Wow 400 million is a lot of money and since north Korea is a dictatorship we know that Kim has to be directly involved. How is there no international pressure towards North Korea? I hate all types of scammers, but if a government is behind it it's even worse. It's a bit relieving that they don't only target bitcoins and seem to focus more on alt coins, still any theft is wrong. Can't we find a way for North Korea to be blocked from engaging in cryptos? Like will they exchange that 400 million into Chinese yuan or their own currency? If we can track the wallets the hacker used maybe we can get these funds banned from being sold on any exchange.

International leagues are usually big tournaments that show most of the times the same big teams from around the world. Everything is predicted well into advance, we rarely see an underdog coming out of nowhere and dominate everything. Maybe it's just me but I always enjoy to see the smaller team win. Might be also that they have much better payouts if they actually win. In local leagues there is more randomness involved, there are usually bigger skill difference which also change based on the daily performance of the athletes. Another thing is that there are usually much more games for local leagues because the teams don't have to fly around the world. That's more matches for us to be on.

Oh wow, seriously Elon Musk is back at it manipulating crypto markets? How are people still falling for that? I do like SpaceX and the Tesla cars, but I don't like how Elon Musk uses his twitter account to promote or banish crypto projects. He has a huge followership that will buy anything he prompts without thinking twice.  We know that Elon Musk is one of the whales behind the doge coin market, so promoting it will benefit him directly. But who knows how long tesla will actually accept doge, it might be only a few weeks. I remain sceptical for now.

This is definitely true. Making research on a project and identify if its reliable is important, but more important is to identify the current the overall market position. Crypto currencies like most other asset classes move in cycles, there are 3 parts in the cycle. A upwards trend, a sideways trend and a downward trend. If we don't pay attention to the part of the cycle we are in, then trading becomes very difficult. Even the best projects are having a hard time in bear markets. That's why technical analysis is so helpful to identify these cycles for us. The real difficulty lies in the prediction of how long the bull or the bear market is going to last.

I would argue that the HODL investor don't impact the bitcoin that much, it's mostly the other type of investors that influence the price. A real HODL strategy is not selling coins into a bear market, so there is no further downward pressure from them. This is a good thing and helps to retain some form of stability. On the other side when we are in a rally HODL strategy is also not selling. It just means that there are less bitcoins available to be traded. This also means that the other investors who actively trade their coins have a larger impact on the overall price.

I had no idea where Tonga was but saw it this morning in the news with the eruption of an underwater volcano. Accepting bitcoins as a legal tender can bring a lot of benefits for such a small island country. First of all not being dependant anymore on westernunion is a big plus. Being the largest financial institution that sends money around the world enables them to charge very high fees. The pressure from the crypto market should help lower these fees. Secondly bitcoins can make it easier for Tonga to collect some international funds to help rebuild the country. The tsunami will require an international relief fund which could in bitcoins instead of USD.

For me gambling is clearly fun, it's another form of gaming with money involved. I always liked playing cards as a kid, so poker and blackjack come very naturally to me. Having the chance to make some profits when being lucky is a nice plus. But I also understand that gambling can be a threat for others. In life many things can be fun and will become a threat if we over do them. Like with alcohol, drinking beers on the weekend is fun, but if we start drinking beers every day than it becomes a threat for our health. Same goes for gambling, as long as we do it reasonably and controlled it's fun.

A few friends of mine from Turkey who are working internationally all are getting paid in USD or Euros. None of them really want to receive TRL because of the high inflation. They all studied abroad and probably had it much easier when negotiating their salaries. For the unlucky one who are stuck with the lira it's the best they can do to switch into crypto currencies. Getting larger amounts of USD or Euros is probably harder than just to buy cryptos on your own. The intermediate economic outlook for Turkey is not that good, inflation will likely keep rising. This will likely increase the people who buy cryptos.

I also tried gambling in casinos and sports betting, both is interesting in its own way. For me personally casino games are a bit more fun and I tend to be luckier here than with betting. In really big tournaments I still like to wager a bit but with relatively small amounts. In the casino I spend much more money. Compared to you however this are just peanuts. Losing 7k USD in minutes is a lot for me. I don't really know your financial situation so maybe it's not hurting you that much. After such big swings it might be better to lower your gambling budget a bit. Casino games are still fun when gambling with less.

It's seems a bit early to declare bitcoins as the winner in the currency wars. Crypto currencies have definitely won some battles in the past, but the war is not over yet. So far there are only a few countries which accepted bitcoins as a legal tender. For me to say that bitcoins won the war would be either after being used as the world currency, so that all international trade will be settled in bitcoins. Or that one of the leading countries will accept bitcoins as a legal tender. At the moment this still seems years away. The war will continue.

