I don't thin kit's right to call gambling as a form of investing, or to say to investing that is all luck based and just gambling. The two are very different and we can distinguish them. First of all, gambling is luck based games that involve money and we can't invest money in it, except if we own the casino and run the games ourselves. When you gamble, you place a bet and you instantly know if you won or lost that round. There is no waiting for prices to change and maybe we make a profit, it's either win or lose. With investing on the other hand, we are actually getting ownership of something. It doesn't matter if it is stocks, bonds, crypto currencies, or commodities. In all these cases we own something, that has some value in the future. The price might go down, but even then there will be some value left and we can still sell our assets again. So, with investing it's much harder to lose all our money, compared when placing everything on a single gamble in the casino. If you find a strategy that works for you in gambling, then follow it, just don't think of it as a reliable income.

I am not too worried about China and their economy, because it's such a huge country and they are in full control by the communist party. Comparing the Chinese economy to Western country economy like USA or Europe is wrong and needs to be looked at differently. It's definitely true that some Chinese companies are struggling with too much debt and the aftermath of the covid pandemic is still having issues today. But in China there are completely different ways to handle the crisis than it would be possible in western countries. In the west it's all about accountability and trying to look good while doing the right things. Whereas in China it's all about the economy and making sure there is a positive growth rate next quarter. So, the Chinese government will decide which company to save and which to go under. There won't be a large public outcry against bailouts or big protest. This freedom of the communist party is going to make it much easier to fight any big crisis and will let China recover much quicker.

In my opinion the biggest problem for people starting out to trade is their unrealistic return expectations. I am not really sure where it's coming from, but somehow there is a believe that you can make very high returns in trading in a short time. Which definitely true, but you need to take a lot of risk to achieve those returns and there is no guarantee to actually get your money. Step one for any beginner in the trading world should be to acquire all the necessary knowledge and slowly gain trading experience over time. There is no need to rush anything, there will always be new trading opportunities around and we can take it slow. FOMO might seem like a real issue, but it's not and we shouldn't fall into that trap. Starting small and not commuting all our capital at once should help a lot to reduce the initial losses in trading.

I fully agree with you, the earlier we start saving the higher will be our portfolio in the end. Both saving and investing is linked to time, the longer the period of time the return is going to be. Another important concept is to reinvest any interest, dividends or other profits we make in the meantime. This will help a lot to let our initial principal grow much faster over time. It's always nice to spend money and treat ourselves, but we need to realize that many times it's just unnecessary consumption of things we don't really need. Thinking in term of opportunity costs, which would be saving or  investing that money in crypto currencies, helped me a lot to cut back on my spending. So, better to be older and rich than young and having many things.

What a horrible story, there are no excuse when kids are involved and I hope this was a wake up call for the man to turn his life around. How can you leave two year old children alone to gambling, I don't understand such behaviour and there must be something really wrong with this man. Probably he is already addicted to gambling and might have had other issue in the past that could have been noticed. It's a bit hard to speculate without knowing more about the family, but the mother of the kids should have intervened as well. There is no excuses to go gambling when you have a family. For me gambling is something I only do in the evening after all the important tasks are done and if I really have the time for it. I would never feel relaxed and could be playing for several hours if I know my kids need me. Also why was he only charged with one count of child abuse if it was twins? Shouldn't it be two counts?

For me the word gambler has no negative meaning, it just describes someone that like to play games where money is involved. I have been a gambler for many years by now and if someone calls me like that it's fine, there is no negativity in the word itself. We shouldn't be feeling bad if strangers or colleagues call us by such words, they might not know any better and we should be standing above. Also I am a gambler and a gamer, as I do enjoy to play on the PC quite a few of my older games without any money involved. So whenever someone calls me a gambler, I make fun of the situation and say, no I am actually a gamer. And if someone calls me a gamer, I say I prefer to be called gambler because I play with money. It's just a little joke I try to play on people trying to label me with a certain word. Every person that plays games is a gamer, so every gambler is also a gamer, because they enjoy playing games that involve money. I would advice you to care less about other people and how they call you, but if it really bother you a lot, then just tell them to stop. If it's a colleague or a friend they will avoid using that word in front of you.

Not sure if I would call bitcoin itself king, for me it's just another currency. Even though it's a superior currency to all the fiat money out there, it still depends on the people using it. Don't get me wrong, bitcoins are a great investment and anybody should at least own some coins in their portfolios. For me the real kings are the OG bitcoin investors. People who were willing to acquire or mine coins in the first several years of the bitcoin creation, when it still was cheap. All these kings are probably millionaires by now and did really well for them. Good for them, they took the risk and got rewarded for it. All of us other investors who just came to the crypto world after the hype are just lords now. We are making great returns with our bitcoin holdings, but sadly we will never achieve what the early investors managed to make from their investments.

