I'm not really sure that gambling is for people to make money unless we are talking about professional poker players and their likes, or any other games which apart from luck also involve a certain amount of skill. Chance games are about entertainment only, and if you somehow come to think differently, it may cost you dear. Regarding casino owners caring only about  their pockets, isn't that as true with respect to casino players who equally don't care about the pockets of casino owners?

If you are after money, gambling is the last thing you should be looking into

There is already such thing in existence today

It is called on-chain betting and used by decentralized apps (more specifically, decentralized casinos) running on blockchains like TRON and EOS (not sure about the latter though). All bets (and consequently all seeds for the rolls) are written on the blockchain and bets can be checked and analyzed for provably fair anytime. In other words, they are truly guaranteed to be fair, and there is for a casino to skew the odds n their favor above and beyond the official house edge (or how it is called there)

Obviously, it is not about people who bought Bitcoin

As it is more about those who mine it, i.e. miners, and I'm very skeptical about the costs of production anywhere close to 19k or even 13k. Indeed, it costs money to make a bitcoin but if the production costs are around 5k on average (which is an accepted figure), then at prices over or around 10k miners can only sell 1 bitcoin out of 2 mined and still remain profitable en masse, while keeping the second bitcoin to themselves (which also adds to price growth)

You could in fact use martingale for that

But your profits won't be anywhere close to 1% daily. If you really want to bet on the safe side with martingale, your profits will be infinitesimal. If we take into account the limits imposed by the casino (like the max bet amount and intervals between bets when autobetting), you will be earning around one millionth of your deposit amount (for example, by using doges). It is really not worth it

As always, the devil is in paying precious attention to detail

Do cars appreciate over time? I'd rather say no unless you have to wait like 50 years till some exclusive models obtain real value. This is definitely not what car manufacturers want. But is it the same with miners? Again, I should say no as bitcoins do tend to appreciate over time and in less than 50 years, so it does actually make sense to keep at least some of the reward and not sell it in its entirety. Long story short, your analogy is heavily flawed, up to a point where it stops being an analogy at all

It really depends which side of the trade you are on

If you are massively shorting, then falling prices will be a godsend for you. But that's the whole approach to short-term trading as you ride the wave irrespective of its direction, either on the way up or on the way down. So it is not like short-term traders specifically who should be complaining as all they need to make profits is nice price swings and solid volatility (pardon the oxymoron). And we have had enough of those recently to make short-term traders happy. It is a flat market which makes them anxious and nervous, embarrassed and frustrated

You likely meant to say higher, right?

That is, there are (were) only 129 or so days when today's price was lower than in those days. Obviously, that refers to the period of the recent spike to nearly 14k as well as the period in November through December of 2017. But this is a ridiculous approach since somewhere near the end of 2017 it could be said that Bitcoin had been profitable throughout its entire lifetime (up to that date)


This train of reasoning is not far from suggesting to ride a time machine and get back to 2010 in order to buy up thousands of bitcoins for pennies

Yes, we got it

But how did you get 129 days which were not profitable for Bitcoin? Bitcoin had been sliding down since January 2018 till February 2019, i.e. for more than a year. The way you put it implies that your base period (on which you calculate the financial outcome) is one day. But in that case Bitcoin has seen more losing days than profitable ones simply because price typically rises fast (actually, extremely fast) and then spirals down excruciatingly slow, like for weeks and months (and in a couple of cases, for years)


That still doesn't account for 129 losing days. In fact, it can be useful but we need to know the methodology used in order to make something tangible out of this information

Let's just hope that Trump gets kicked out from the White House in 2020

Regarding using the IRS to reshuffle old tax payments, isn't there a 3-year limit within which they can do that? Or it depends on the kind of income and the reason for rechecking, like money laundering or whatever? I don't know as I don't live in the US but I remember reading something like this. For example, in Russia any income not taxed within 3 years basically becomes tax-exempt due to the tax limitation period

Okay, I will try to explain

If you don't eliminate TT, then the correct proposition should be as follows: with 2 flips we have 3 chances out of 4 to get 1 or 2 tails, which would match sequences HT, TH, and TT. Put differently, getting exactly 1 tail is not the same as getting 2 tails with 2 flips. 2 tails in 2 flips violate the proposition of only 1 tail in 2 flips

And while we are at it, it is the same with heads, i.e. 3 chances out of 4 to get 1 or 2 heads, which is HT, TH, and HH. It may look like we have total odds exceeding 1 but that's because sequences HT and TH match both propositions (i.e. they are not mutually exclusive). In simple terms, in this case you can't sum up probabilities

In the next 2 flips your chances to get 1 tail are the same as to get 1 head and equal to 0.5. You have 4 possible outcomes with 2 of them having 1 tail - HT, TH (the other two being HH and TT). The outcome TT has 2 tails, while its probability is the same as for 2 heads (HH) and equal to 0.25. In other words, 2 tails is a different outcome than 1 tail in 2 flips. Basically, you are trying to exploit the tendency or weakness of human beings to answer a similar but different question, i.e. not the one asked (an easier one, for the record)

You may want to try again


You will have a hard time to prove that unless you implicitly assume the outcomes are not independent while the odds are changing in the process