While you are right that it won't be exactly 21m bitcoins that are going to be mined, this is a number that is very far an in the future. Unfortunately we all here won't be around anymore when we are getting close to the 21m barrier. What I find more interesting is to know how many bitcoins are already lost today that can't be recovered anymore because no access to the wallets. Then we could extrapolate that number to the future at find an estimate of how many bitcoins actually will be in circulation. Who knows, this number might be closer to 19 than to 21m. Nonetheless the bitcoin price has to rise in the future, the hard cap on the bitcoin supply means that the miners require higher prices to keep mining in the future. If energy costs keep rising, so must bitcoins to keep profitable for the miners.  

I do believe that trading can earn us money. First of all the trading world is a zero sum game, no money is disappearing. If you are making a loss than someone else is making money. It can't be that we all make money that the same time. When it comes to losing money in a trade we need to determine if we made an error on our research and the coin is not as good as we hoped, or if the overall market is just moving against us. A lot of price movements in the alt coin market is due to bitcoin market. If bitcoins are going down so are most other crypto coins. Like you I would rather hold a coin longer and wait for the price to rebound than to sell it too quickly in the red.

The best method to bet on football matches is to bet only the money you can afford to lose and don't bet all your money on one game. Even with the most save bet we can manage to lose money. As for betting crypto or fiat money I don't really see a difference there. Most of the big bookmakers accept fiat money and the major crypto coins. I would say it comes down to what free money you have, if you have a lot of fiat money in your savings account I would rather use that. You can always convert your winnings into cryptos later.

I fully agree with you on why we need bitcoin in today's world. Printing unlimited amounts of money is a sin by politicians. Having the opportunity to create money out of nothing removes the need for a balanced budget. Every year the government makes a plan for the upcoming year and how much they are going to spend. They are fully aware that they won't meet their own targets. Spending more money means making more voters happy. That is why we finally need a currency that is independent and can't be touched by politicians. The more we invest in crypto currencies the more we show the government that we want more control over our own money.

I don't think the rise in bad projects and bad advertising is destroying the crypto msekets. It's just a side effect due do the popularity and success of crypto currencies. As with any successful sector in the economy, people will try to profit from the success of others. While for the unlucky few who fall for the bad eggs it's devastating, all the others will not really be affected. For example, the whole scam business of fake amazon emails sending out invoices, is not really hurting the business of amazon itself. As with any area of the Internet, we need to be critical and not take everything at face value.

This is very good for you, it shows that you are not at risk to become addicted to gambling. As someone who doesn't feel that urge to keep gambling when it's better to stop, it can be hard to understand the compulsory behaviour of addicted people. We humans are not all the same, there are some of us who are more vulnerable towards addictions than others. In general I would not distinguish between gambling, drug, alcohol or even a gaming addiction. It becomes very difficult for a person to control their own action, even though they know it is wrong and will harm them. We also see that if some is struggling with addiction on one area, he is more likely to become addicted to something else. I have seen this myself with a good friend of me, we both started smoking during high-school but he was smoking much more than me. After high-school we both tried to stop but he just couldn't, it took him so many attempts but he still fell back into his old patterns. Only later when he went into gaming and started drinking he managed to stop smoking. Unfortunately he just switched his addiction for something new and was still unable to control his actions. Something we can't understand our friends why they are doing something. The only thing we can do is try to help them.

If you want an honest answer, I am afraid but this is not realistic. First of all you need to have healthy expectations when it comes to trading. If you start again with trading I would aim for returns of 30-40% per year, but not to become a millionaire overnight. The problem with focusing on a fixed number like 1 million is that it will keep you forgetting about the risks you need to take to get there. The chances for you to get so much money is very small, it's much more likely for you to lose it again. Since you lost alot of money in the past you should have some tax credits and can save on paying taxes in the future.

I don't feel like raising the marketcap of Bitcoins to circumvent the 21 million problem is what the crypto community really wants. We all are aware that the huge energy consumption for crypto mining is a problem. But the rest of the world is also constantly increasing its energy needs. Its just a matter of time that we become more efficient in the harvesting of energy. That's why we can't look to far into the future based on our current technology at hand. Technology advancements are going to help solve the energy problem.
The attractiveness of Bitcoins is the hard cap of 21 million, it stops inflation reducing the value of the existing coins. For me this also means the bitcoin price is going to stay on a upwards trend. While the price for 1 bitcoins keeps going up we can trade in even smaller amounts going forward.

Unfortunately bitcoins don't provide any dividends. Just holding the coins in our wallets is not going to earn us any interest. The only form form of profit comes through price appreciation and when we sell bitcoins for a higher price. There are companies that offer you returns for your bitcoins, but then they will have full ownership of our coins. The company can be legit or can be a scam. For me the risk is just too high to lose it all. Another form of making some returns would be through gambling. It's not passive income and also involves risk, atleast we can control the risk here.

Acceptance of Bitcoins World wide is a good thing. It increases the number of stores who are going to accept bitcoins as a form of payment and the number of investors. The more people know about bitcoins the more people want to own them. Which again means the more people want to be kept up to date. That's why I don't think news about crypto currencies and bitcoins is going to disappear. Newspapers and news shows on TV will have to include bitcoins going forward. The most likely is to just include it into their financial news coverage about stocks and bonds.