The biggest benefit is not having cancer. My father had lung cancer that was spreading everywhere and I he was a smoker all his life, mostly smoking unfiltered cheap ones because that's what you could buy in the 60s. He also smoked a pipe from time to time. I grew up knowing the smell of tobacco and hating it. This made me avoid smoking my whole life and I hope that my life choices save me from health problems.
There's a lot of benefits like saving money, smelling better, not having bad breath, catching less cold because bacteria like smoke and spread better in it, but not getting cancer beats all of it.

It's not just past events, but a number of things like math, supply and demand, scarcity and many other.

We will have an ATH because we will have the next halving and then the next, so we'll be getting less bitcoin added to the pool by miners. We know that the demand is there because countries and banks are interested in bitcoin, not to mention billions of dollars in ETFs. Then there's the problem of money printing. The more money is being printed the less it's worth, while bitcoin is finite, it will continue to go up against fiat currencies. It will have its ups and downs, but a year from now it will be higher than it is now and then again and again.

I'm bullish for the halving. We'll most likely continue to go up with bigger or smaller corrections, depending on the news and how much GBTC decides to unload.
We depend on the news right now and the general trend is up, but may face significant resistance if the media decide to manipulate the market, the way they did it before the approval of ETFs by the SEC.

I'm sure we'll be above 50k after the halving, but it may happen that we'll go there next month. Nobody knows, but what you should be aware of is that we're above the 200 WMA and even a fall to 32k would still be a sign that we're in a bull market. We'd have to fall below 30k for bitcoin to look weak, so we're on the right track to the new ATH.

I came here as a total newbie so the first things I've learned about bitcoin was with the help of the forum.

As a new investor I was interested in mining, buying altcoins, cloud mining... I didn't know how many scams there were in the space, how many things that are risky or not worth buying. Nowadays I'm a bitcoiner and a hodler and that's all I care about. It took me months to understand the real value of bitcoin and how it compares to other projects.

I'm sure this knowledge saved me from a financial loss and made me save my bitcoins instead of spending everything at 2x gain. Now I'm at 50X and I still hold.

I've never hated myself because of gambling, nor did I hate myself at all for any other reason.
I don't lose much money and I'm a casual gambler, so there's really no bad sides of this. It's more of a hobby for me than anything else.

There were situations where I felt bad about it, like I wasted so much time playing a game and it was all for nothing because I lost, but that happens when you get your priorities wrong, meaning that you don't understand what the goals are. You're paying to have fun and if you lose it's still money well spent.

Many things aren't public, for instance something as trivial as key player performance during training sessions. They may not be injured but simply out of shape. It happens and the people close to the team will know about it before the match. As a coach you know if your team has a chance or not, especially when facing a better opponent.

There's also tactics. This is given to the team before the match and plays key role things like World Cup groups. You need a certain number of points to leave the group and when facing a stronger team the coach may tell the team to play on the defensive, so that you get a draw. Knowing the tactics you can bet on it, for instance that the team will not score at all and you know they won't even try. You can even bet on individual players that they wont score, or that they won't score in the first half.

When you steal a lot of money it doesn't really get easier. You need IDs, tickets, passports, people who will rent stuff for you, you can't do everything alone, but if these people learn about the money, what's stopping them from:
*Torturing you and taking it for themselves
*Blackmailing you
*Selling you to authorities for a bounty

You need trusted people to be able to hide, especially that you'll be doing it for many years. Most of these people who hack exchanges or run ponzi schemes end up not using the money out of fear or using it and leading the police to their doorstep. Read about that guy from Czech Republic who stole money from Sheep Marketplace. He started spending the money, bought a house and... got 9 years in prison.

It's sad how little people know about bitcoin.
OP did not know the saying "not your keys, not your coins" and held everything on a centralized exchange platform.
Instead of choosing a well established exchange he chose little known bitcoin casino. What's a difference between an exchange and a casino that poses as an exchange?

Here's a description from coinmarketcap.com :
BKEX Perpetual Futures supports 1-100X leverage, double-position mode, multi-position mode, and tiered liquidation. BKEX Ultimate-M supports 500X leverage, and users can place orders when looking at the candlestick chart. In addition, there is no funding fee for Ultimate-M.

