It is not just about scarcity alone

As it is always about utility too as these two characteristics of an asset, service or good are complementary and work hand in hand. What I mean to say is that utility has the same effect on price as scarcity. If Bitcoin becomes more useful (when, for example, people start to use it more widely as a means of payment) its utility rises which leads to higher prices even if its scarcity doesn't change or even decreases (i.e. Bitcoin becomes more abundant). Conversely, if people become less interested in it, Bitcoin's utility goes down - along with its price

Actually, there can be certain advantages

In fact, if done right, Libra can combine the benefits of the both worlds - those of fiat and crypto. Because it is a stable coin, you don't need to worry about volatility, and you would send it without the habitual pain in the ass that international money transfers typically cause. In other words, it can be quite useful in certain areas and for certain applications. That's likely one of the reasons why it causes such butthurt in the banking as well as payment industry (and their lobbies in the government)

Facebook is not the first business trying to launch a private currency

I remember some years (or maybe even decades ago) there was a Canadian company which tried to do essentially the same, i.e. to issue a private currency that was going to compete with the official money (the Canadian dollar). Not surprising at all, they were outlawed by the Canadian authorities and eventually bankrupted. This seems to be an inevitable outcome of any such effort or initiative. So why should Facebook be different?

If I'm not mistaken, this is called selection bias

And it is the same with lottery. We hear a lot about lottery winners ("from shithouse to penthouse") and know almost nothing about losers (who are standing small indeed). So even if we do understand in a semiconscious way that there cannot be only winners or their number cannot be big, we are still subliminally made to believe that it is not really so (this technique is called priming). And I'm not even talking about cases of "natural" selection bias when it occurs spontaneously without someone's ill intent or purpose

Your words are going to fall on deaf years

The reason for this is quite simple, though. To see things in their true light and proper perspective, you have to be an expert in these things, and while it is a prerequisite for drawing correct conclusions and inferences, it is still not a guarantee of their correctness because you may lack some important information (like pieces of a puzzle). Little needs to be said that the majority of people lack both such expertise and such information. But that doesn't prevent them from thinking they always know better, of course


Welcome to the club!

Personally, I don't see a lot of connection here

As long as you can't convert your paper money to physical gold in accordance with the ratio of gold reserves to amount of money in circulation (what you seem to be trying to convey in your post), it makes no difference. I mean, the government can pile up gold like there's no tomorrow, and the currency can still be weak, unstable, and highly inflationary due to insane monetary policies of the same government. If you could in fact redeem paper money for gold, that would technically mean a variety of gold standard implemented (which is prohibited by the IMF rules)


Because they know they don't stand a damn chance in the modern world on their own. Their economies will collapse if they lose their foreign markets

Кто там куда разбегается?



И что там говорил Карл Маркс (зачеркнуто) Марк Твен по поводу трех видов лжи? Но это далеко не все, что он говорил. Еще он говорил, что по нынешним, то есть по его тогдашним временам верить можно только половине из того, что видишь, и ничему из того, что слышишь. Ну а если уже говорить конкретно за настоящее время, то верить вообще ничему и никому нельзя (мне верить можно)

And do you happen to know why?

Because they have either moved most of their industrial complex to countries which are poor or been able to shut it down completely by exporting things from those poor countries. Note, I don't make a value judgment here as this is how things stand in a world like ours

In other words, this cleanness is definitely at someone else's expense, whether we like or not. And while we are at it, Europe is the most suicidal region in the whole world (with Scandinavian countries closer to the top of the list). So much for "happiness" (perhaps, they feel guilty, or something)

Petrocoin (or whatever its name) was a complete failure

While the rumors of China creating their own variety of cryptocurrency have been circulating since 2016 (if not earlier). But the truth is, if they really wanted to do something to that effect, they would have done it long ago. Some folks (for example, Christopher Giancarlo, the ex-head of the CFTC) are even suggesting the blockchain-based dollar run by the cartel of banks and thus not controlled by the Federal Reserve. How likely is that? I don't think that very much

And I come to agree with that

To put it differently, if this privacy option referred only to hiding one's name but you still could see their stats, it would be possible to guess or work out who these stats refer to by indirect references or slips of tongue made by forum members - even if you wouldn't know their user name at wolf.bet. And as I also come to think, this is not what most people would really want or readily agree with. The point is, it is not just about hiding one's stats as such. It is also what can be worked out on their basis (quite a lot of things, actually)

Technically, that's not quite true

Most altcoins (Litecoin, Ethereum, EOS, etc) had also shown quite spectacular performance at first. In fact, they were massively outperforming Bitcoin for some time (e.g. Litecoin rose 7 times from its early 2019 lows). But then the correction started, and while for Bitcoin it was indeed a correction, for the rest of the pack it looked more like a painfully long panic sell (even though the altcoin market is still far from its yearly lows)

But whose fault is it then?

