Interesting question, I find all narcos stories fascinating, if it is Pablo escobar from the past, the Mafia or Guzman from Mexico. They all made billions from transporting, distributing, and selling drugs. Unfortunately there is no real way of tracking their wealth. Which criminal would make it public how much money he has in hiding. The only way we have is by the court and media when criminals are getting caught and put on trial. Would be crazy if you could earn still earn billions from drugs and be under the top 10 richest people alive in today's time. I am not an expert on drugs but I know that in my country there was a huge epidemic in the 80s and 90s. Hundreds of people where doing Heroin and other hard drugs in the parks in the city center. Today if you go there you see almost no drug users anymore. It might be more hidden in today's time or there is a lower number of drug users. I would expect that we have more people now doing Marihuana than in the past but less people doing hard drugs.

At the moment I am not earning any interest on my bitcoins. Bitcoins had such a strong year in 2021, in my opinion there is no real need for interest on our coins. When making returns of 100% in a few months than we should be already happy with it. Crypto lending can offer us some good returns during our HODL periods, but we need to be aware that there are risks involved. 4 to 6% interest sounds nice at first, but when losing everything its devastating. It's another layer of risk we need to be comfortable with or not. Personally I am not looking for interest by lending out coins.
Another form of interest I had in the past was gambling. Before the recent bitcoin rally I used to gamble and play poker with my bitcoins. So every time I won money I withdraw using crypto currencies, and every time I lost money I covered the losses with fiat money. This was probably more a way of switching fiat into bitcoins but it offered some easy way to boost my crypto portfolio.



Unfortunately yes, there is always a problem with the security of wallets when we rely on mobile or online wallets instead of hardware wallets. While this might be not a big issue in the past when we used online walkers for a few hundred USD. But now with the rising bitcoin price the pressure towards security is rising too. For hackers it becomes much more profitable just to steal a few BTC. And with bitcoins likely to rise even higher this will intensify.

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It's quite funny that Elon Musk puts so much focus on these number. Most of the younger investors might watch out for such memes, but the average investors probably not. To be honest he probably smoked something when he came up with the name for his son. Would be interesting to know how many of the billionaire crypto investors are smoking weed. Also would a bitcoin price of 69,420 USD be a bigger milestone than going above 70,000? Personally I prefer round numbers, the same goes for stop losses. I try to look at more fixed numbers. For example, buy when BTC is below 30,000 USD or consider selling when above 100,000. For technical analysis the barrier of 69,000 might be important, but I think we are still in a general upwards trend. Let's hope the reverse 69, 96,000 is the new target for Musk.

What do you mean with "perform very well"? That many people are using bitcoins and there is an active market for them, or that the there is a lot of upside trading potential? There is no fixed value for bitcoins, it is not an asset that will reach it's true intrinsic value and is not going to rise or fall anymore. So saying bitcoins should stay at 6k or 30k seems wrong to me. All currencies tend to move in price if they are traded freely. I think that the value from bitcoins comes from its scarcity, we know that there is no unlimited amount of bitcoins out there. We are going to get less and less new bitcoins which makes the old bitcoins more valuable. That is why there is a long term upwards trend for bitcoins. To be honest we could ask the same questions about gold, why is gold so expensive right now? The price doesn't seem natural, but as long as people have a lot of free money they can pay what they want for the things they like. The same goes for bitcoins. Also we shouldn't forget that analysts said a bitcoin price above 100,000 USD is possible for 2022.

In my opinion crypto currencies are not so important in the development of a country. It can bring some help for problems like inflation or missing confidence of international investors in a currency. But for a developing country to only rely on crypto currencies can be risky. Most of the exports of a country are either being settled in USD or in the local currency. I don't think that it is very bad for country to rely on cryptos as long as it is not the main focus. There needs to be some commodities or some services for a country to export and rely upon. Cryptos are another form of currency that are easier to transfer and don't rely on a government, but they don't provide economic growth by itself. A government can make a profit by investing some surplus money into cryptos but its not a guarantee to make money of it.