Any exchange that offers 100x leverage is a casino. An exchange that offers 500x becomes really suspicious casino. You should know to stay away from these companies, unless you just want to gamble on a shady platform, then go ahead, it's your money. When I gamble I at least do it in a verified casino.

Then OP is looking for companies that will recover his funds from the exchange, which again shows how little he knows about bitcoin. These people will scam you out of the rest of your money. Don't expect any real recovery to happen if you pay them.

Statistics don't lie.
Most players at physical casinos are male.
Most professional gamblers are male.
Most bookies are male.

Go to any event like a football match - most people in the audience will be men. But maybe it's because this is male football, so go to a female match and again most fans will be men.

There's no difference between men and women when it comes to the game itself. A man rolling dice will statistically achieve the same results as a woman, but most women don't play. All the casino games are dominated by men so maybe it's in their nature to do so?

I feel like this is good advice. I don't know a single bitcoin investor who does not hold his private keys, although most of these people are the ones that I have talked to about bitcoin and directly or indirectly pushed towards it. You need to broaden your horizons, OP. How many bitcoiners do you really know in person? Who are these people and how much do they own? Don't take this as an insult, but if they hold a few hundred dollars worth of bitcoin, they aren't serious about their investment, so I wouldn't expect them to be serious about concepts like self-custody, decentralization and security.


I've encountered people who have a lot to say about these things and who wanted to tell me how I should secure my bitcoin and then I ask them how much they have and they happen to own 0.01BTC and my response to them is that I wouldn't care where my private keys are if my whole investment was worth less an average mobile phone, or a set of car tires.


What real problems would you like it to solve? Poverty? Wars? How about dilution of money supply by the Federal Reserve and inflation?

First of all, saying that high transaction fees deter people from using it is a bit of an overstatement because I believe that if you, like in this case, try to sell items that cost $1 for bitcoin, you're a dreamer. Math says this can never work, but that doesn't mean you can't sell thins for bitcoin. The value of an item must be much higher than the fee for it to even have the slightest chance of success.

As for the solution, there are even better ways of fixing this. You can sell in bulk, like Chinese manufacturers, or do hat many online stores do and allow clients to load funds onto their account. They can send 1k USD to the store at once and be able to use it for purchases throughout the year.

Bitcoin is a great tool for auctions, where you need proof of funds. In traditional auctions you usually have to send some money before you're allowed to participate. With bitcoin you can sign a message and achieve a similar result.

That's true. My parents raised me to live in fear of the unknown, be careful in life as they were, basically live in a cage built by my own emotions. They'd rarely travel, never take any risk, they would work government jobs because it offered steady pay, would not invest, but instead keep money in the bank on small interest rate. They lived their lives in fear and died owning very little. During this time they learned to value what they had and have fun with what they owned.

Watching how they lived taught me to be more careless, look for investment opportunities. It's like a sine wave where weak and fearful parents create fearless children who don't want to end up like them and those fearless children at some point go overboard and lose some money or get into an accident or into jail and their children become more careful not to repeat that.

While I understand what OP had in mind I wouldn't call throwing my money away on electronics a responsible spending. It's like buying yourself a bigger phone because people no longer feel envy when you show your old one.

OP had a smaller TV, could buy a smaller one but decided to go with the biggest he could afford with the money. It really feels like buying a wallet with your last money, or throwing everything away on an expensive sports car when you don't even have a garage to keep it in.

The message is good, gamble responsibly and don't bet everything you win. From time to time you need to spend or invest some of it.

I don't become emotional when I gamble or invest. I have this habit of getting bitter when things go wrong, feeling the need to do something about it, but I calculate everything in my mind and end up not acting on my emotions.

I'll give you an example. When I invest, the price goes down, I feel like I should sell and protect it, but then I rethink it, get bitter, think to myself -fuck them, and don't sell because that's how I am. Stubborn.
It's the same with gambling. I win some money, I feel like I'm in a streak and could continue, but then I realize that I'm fine and take a small win home or stop at a small loss. I don't try to test my luck more when I win and I don't attempt to win back what I lost if I lose money.