Look, you can't just say it is the "changing nature of productive capitalism". It is an abstract idea or notion which in practice can be traced back to individual decisions and choices made by people, actually by many people. In the end it all comes down to people and what they do (and avoid doing), be it capitalism, communism, or whatever. See my point now? Who if not baby boomers are to be held responsible for all this shit, aliens?

That depends on your particular circumstances

More specifically, I'm not sure that you would like to be open and upfront about your gaming (gambling) activities if you happened to live in Saudi Arabia, North Korea, or Iran (not sure about Iran, though). But even if you are lucky to live in a more "democratic" country, you should still be cautious and careful about telling the world about what you do as it could raise certain questions from, say, tax authorities as to the source of your income (even if gambling itself is not prohibited)

But isn't it what the hidden option deals with specifically?

I mean it is not just about hiding one's user name (for example, my user name here is the same as at wolf.bet) but also one's stats and what not. If you could see someone's stats behind their hidden status, you would still be able to track that user eventually (by circumstantial evidence or whatever). If anything, I'm in favor of hiding everything once you chose to hide your user name since otherwise it doesn't make a lot of sense (as it leaves plenty of holes)

Was that actually intended as a piece of irony or sarcasm?

Or do you really believe that today's newsmen are less immoral that their colleagues from the 19th century? The problem is not with stats as such but how you interpret them. In this particular case, when you see that 40M people visited casinos, you come to think that these are all different people. But we don't know that for sure, and thus can misinterpret these stats in every possible way. That was Mark Twain's point as I see it, that the same stats can be explained and understood in quite polar ways


Actually, a wealth distribution chart typically reveals a completely different picture


What do they say, seeing is believing? Have you been to Vegas?

We can know that only in hindsight

Unless we have insider info which we typically don't (I mean, en masse). As an illustrative example, when the price of some cryptocurrency starts to move down big time (think Bitcoin here, for simplicity's sake), we essentially have three modi operandi (plural of modus operandi, i.e. a particular way of doing something), which are described in detail below. Maybe someone can come up with something entirely different

First, we can do nothing, i.e. wait out the bad times and hope for the best, in this case, for the price to recover (eventually or otherwise, sooner or later). It may pan out but as easily it may not. For example, those who bought at anything above 15k are still deeply in red, and many of them have already lost all hope and called it a day by fixing losses (so much for doing nothing)

Then, we can sell immediately and thus prevent losses from accumulating and multiplying. But this is not a panacea either since, as I said, we can only measure the bottom once we have touched it and rebounded from it. In other words, selling in these circumstances can in fact turn out quite counterproductive, and instead of preventing losses, we can set off on a journey of collecting them here and there

And finally, we can choose a completely different, even somewhat antagonistic approach by taking the route of cost-averaging. Basically, we can continuously add up to a losing position but since this can be seen as an extension of the first approach, instead of making our position better, we may actually end up with a worse one (like when we started to average down from the ATH of 20k)

As you can see, not a single one of these three possible ways of trading in a downtrend market can guarantee anything

It has been tried out already, and no, it doesn't appear to work. For example, you are inevitably losing in the long run, so you set up a system which automatically changes your orders into their opposites without you even being aware of it (or someone else sets it up for you to try out this approach). So when you buy something, the system sells it, and vice versa (let's assume you can both sell and buy)

Does it mean you will stop losing?

Most countries went off gold standard during WWI (or soon thereafter)

While the Americans forced their way only in 1944 (with the establishment of the Bretton Woods monetary system). Although countries can return to gold for international settlements of payments, it is not very likely that we will be back to the proper gold standard when you could freely and fully exchange (redeem) whatever piece of paper is called money for real gold. It seems we are irrevocably past that point already

I would say that this world came undone

Gold is mostly meaningless on its own (apart from its industrial use and value, of course). It is the economy, its strength and power, which matter in the long run, not some precious metal. The Soviets had enough gold (yet more crude oil), and it allowed them to last longer (for example, they started to buy wheat from Canada in the early 1970's in exchange for physical gold) but since their economic model was massively flawed (essentially suicidal), it was only a matter of time until they finally kicked the bucket

This number is far from consistent yet

Right now it is at 31 and I've seen it widely, or rather wildly, oscillating between that and the ATH of around 170 users. I don't know what accounts for this behavior, but consistency in the number of players seems to be of a higher priority to me. Really, if we see over 1000 players momentarily but they roll a few times or don't roll at all and then leave, what real difference would that make?

On the other hand, the longer the site remains in the game (pardon the pun), the more credibility and trust it will gain. And all this will correlate with and translate into the number of active players. So, basically, it is just a matter of staying afloat long enough while adding new features as required. One such blockbuster option would be to open the casino bankroll for outside investments. How many casinos are offering that opportunity nowadays?