That's absolutely right, we are in control of our own life and nobody else. There is no point in cheating ourselves, because it's only going to hurt us in the long run. I have been in that situation myself so many times where my brain tried to play tricks on. Whenever I see the newest generation of graphic cards, or a cheap deal on a new monitor, then my brain tells me we should upgrade my PC system at home. There is no real need for it, my current PC is running fine and will not be replaced. It's just my brain trying to make unnecessary purchases seem important. Which is why financial accountability and responsibility is so important. Only with a clear head can I remain in control of my money and invest it instead of spending it.

   

No I am not affected emotionally by my gambling anymore in any severe form. This only happened a bit when I first started with gambling, but I had to learn quickly that emotions don't have any space in gambling. Of course I feel bad after a big loss, or I am happy after winning some money, but I try to not to let it affect my decision making in any form. We might not be able to control what we feeling, but we can control if we want to act on these feeling or if we try to change our mindset, clear our head and feel differently afterwards. Doubling your bets after a loss is quite normal if you follow a martingale approach, it's a nice stratey that I use from time to time when playing roulette. Everything is fixed in the martingale strategy, so I am not reacting to my feelings or emotions, I just follow a strategy. For me the best way to look at gambling is in the same way as trading or how I handle money in general. When you go shopping, you don't buy everything you see and like, or when you watch advertisings then you also don't order everything that makes you feel good. Here we know very well that we can't trust our feeling and shouldn't be affected by our initial emotions. In gambling it's no different, we should think and act with our head and don't give into sudden urges coming from our emotions.

I fully agree with you, if we want to enjoy gambling on a regular basis then we need to have a steady form of income to finance our gambling adventures. The thing with gambling is that there is a lot of randomness involved and we can't rely on making a consistent profit to at the casinos. First of all, the games at the casino have a house edge that makes it harder for the gambler to find a profit. If we now don't have a regular income to compensate for a losing streak then it's going to be very hard. The chances are high that we just get wiped out and lose our bankroll during a bad night. It needs some from of income that will help to build up our bankroll over time. Only after some time, when we have a large bankroll we might be able to gamble without any additional income. I had to learn this the hard way when grinding through low stakes poker games and jumped up the blinds too quickly. There will always be a few bad nights accumulating losses, and if we don't have the capital to withstand that, then our gambling career will be over quickly.

I have two portfolios and two different strategies I focus on. The first one is my bitcoin wallet, where I am trying to aquire as much as possible and will just hodl my coins. This is purely for long-term investing without any trading in the mean time. I used to trade bitcoin actively in the past, but my results where mixed compared to the time I invested for research and monitoring. Now I am just sticking to the DCA method and will buy new coins every month. Once we reach a new ATH I might consider taking some profits. The second portfolio is for both stocks and crypto, I use it to trade more actively. Here I mostly follow technical analysis to identify medium term trends to take advantage of. I am not a fan of day trading anymore because there is too much noise in the market and my technical indicators are not working that great. A more medium term approach of 30-90 days works better to identify trading signals and keeps the transaction cost lower as well.

Not spending money on unnecessary things make sense. It's always better to try and avoid purchases today and rather invest that money to earn a profit for us. My plan is usually to not use my principal money for purchases, but rather wait and use the dividends and profits to make a purchase. But the real question remains where is our wealth really coming from? Starting from 0 is almost impossible to get rich in today's time in my opinion. Because we are living in a period of high inflation, food prices are constantly rising, so is rent. These are all cost that we can't avoid to pay. As long as our monthly income is high enough to pay all costs and leaves us with enough money to invest, we will have a better future. But changing our situation requires a lot of dedication and time, reinvesting profits, interest and dividends helps a lot to build our portfolio more quickly. And even if we won't manage to become rich in our life, we can at least help our children to have an easier life and maybe they can become rich one day.

That is the sad part about rising crypto prices, the number of scammers also increases. With the Bitcoin price getting expensive again it will not only bring more investors back to the market again, also it becomes more profitable for scammers to streal some coins. Which is why it's so important to protect ourselves and our money. If something sounds too good to be true, than it's mostly like scam and we should avoid it. Over the last few months I noticed a rise in scam emails, calls, text messages and even WhatsApp messages. Everything including suspicious links that I should click. Even though I have two different anti-virus software, I would never click on a link from a person that I don't know. When it comes to money we need to responsible and have realistic expectations about the future. We all can dream from time to time, just don't trust strangers that promise us the world.