The probabilities are the same

Statistics refer to past data, and technically they can be any, especially if the sample size is small (the infamous law of small numbers). Probabilities, on other hand, refer to future outcomes, i.e. they do not exist for what has already occurred (but they can be obtained from the past data, given a large enough sample). So in terms of probabilities HTHTHTHTHT is as likely as TTTTTTTTTT (or any other combination of heads and tails), at least as long as it is 50/50 for both tails and heads. Simply speaking, it is exactly about mathematics, not actual outcomes (which you seem to imply here by "facts"). Otherwise, the odds are not 50/50. It is an accounting identity of sorts, which you can't possibly get around


I don't understand what this chart means

It doesn't mean anything

They can use a whole arsenal of indirect methods to hurt Bitcoin if they really wanted to (and they do). Obviously, fighting Bitcoin directly may be counterproductive (it's like banning the law of gravity), but I wouldn't be overly optimistic about their real intentions. In short, if they can kill Bitcoin, they will do it without thinking twice, ever, as it is a competitor to the dollar hegemony (what your post is about). In this manner, a war against criminals using bitcoin for illegal activities is in fact a war against Bitcoin itself

You don't specify one important condition. More specifically, you don't specify the exact order in which we are going to see 5 heads and 5 tails. If we are to see them in an arbitrary order, i.e. just 5 heads and 5 tails in 10 flips, then you are correct. Otherwise, if you actually mean a specific order (like HTHTHTHTHT), then the probability of seeing this sequence is the same as seeing 0 heads and 10 tails in any order (which would always be TTTTTTTTTT, of course) as outcomes are independent of each other. I guess this is the source of your confusion

Or maybe you mean something else

Talk is cheap, show us the money

I assume that in this case he should first prove that he actually owns so many bitcoins and only then turn to threats of selling them all. Until then, whatever he spits out should be taken with an 800-pound bag of salt as all his words have been just empty threats so far. The longer he reiterates his hogwash, the less weight what he says will have. But personally, I think he is already well past the point where he can still be taken seriously. Long story short, nothing to discuss here


What we are dealing with here is an attention whore and drama queen

You say that reputation is not worth anything (in terms of creditability), I say that it is, so let's just agree to disagree. A bank can't sell someone's reputation but it can definitely ruin it


I didn't in the least change my mind

And even in this very thread I repeat what I have been saying for years here, that banks don't need deposits to create new money. But that doesn't mean that banks create money as they see fit in a completely arbitrary fashion. They create money based on demand for money, i.e. through credit. But since most loans require collateral in one form or another, this newly created money is a collateralized form of money. I could even go as far as to say that reputation is also a form of collateral in this day and age (probably even a better one in certain respects)

I'm no longer sure about the blink of a second

Nowadays, it is actually more like hours than seconds (let alone a couple blinks). Third party fees are also irrelevant here as miners are that third party anyway, so under these circumstances it is the size of the fee which ultimately counts. But in this department Bitcoin doesn't shine either. Regarding Bitcoin's effect on the economy, it is greatly exaggerated, and if the role of a devil's advocate should be played to perfection, this effect exists only in the minds (read, imagination) of Bitcoin holders. As you can see, banning Bitcoin in its entirety will turn out mostly unnoticed by the wider public

Well, let me try playing a devil's advocate here

Indeed, knives can be used for anything other than being kitchen inventory, including a murder weapon. But you can't ban knives because their home use (other than homicide, obviously) by far exceeds their other uses. Thus it is out of the question as entirely impractical. Further, some varieties are actually banned from possession unless you have a license (e.g. hunting knives and anything looking more like a sword than a knife). On the hand, banning Bitcoin will not have a lot of side effects and unintended consequences apart from a bunch of nerds wining and crying over here and over there. Simply put, banning Bitcoin is not a big deal

Reputation is everything these days

According to Robert Greene, reputation is "a treasure to be carefully collected and hoarded", which you should guard with your life. In fact, it has always been so, e.g. outlawing someone was considered a pretty severe punishment in the past. I feel certain that many people who defaulted on their loans would prefer to keep their reputation intact (represented by their credit history in today's world) and rather have bank taken their property

The bottom line is that it remains to be seen what is more solid here. And personally, I'm strongly inclined to think that reputation would win. That's basically why banks don't need to have the rights on any tangible assets transferred to them as losing reputation through a default will have more devastating consequences. It can be said that bank loans in the form of a credit card are already collateralized by the borrower's reputation


You'd be surprised but I cited this article as early as 2016. But that doesn't deny or defy the facts that a) banks have deposits, b) loans are typically collateralized, and c) those which are not may come straight from these deposits

Either way, in fact, any of these three ways, banks don't create money completely out of thin air

We don't know what is going on behind the scenes right now

It may look and feel like really pathetic (well, it definitely does) but it is not us who they (Bitfinex) should be afraid of or whose opinion care about at the moment. If you look at it with this perspective in mind, it may make sense after all, given they have a hearing on Monday (if I'm not mistaken), and a judge, or rather the judge, may find it totally appropriate. Once again, we don't see the whole picture, only minute details which make no sense to us. But it doesn't mean that the whole painting is as meaningless