term bonds. For the younger generation this completely different, the longer the investing horizon I would recommend to invest in cryptos rather than gold. The thing with gold is that it's good to store value, but you have no more upside potential. There is no chance that gold will rise 50% in the next 6 months, whereas with crypto currencies you can store your value long term as well and still have a chance to make a nice profit.

I am in favour of gambling and it should not get banned anywhere on the world. Since I am 18 I enjoy gambling regularly, there are so many different casino games out there that make me excited that I don't want the government to tell me one day you are not allowed to gamble anymore. In my eyes it's wrong for the government to constrain the way we live. During university I had a lot of time and played poker almost every single day, now with work I have less time and I play usually 1-2 days per week max. Also I play less poker now and enjoy more games BlackJack or Roulette. The thing with the con arguments against gambling, is that it's the same arguments against so many other things like alcohol, tobacco, or even unhealthy food. They are all bad for us, reduce our life expectancy and make create a lot of problems. But the government can't just ban everything bad in our life, humans need to have a choice what to do with our lives. As long as gambling is for adults I have no problem with it. I prefer to use my money in a casino instead of buying cigarettes or beers every single day.

I tried a betting bot only once and it lost for money. It might have been the case because it was a free script online. In the past I read a few success stories of people making money with betting bits, so I wanted to try it out myself. When using free betting bots you probably have to be very lucky to make money. Why would anybody give away his bot for free if it makes good money? As for subscription based models I haven't tried it, but would like to if they are legit. I am a little bit afraid now that it's a complete black box and someone takes advantage of my data. When it comes to automated betting then there could also be a bot that takes advantage of these strategies. Would be cool to see a survey to see how many people used a bot and how many made a profit of it.

It depends on how much time and money you want to invest in a big project like that. My grandparents were the first to buy a piece of land far outside of the city. We still have the aerial pictures from back then, there were no roads, no lights, no infrastructure, only our house. And now 80 years later we live inside the city. It's hard to predict how big cities can grow, but if you are willing do wait all your life then everything is possible. The problem is that my grandparents invested so much time into building up the house and garden, and they had to pay for so many things, like development of roads, canals, traffic lights and later even the Internet cable. All the people who moved later in the area didn't have to pay for all these things, they had to pay for much higher land prices.

Yeah what a final that was yesterday, really awesome CSGO matches. Best of 5 finals are always more interesting than best of 3 matches. After the first 3 maps I thought it's over for me and NaVi would win this tournament. Even though NaVi is the best team in the world I bet on FaZe for the final. Similar to the PGL Antwerp final I thought that FaZe would pull through and win. Surprisingly only one map went into overtime. Winning two maps in a row after being down 2-1 is a very strong performance. To be honest FaZe looked stronger during the tournament, they didn't lose a single map until the finals, whereas NaVi lost a map to Movistar Riders and to MOUZ. Kind of funny that the two teams always meet in the finals this year, the Major won Faze, then NaVi won the Blast Spring Series and now Faze won again. I guess next tournament NaVi will win again.

I am sorry for Steven that his life got out of control and he lost everything, but crypto currencies are not at fault here, it is his own wrong doings that let him down this road. Saying that trading is gambling is wrong obviously. Gambling are games that are being offered by casinos in which the gambler knows his odds of winning before even playing. Before ever playing any casinos game we know that our chances of losing money are larger than our chances of winning - this is how the casinos makes money. When it comes to trading the rules are different, there are no fixed odds for us to win or lose. Trading is a closed system, we trade against other humans and the only way for us to make money is if someone else loses money. Who knows what would have happened to Steven if he didn't start with crypto currencies, maybe he would have traded stocks and became addicted to stocks instead. It's good that he got help and is living now in a rehabilitation centre and can get his life back on track.

In my opinion bitcoins will always be recoverable, there is no price that is too low from which bitcoins couldn't come back. Let's say bitcoins drops down to $1 which is already very unrealistic, then the market would be flooded with buyers. Who wouldn't buy 1,000 BTC for 1,000 USD? At such a level I would even take out a loan just to buy more coins. It's seems so unrealistic because who would sell his coins for $1? At such a low level it looks like a bad idea to sell. If you bought your coins at 10,000 USD you would never sell them so cheaply, rather hold them until prices recover. Same goes for the buyers, would you really wait until such low prices before buying? I think if the bitcoin price drops close to 1,000 USD there would already be a lot of new buyers pushing the price back up.

