Short term gains are much less significant to the long term gains when it comes to bitcoin. Consider buying bitcoin 10years ago, imagine the number of bitcoins you would have bought at a budget of 10k USD and think of the price they would have yielded at the last all time high. This is a number that bitcoin users can only dream of and hence the best time to invest in bitcoin is anytime when its price is low.

Dont depend on someone to forecast it for you, read the charts and determine your buying point before you start buying and sell when the price reaches a certain level, cycle this against the market and watch your profits go up as years go by.

  As long as the investing is kept in a logical manner and done diligently, it is not gambling. Crypto can be compared to what stocks is and we have some people who tend to call stocks trading as a type of gambling.

From there any sort of speculative trading ends up getting named as a sort of gambling. While trying to look for similarities we tend to find bizarre connections, they are different indeed. How people end up using them is also a different topic.

Gambling on crypto is possible and should be done with caution because it is an EV- game to predict highs and lows.

Nobody knows whether it will be a barrier or allow more opportunities for common people, so better not to comment such.

I feel the same, with a better control over the scam projects, most of them will be forced to run underground, at least it will make it easier for older users here to identify which one might be a "high risk" project as compared to others.

Too much investment opportunity is not there for crypto, it is better to keep yourself limited to bitcoin and the top few altcoins. Mass adoption is a good thing is something I expect to increase if the regulations come in place in the proper manner such that people get interest in crypto while keeping the bad things at bay.

Trading as a job is a bit longshot, agreed that it can make you money, but keeping a close eye on it turning from a hobby to a obsession would save that person from a lot of troubles. The important thing is that we need some working exchanges that accept our local currency and allows us to trade freely.

Without exchanges there would be problems, which the first generation of bitcoin owners faced before the first bitcoin exchange appeared. This is before I started so I cant comment much. Currently we have so many exchanges that seeing the crypto space without one seems like a odd one.

Trading can be done on OTC too, but that carries it own risks and cons. It is better to be the average joe and trade on an exchange.

The one who wins the most is neither the high roller nor the pleb - it is the casino.

It is a EV- game, you cannot win by putting in more money but only if you get that chance or luck which may be temporary and hence cannot be predicted and therefore it is a game of chance. By doing more bets you are only making your money more loss-worthy to the casino.

On the other hand if you win a big amount and immediately cash out, technically you have beaten the casino but only if you never ever spend on a casino in future. In most cases this is false because a winning bets fuels in more confidence to bet.

Risk is something that humans love to take but hate it when it hits them. Altcoins are the cornerstone of how risks are involved in cryptocurrency more than bitcoin. Some people will always go for them because that impulsive decision taking and quick money making mindset is present in them.

Crypto ends up being a short term stint for many people. They buy at the top when everyone is talking about it and then sell at the bottom when the same people are making FUD about it. This happens because of lack of research and dummy trading. Hence these people lose out on cash at hand or bitcoin at hand at the proper times. After all, how hard is it to buy at the low and sell at the high? Turns out, it is a game of patience and people lack it in general.

If you smell it, go with it but come with caution because smells are often deceiving.

If this pump sustains, we might be having a bull run on ethereum. But at this point it is difficult to say what will happen in the future. If you have bought at lower price, keep calm and hold for a few more days unless you are looking for a quick flip. If you have not bought yet, you missed the opportunity and hence just hold the fiat/btc till the price drops again.

That is as far as you need to do, let the market unfold on its own, bull or bear will reveal on its own - keep watching and waiting. Patience over the market's short term movements will give you good results instead of impulsively acting on them.

Getting access to a casino from your bedroom is defenitely a good option for those who are privacy concerned added to it the chance to deposit with cryptocurrency as an icing on the cake.

Land based casinos should not be compared like that, those are different experience mainly attracting tourists and big names. More like a one night outing to a club and hence have their own space. Of course addictive gambling at either of these are bad and has the same outcome, but if done as a once per year thing, I think its worth the experience.

Some local casinos are often the haunts of many local gamblers. They would always go there for the ambience, the people and the locality. It becomes a personal preference only then.

Mistakes are made in every new procedure, not learning from the mistake and repeating the same is the bad habit. It is not that everyone needs a mentor to correct their mistakes, often they understand the reason behind the mistake but fail to correct it.

I have often seen newbies start buying at the top because everyone is talking about it and not when it is in the lows when everyone is giving FUD on it. Bitcoin typically ends up being bought like this and then when the cycle reverses the investors lose money. A simple knowledge of buying/selling would correct this mistake.

However this has nothing to do with how much educated we are. Trading profitably needs a different mindset which most users dont have and hence the few number of professional traders.

  Good altcoins are rare.

You are more or less stuck with the top 10 altcoins and the rest are shitcoins. There will be times when bitcoin goes down and you can buy it. That is the diamond, no other altcoin will give you returns close to what bitcoin can give.