It is hard to say when exactly I started gambling, already at a young age I was into lotteries and evrytime I went to a fair in my city most of my friends used all their money on roller coasters whereas I used atleast half of my money for the small lottery and usually won some toys, for example my small army soldiers came from there and I loved them. Also my grandfather used to give me scratch tickets for my birthday, I like to buy them to this day but never won anything big. So small gambling I started around 10, first time casino with 18 and online poker with 21. Since then I gamble on a regular basis.
In regards to if my gambling career was profitable I would probably say no, in poker and blackjack I definitely made money over the years, but in Dice, lottery, roulette and other gambling I definitely lost money. It was still not a waste of my time. Having a good time with friends usually involves spending some money, like going to a bar drinking or watching a game in the stadium. That is why I could never look at gambling as a form of making money. For me the returns are not consistent and reliable enough.

I heard about a similar project that focuses on offline transaction but the project didn't do to well. The main issue I see here is that Internet is just so important for our everyday life. We only notice how important the constant connection to the Internet is if we lose it. Last year I had several outages and was days without the Internet, eventually I had to switch providers. Even though I still had my mobile phone and could access emails it was hard on me.
Projects without Internet are not so attractive because it is so unlikely to imagine a time without the Internet. It's just a matter of time until we reach global Internet coverage by satellites, than we have cable Internet, wireless and satellite Internet. So even if one of them is going to fail we will have some backup to rely upon. That everything fails is a black Swan event.

Always nice to see fellow traders documenting their success. Keeping track of all our trades is a good way for our self's to try and identify bad trades and the reasoning behind it. Unfortunately is one week very short to be a good sample size of making money in crypto trading. Crypto prices rallied over the last few weeks which makes it hard to stick out as a good trader. Everybody can make money in a bull market but only food traders can protect their money during a bear market. Keep up your trading journal try to go through the next bear market well. Good luck buddy.

This is a hard question. First of all Taiwan is a very small island and would have no chance in a war against China, only with international support Taiwan could hold out and engage in peace deals. If there were American, Japanese and maybe other Nato countries involved in Taiwan than it would also mean these countries would enact heavy sanctions against China. This would likely mean a collapse of international trade. The whole world is relying on cheap products from China. And China is relying heavily on their export sector. So after the initial shock to probably all asset classes except high security assets, it would be a good time to buy. I don't think we will see a long war between Taiwan and China, either they will annex Taiwan quickly or have to back off.

He knows that his banking business is being threatened by crypto currencies. This sounds to me like some cheap arguments in a half hearted effort to try and discredit crypto currencies. Pretty sure he is looking also into ways to profit of the crypto hype. But the importance of banking will be lower every year. It is just a matter of time until the whole banking industry has to reinvent itself. Even if we don't understand anything about cryptos and the algorithms behind them, the halving process shows us that the number of new bitcoins if falling every 4 years. Eventually the number of new bitcoins being mined become so small that it won't be profitable anymore if the bitcoin price doesn't keep rising. I don't trust bank executives trying to talk bad about cryptos.

I know what you mean, back in the days there were so many different poker formats on TV, not only the big tournaments but also cash games tables. Especially shows like Poker After Dark or High Stakes Poker were awesome to watch. Mixing the old guys who have been around for years like Doyle Brunson and Barry Greenstein with the younger generations like Phil Ivey or Tom Dwan was just genious. I am really glad that they tried to revive the old formats but somehow it doesn't feel the same anymore. Most of top cash game players these days are just so focused at the game, there isn't much table banter going these days. But if we looking for ways to improve our own poker game than watching the professionals play live again is a good training. We can always ask ourself, why is he raising or calling at this spot now and try to analyse their range by watching them for hours and hours play.

I didn't read this book. Is it good? It's already a bit old, maybe there is something more current for crypto currencies? Mandelbrot was a very famous mathematician and kind of the godfather of quantitative finance. He did a lot of research into price modelling in the 80s and 90s. Back at university we looked at some of his papers, very technical stuff. However what was inefficient 20 years ago is probably not anymore today. I would be careful building an investment strategy on such older theory. Nassim Nicholas Taleb goes into a similar direction and has more up to date books, maybe he could be helpful too for a new staretgy.