That's an interesting strategy you are running here. With 1 million bets you should be able to hit the jackpot. To hit it with less than 100k bets you should need to be lucky. Based on your past strategy to reach the 10,000x multiplier, it would take you 693,000 bets to reach the 330,000 multipler. But with so many bets it's hard to say, you might be lucky before. I am wondering now how high the jackpot is and if it's going to be profitable for you. There is probably a fixed number of bets you can make before you lose money, even after getting the jackpot. Or is the jackpot increasing every day? Than it could be profitable to keep playing. Hitting a jackpot must be an awesome feeling, I tried so myself for years in slots to one time hit a jackpot, so far I have been unlucky. It probably happens when you completely forgot about it and don't expect it anymore.

Pretty cool idea to interact with aliens. Bitcoins offer a lot of new possibilities to interact across different planets, and it could also be a tool to show other life forms that we are friendly and no threat to them. I am thinking about that message that is being broadcasted into the universe to try and contact different species. How about we add some free bitcoins to that message. So whenever it reaches aliens they directly have a wallet and currency to buy something on earth. This would make the first contact much more fun and less stressful for us. The message for the aliens could be something like, we humans invite you to a free beer on earth.

This is what you call market risk in the crypto market and it determines most of the prices changes. It doesn't really matter which exchange you look at because they are all connected, there can't be two different prices for one crypto coin on different exchanges. If that was the case traders could just buy the coin on one exchange and sell it on other to make a free profit. The market risk is also what makes most stock prices move. Stocks are highly correlated to each other, like crypto currencies. If blue chip stocks drop, so will also the small cap companies. In the crypto world we can see that when the bitcoin is falling then all the alt coins are also falling.

So far I have never met anybody who can work for a living as gambler. I know some guys who are successful in gambling and made some money, but never enough to cover all their living expenses from it. In my eyes they are still recreational gamblers. From the Internet I know that there are people who managed to become millionaires through gambling, that is such a small percentage compared to the total number of gamblers.
I wouldn't say that anybody who loses in gambling is not interested in winning. Ask any gambler to choose between winning and losing and everybody will pick winning. You can have fun in gambling when winning and losing, it shouldn't be only about money. Because there will always be a time when we lose, even if we spend all our time forecasting games we can be wrong from time to time. Winning consistently is one the hardest thing in gambling.

Yes I think the US Dollar will be more valuable than the Euro in near future. Europe is screwed and I don't see our politicians reacting fast enough to offset all the negative shocks. The Russia Ukraine war is having negative consequences on the whole world economy, but Europe is hit the hardest. USA is pressuring European countries to buy energy outside of Europe, preferably from North America. Cheap Russian gas is what made European countries so competitive, now we have to buy gas for almost 3 times the usual price. On top of that is inflation still rising and the European central Bank is much slower to react than the FED. It might take years for Europe to recover from this.

I am pretty impressed by the performance of Movistar Riders this tournament, reaching semi finals is a great achievement and a big boost for the spanish CSGO scene. The game vs Liquid was very close, luckily I didn't bet on it because I would have picked Liquid to win. Both of semi final games today look very one sided to me. NaVi should win easily against Astralis to reach the finals tomorrow, they won all their matches so far and are ranked #1 team in the world. Same goes for FaZe, I don't think there is any way for Movistar Riders to win in a best of 3 match. FaZe won all their games so far without even losing 1 single map, the are ranked #2 in the world and even won against NaVi in BLAST Premier Spring Final last month. In my opinion the final will be NaVi vs FaZe, with FaZe likely to win again.

I am not sure if this is really the case, both smaller and larger teams rely on supporters to watch their games live. But I would expect that smaller teams get a larger percentage from their earnings directly from the supporters, whereas larger teams can also rely on sponsorship deals to cover their expenses. The biggest companies have the most lucrative sponsorship deals and most of them were not cancelled during covid pandemic as the games were shown on TV. That is why the big clubs should still have all their money to keep running the most successful teams. Also the big tournaments didn't seem to have changed much during covid. The Champions League final 2021 was Man City vs Chelsea and this years final was Liverpool vs Real Madrid, so the same teams as usual still competing at the top. I felt like the first season during covid football lost a lot of it's charm without any fans actually watching the game. Seeing a whole stadium completely empty was a bit depressing for me, the flags and fans shouting makes up most of the football atmosphere.