Today the last two matches of the BLAST Premier Spring Groups 2024 are being played. So far in the four groups Vitality, FaZe, NaVi and Virtus.pro dominated and reached the first place respectively. Now the four group final losing teams have to play an elimination match for the 5&6 place to reach the Spring Finals directly. The losers have to go to the Spring Showdown matches first. The first match of the day will be Astralis vs BIG in a best of 3 match. Usually I am a fan of BIG and like to put some money on them, but Astralis played quite well this tournament. They actually managed to beat Vitality 2-1 in the group stage, before losing to them 2-1 in the group finals. Astralis is definitely the better team at the moment and should have no problem winning against BIG today. The second match of the day is going to be G2 vs Team Liquid which should be won by G2 without a problem. Even though Team Liquid did quite well in the tournament and won a lot of there last several matches, they haven't faced such strong opponents as G2 has. Both G2 and Astralis should be advancing today.

Not sure if I understand the screenshot correctly, you can cash out 1.8 million now or gamble for a potential win of 31.6 million, while your current stake is only 3,100? With such a small stake at the moment this sounds like a clear cash out for me. You make such a high return and good profit with 1.8m that I would always take that money. Sure 31m sounds much nice, but that money is not guaranteed. Better take a huge profit that is save right now than gambling even more. If you already have millions and don't care so much about one more or less million, then I would say gamble for the whole 30m. We need to put everything in perspective of our total bankroll and how our bet is going to affect our future gambling chances. Which is why I would never put all my money into one single bet, the risk is just too high for my stomach. Also it depends a lot how we think the chances of winning are changing during the game, which makes watching the game and analysing it during the half time break very important.

There is no exact prices in trading, everything is just predictions and guessing. If someone tells you he knows the exact bitcoin price next week than it's likely a scam. Everybody would become a millionaire very quickly if we could know the exact price of Bitcoin at a specific point in time. But then again nobody would actually trade us bitcoin anymore if the price is known next week. It would be that the price jumps directly to that price. So, if you want to make money don't focus so much on short term trading. Looking at a more long term approach can be very profitable. Hodling bitcoin has been a very profitable strategy. I can't tell you the price next month, but what I can tell you is that bitcoin is on a upwards trend. If you don't already own any coins and buy today, then you are going to make a profit in the future. It might take some time, but the price is going to rise again.

For me gambling is an activity I follow for fun and not for the financial benefit. Any money that I make from gambling is nice to have but never my main goal. When I first started out I was focused much more on the financial aspect of gambling, but didn't have any consistent success. Now I am much happier with only gambling for fun and take any profit that comes as a bonus. Even in poker where the main benefit is making consistent profits, I am not looking at it as a form to make money. For me it's a card game that I enjoy to play for fun and would still do so if there was no more money involved. I am a micro stakes gambler, I like to play with very small betting sizes because I gamble so much. Instead of placing big bets, I would rather keep gambling for another hour. So I am comfortable with a bankroll of 100 USD, more than that is unnecessary.

I don't think that gambling addiction is going to cause domestic violence. With gambling addiction people are attracted to casinos and their games, they would love to spend a lot of time gambling and make a lot of money. Violence has no real part in that addiction, it's not like gambling addicts love to hurt other people or start to fighting. Also when visiting casinos there will addicts there, but I never saw a fight happening. The number one factor leading to domestic violence in my opinion is alcohol, because it makes people aggressive. Gambling addiction doesn't make people aggressive like alcohol.

Maybe I am just a bit different from the majority of gamblers, but I never dreamed about one particular casino game that I won in my dream. In general I rarely dream or just can't remember my dreams after waking up. The few dreams that I do remember are usually things from my past and involve people that I miss a lot and haven't seen in a while. For example, many dreams involve my grand parents that died many years ago. Only a few times I dreamed gambling and that was mostly after visiting casinos. But then I don't dream about winning at a game, it's rather just about meeting the people I spend the evening with in a wierd constellation. I heard that there are people that can dream actively and choose their actions, maybe they have better luck.

I don't think that it's very likely for the traditional banking system to disappear, with or without bitcoins there isn't much chance for the government to abandon the banks. The economy, the banks and the government are all connected to each other. Because the banks mainly deal in fiat money the government will always come and bail them out. We have seen that happen in the financial crisis of 2008. The banks are just too big to fail and would take down the whole economy with them. The only option would be a very slow transformation where over time people take money out of banks and fiat. The problem then would probably be the government that is afraid to lose control of the money supply and will try to revert the process.