I haven't lost mine, but I know a guy who did, but it was in the old days, probably 2013. The deal was, he mined bitcoin at work. He worked as a security guard and he'd bring his computer to work in 2012 when you'd mine using FPGAs. Those were a little stacked towers of mining chips that were a bit faster than GPUs but still slower than ASICs. He kept everything on a single hard drive with no backups, but bitcoin wasn't worth much. He was making some money every month, but it wasn't a lot. I won't tell you the exact numbers but it was less than $100 a month and he'd sell bitcoin every few month.

Then he got bored with it and kept some of the unsold coins on his computer and in 2013 someone broke in to his place and stole his whole computer. They cleaned out the place. Stole his TV, computer, console, basically everything that had value and was light enough to be carried out. It was right before bitcoin went above $100 in that big Spring rally and the thieves never knew what they were stealing because the money was still on that address a year later. They probably wiped the drive so that the new buyer wouldn't know who the stuff used to belong to. I bet some kids bought it and played games on it not knowing that it was stolen.

This wasn't a lot of bitcoin, less than 2BTC, but it would be worth at least $60k today.

Why he did not have a backup? Because that was dust that he mined to have money for beer and smokes. 1 bitcoin was worth $10, so he wouldn't care if he lost $15 or something like that. Today you can get that much money if you get someone to register on a bitcoin exchange with your referral.

How to best protect yourself? Get at least 1 backup and hold it in a different place. If you have a garden, buy a watertight capsule, engrave the seed on a piece of metal or plastic and bury it somewhere where it will be easy to find for you, like right next to a tree. If all else fails, even when your house burns down you'll always have that backup that will never get destroyed

So, where do the men 45-60 find themselves? They've been banned from the topic


In other words, I have an idea, but I'm not going to tell you how I came to this. I also can't prove it, but that's my way of thinking, you know.

Let me guess, you think older men gamble for fun because they have more money and can lose more without regrets? That's a pretty dumb statement as certain wealth and status is something you get used to, therefore a rich man losing money feels bad, just like a poor man.

I'd say that a gambler is someone who plays games that require betting money. So, if you played a poker game with your friends betting chips with no money involved, just for fun, that wouldn't make you a gambler. Since you used real money, you are a gambler.

The way you said it is pretty strange because you seem to think that a gambler is someone affected by gambling. Like a woman saying that she tried this whole sex for money thing a few times but she wasn't affected and left the business so she definitely wasn't a prostitute

First thing that comes to my mind after reading your story is that you must be bored at work and have a lot of free time. I'd never be able to play such guessing games at work.

What stops you from trying to do it for real? You can always try your luck and see how it goes when it comes to sports, but you can also try some street hustles. Try doing what some of those youtubers do when they offer people money if they can't guess something about their personal life and if they do they keep the money and get content for their channel. If you do good, you'll be popular.
What have you got to lose? At worst it will be your time and you'll get laughed at in public.

There's no need to panic. It's probably the last squeeze we see before the halving and the closer to April we get the more bullish people will be.


That's a strange sentence because new lows is something that always comes. I could bet you all my money that bitcoin will see new lows, it's just that these can be higher lows or lower lows.
Such predictions are meaningless because a new low is not a bad thing. To have highs you need lows, which are a part of every price action. Note that lows and corrections are also observed in the bull market.

Are you sure about that? If this is the first time it's in the spotlight, how will you describe the opening of bitcoin futures in 2018?
What about acceptance in El Salvador? What about that short time when Musk was promoting it, or the investment that Microstrategy made?


It never was a viable mainstream currency. In fact, bitcoin never was a mainstream investment, which is proven by the amount of people who own it. If you ask around, maybe 1 out of 10 people you know will hold bitcoin, probably even less than that. Is that mainstream?

It's not and the fact that a certain amount, for instance 10% of it will be held by ETFs doesn't make it centralized.

It has already done that long ago. Do you think Wall Street wasn't involved in bitcoin trading in 2019?