Looks like the media is trying to make up stories again to attract more readers. The more flashy and negative a headline is the more people will open that story, it's all about generating clicks to get ad revenues. Bitcoin is obviously not dead with a price around 20k USD, why would any reader believe otherwise? There are a lot of buyers in the market again that bought between the 17-20k USD levels for the price to stabilise and rebound. If bitcoins were really dead than there would be no more buyers and the price would be below 1$. Even if the price drops to below 1,000 USD then the market is not dead. I am sure the lower the price will drop the more buyers will come back to the market. Also it is not like all the other asset classes are doing so well either, the stock market is hurting too and nobody is calling the stock market dead. The world is afraid of a recession because of high inflation and the we see even the biggest stocks down 20-30% this year.

Making sure that our kids have good friends and don't spend time with sketchy people is important, but parents can't control everything in the life of their kids. Eventually they are going to leave the house and make decision on their own. Already in high school children will be more independent and might even have rebellious phase where they won't accept anything from their parents. In my opinion it's best to try and make them understand why there are age restrictions on things like gambling or alcohol. Teaching critical thinking and some scepticism can help in later parts of life too. My parents are totally against gambling and never taught me anything about it. I will do the opposite and be very open about gambling with my kids when they are old enough.

That's the best approach you can do when it comes to trading, split your orders in smaller sizes and trade over a longer period of time. Nobody knows exactly when we will reach the bottom, it's predictions and only time will tell if we were right or wrong. Similar to your approach I have been buying bitcoins for the last two months now. Buying every 4 weeks seems like a good interval to take advantage of the dip abs get a good average price. Your 2 orders are fine if the price will drop further. But what if the worst is already behind us and prices are recovering? Than you will have missed out on investing 50% if your money.

I agree with you having the opportunity to access casinos online all around the world within seconds makes it very hard to get out of the reach. A relocation could only help if you are addicted to gambling in physical casinos and never use online casinos. There are other ways to help addicts in their way towards recovery. The best thing in my opinion is to not live alone and make sure they share an house with other people who are struggling and get some form of supervision. Limited internet access that blocks casinos could be one tool to try and limit the online pressure from casinos, but there is always the possibility to use the cell phone network to get around any ban. Another good tool that the parents or friends should do is control the personal finances of someone who is struggling with gambling addiction. If a person has only access to small allowances it makes it much harder to use the money for gambling only.

Nassim Taleb being negative as always. I liked his books and read them all, he gives a good perspective about risk and that humans tend to underestimate the risks of big negative events (tail risk). The problem is what negative effects are there if you invest some of your money in crypto currencies? Sure you could lose some money, but so you can when investing in stocks or commodities. He doesn't know with 100% certainty that cryptos are going to fail and he also doesn't give us an alternative that is going to make us money with certainty in an high inflation environment. Right now there is no correlation between rising inflation and a rising bitcoin price. But for someone who bought bitcoins 5 or 10 years ago it was a pretty good hedge against inflation. I think it's wrong to only look at the recent bitcoin price movement and only use it to for your analysis.

Yeah that happens regularly to me when I gamble. Usually I have fixed budgets per week that I give myself to gamble with and when I lose my budget than I have to stop playing for that week. So it's kind of my budget is my weekly loss threshold, whereas winnings I try to take out of the budget and save it for the next weeks. Maybe my threshold is set too low, but I hit it quite regularly. For example, two weeks ago I was playing poker and had AA, so I went all in and lost all. After rebuying and a few hands later I had a flush and went all in and lost it all again because someone else had a higher flush. Then I played a few hands roulette trying to recover and lost again. In less than two hours I reached my loss threshold for the week and had to stop gambling. In the past when I don't give myself a fixed budget for gambling I tend to gamble too much and my losses become higher. With the fixed budget my winnings are smaller but so are also my losses, it's the best approach for me to enjoy gambling long term without losing too much.