But choosing when to buy Bitcoin is the diamond opportunity. We make major mistakes in this only. Bear market is the time to pick these options - don't lose them.

Very few stores have done this truly speaking. There are so many niche marketplaces out there and some may have applied for crypto, but they are mostly fiat based. To make an impact on the economy a big e-commerce platform needs to accept crypto or everyday small to medium sized companies need to make the headline about crypto acceptance.

We can only hope for the best here. Even then the impact of crypto is seen clearly with more and more youth population becoming aware of Bitcoin and saving money to buy some.

You mean to say that many underdogs are present in the market which are going to be big in the future. This is a gross mistake when it comes to crypto currency. The reason behind this comes from experience, which has shown that crypto projects unlike mainstream projects can never be a continuously profiting one unless it actually solves a problem.

Most altcoins do not and they are all created for that one hit wonder to fool investors and make the owners rich. Hence don't go into this delusion but remain practical, stay away from such coins or you will face the long duration of frustration when the asset keeps spiralling down.

Why do you have to "hope" mate? It is clearly there in the charts which you obviously have not seen before commenting. Every bear market is a part of a cycle and comes back to the bull market - this is inevitable.

The duration of a bear market is something that cannot be predicted, while sustaining through it is tough for a average trader. Still news media ends up making these bitcoin burst and chatbox trolls come up with the "the end of bitcoin" type quotes and are never to be heard of again.

Point remains same, while the entire world seems upside-down you have to keep your feet on the ground - meaning that you need your own research and analysis to keep your footing on bitcoin's price instead of  listening to netizens about their predictions and comments.

Regulations are only done to curb criminal activity and allow honest users to streamline their trading. It will not be a sort of restriction to stop you from using it. What governments want is to oversee such money launderers and to keep offshoring of money in check. Prohibiting something only leads to more people using it is something that governments have understood by this time and they will not do that. Taxation is something that governments want and chances are they might include taxation framework and a legal framework on crypto via regulatory bodies.

I still dont see anything bad in this, but this discussion has been going on for more than a few years and it is yet to come in reality.

The risk with buying bitcoin at a low price is much lower than buying bitcoin at high price or buying altcoins.

Most "projects" are recycled ideas for altcoins and they are based around hype which is going to crash in a few days after launch or never launch at all. These are a type of gambling and are never recommended to a trader who plays it safe. There comes the risk vs reward thing, which is marking such projects with a high risk and high reward label and bitcoin at low price as a low risk low reward label.

One can buy bitcoin at different price levels and sell at a profit to get maximum gains but investing in such altcoins rarely ends up giving profits to its investors rather only to its owners who dump and run away.

Memecoins are based on hype to generate money for their owners. That is how they fool the investors in putting money on it who end up losing their initial investment eventually.

Shitcoins may not have been shit from the start, they usually have a story which the older investors usually know. After one or two bear markets they dump down so much that they cannot back up.

To be honest either of these are not worth investing. Although memecoins are mor dangerous than shitcoins because the newbie members usually fall for their as their first crypto and thus they lose a lot of money because of their inexperience and it gives them bad vibes about crypto in general.

Bitcoin is way away from becoming a part of education curriculum at lower grades. Rather cybercrime and safety on the internet should be the next addition into the curriculum then gradually move to cryptography and crypto currency. It is more of a specialized course in my opinion and the brain required to understand this is not of a school kid.

I am against the idea that we should force feed everything that we want to our kids. Let them learn on their own and make their own decisions and if they find interest they will have a better outcome trying to catch hold of it.

Spot Trading is comparable to EV+ gambling similar in the lines of sports betting at best. This needs skills and knowledge and not hastily made impulsive decisions. Therefore it is often likened to gambling but a trader can keep a control over their trading habits if they wish to.

Most of the times this simile is used in a degenerate sense. It is our job to make sure that it does not hit that tone.

Comparing and analysing the market is definitely a tough thing, that is why it needs practice and dummy trading. But again it is not for everyone, specially those who lose patience quickly.

Why not bitcoin? Did you ever see anybody market it? Hell no. It has got a community of its own and a userbase supporting it in every bad day. What it shows is that is a product is having its use case and solves a real problem, it will need the least marketing and be able to grow on its own.

Then we have these shit coins that claim to be prepared hat not, but end up as a disappointment in the long run.

So my hidden gem is never hidden because it is bitcoin bought at low price.

There is a lot of confusion and mismatch in the OP's post,

Cryptocurrency are a type of currency meant for transacting. Gambling is a game of chance. Like we have Forex, a specific crypto can be exchanged for other crypto or fiat making it a speculative market where people are buying/selling. When this trading becomes a risk vs reward game, it tends to become a gamble.

Crypto is not unpredictable, its price is. How the market reacts to news is unpredictable. After all its a currency whose price in terms of fiat gets fixed by the traders.

Just because apples and oranges are both made of carbon and round in shape does not make them the same thing.