At the moment I am not spending my bitcoins. The bitcoin price finally bounced back above 50,000 USD, selling now my coins seems wrong. First I want to see a new ATH before considering to use my bitcoins for any purchases. I kind of stopped spending any coins once bitcoins went above 20,000 USD last year. Before that I used bitcoins regularly to buy and sell CSGO skins and to deposit and withdraw money for playing poker. The problem is just that once you buy something for coins you have a fixed price in your head and as soon as bitcoins rise higher, I feel like I lost something. Right now I don't want to do the same mistake again. Better to hold and buy in the future.

At the moment it seems very unrealistic to have humans life on another planet. Maybe in a hundred years it will look different but even if we could fly to Mars and back, the first people going there would be astronauts and scientists. We just started with commercial space flights for the super rich. The flights are short and of course all inclusive. When it ever comes to inter planetary travel we will probably see similar setups, you have to pay all costs before on earth. And if there was a need to send money to another planet the information would be send with light signals, it's the fastest way.

I wouldn't say so, you are right that many casinos use crypto currencies these days. But there is also a lot of other businesses who use crypto currencies as a way of payment and investors who use it as form to invest or just to store money outside of the FIAT money system. Cryptos are a fast and easy way to deposit money and withdraw it from casinos. There might be a small boost coming from the gambling industry, but saying that it is all because of gambling is wrong. If there were no online casinos and no gambling I believe that there still were a lot of people invested in cryptos. The bad image of cryptos doesn't come from gambling, it rather comes from criminals who steal cryptos or misuse them to launder money. Gambling is just a form of hobby for most of us. If you like gambling in pyhsical casinos before and switched to online gambling because of the pandemic I would say that it is normal and nothing bad about it. And if you never gambled in your life and are just here for the crypto currencies that it is good too, no reason to start gambling now just because you own some cryptos.

I am not a professional crypto trader, but I worked with stock trading in the past and tried myself with arbitrage trading in the past. There are 3 points that caused problems for me and ended up not being so profitable. First of all, we need to take fees into account,since we have to buy and sell at the same time we have to pay fees twice. Secondly, how fast can we react to the arbitrage opportunity? Arbitrage is an inefficiency of the market and will only be around for a very short time. There are other traders looking for the same thing and might react faster. Or it was just an error by the seller or buyer and they quickly cancel their order again. And the last issue I faced was how reliable the trade actually is. I was in a situation where I saw cheap bitcoins bought them instantly and sold them again, just to find out that the buy trade was not being fullfilled and I was left hanging with a sell order. Nonetheless there are arbitrage opportunities that can turn a profit.

A crash in the bitcoin market would be disastrous at first because it would trigger a world wide sell off in the alt coin market as well. Investors would likely lose confidence in all crypto currencies. But we have seen this in the past and know that it is only temporary. Bitcoins like most other asset classes move in cycles and it is just a matter of time for prices to bounce back. Taking a loss with some Humor is a good idea. We shouldn't worry so much about short term losses as long as we make money in the long run. A crash also has some positive things, it gives us a good price to buy new bitcoins. A panic sell is usually when a lot of investors want to sell and don't care about the price. It's the perfect time to get cheap bitcoins.

Inflation is the favourite tool of countries with high debt levels. Instead of looking for ways to save money or cut down on government spending, you can just make the current money less valuable through inflation. This makes your debt also less valuable and easier to be repayed in the future. An inflation target of 2% is a good way for countries to not end up in downward spiral of excess debt. But staying above this target for too long is not good for the investors and people with some form of savings. Eventually inflation has to come down again. I don't think we will see higher inflation in the next few years. The pressure is already rising on the government to start raising interest rates again. Also commodity prices tend to move in cycles, it's just a matter of time for energy prices to stabilise again.

I agree with you, HODL is still the best strategy for the average investors. Sure skilled traders will make bigger profits, but if we just hold good crypto currencies than we will profit if their long term price increases. Both for alt coins and bitcoins HODL became my favourite strategy. You don't have to stay up to date to the market every day. As long as we can identify the big bear and bull markets we are fine. For me crypto currencies are like a savings account, if I have spare money I will add it to my portfolio and only if I really need the money I would consider selling some crypts again into fiat money. There is a difference between people who only look at crypto currencies as a way to make some quick money, and people who actually believe in it and think that it will be the future of money and how we send and receive money.