It depends on how close you two are because you can either help or not. I honestly don't know what I'd do.

I find the situation a bit funny though since he found a bug in the casino and is trying to scam them to get back the money he lost and despite knowing that bug and taking money from the casino, he's still down a lot. He won't make it. Even if they haven't noticed what he's doing, they will by the time he gets everything back and block his withdrawals, so he can try but I think that he will still be at a loss when dust settles.

Someone once said that people make it look like a water flooding a dam. It slowly begins to overflow and then water breaks through and destroys everything on its path. People are just like that. They get poked by the price rising and they're always -nah it can't be real, it's not it, I'll wait a bit longer. Price rises a bit and pokes them back again and it repeats and repeats until they finally say -fuck it I'm buying.

Remember how the Wall Street Journal said that bitcoin is dead and all the investors who got in like Saylor and Bukele are regretting it? Just look at them now.

IMO whatever the future brings we're long past the times when people waited for bitcoin to correct back to 1k, 3k, or 10k. If you haven't bought sub 20k, you're not going to.

I second that. If OP isn't full of shit, why not disclose the brand? It's only going to work like a sneak peak and give you free promo for the interview. I'd read/watch that for sure, especially if there was a chance that my questions are asked.

What stuff is important? Probably the basics like how much money do you need to have a chance in this business nowadays? How many people try to scam, what's the percentage of scammers they catch and ban every month? Were they scammed/cheated somehow and what was the amount of money they lost to scammers?

I could make up a lot of interesting questions that would keep someone busy for hours

I have a question to all the people who go to these sites, but it will probably remain unanswered: why do you do it? What makes you interested in these shady sites. What are you trying to achieve?

Don't google a site to invest, ask here, or go to review sites and pick the ones that have legit reviews and that people recommend. Don't take reviews for granted though. Don't be like "oh, 5 stars, this must be good, here's my money." Be cautious and if you're not sure, send a few dollars there, see if they allow you to withdraw, how much does it take for the deposit to arrive, test them out.

Isn't the 12th that is important here? It's the day of the dump.


The only numbers I mention are the amounts of BTC stored and the value of that BTC in dollars - totally on topic.


The blue bar of your chart that represents GBTC is around 605k mark on the 13th, while the combined is close to 640k, showing that the holdings of GBTC fell down by ~15k and somehow out of the blue the other ETFs accumulated additional 20k BTC which is... yup over 2x what GBTC had sold.

But it doesn't fit your rhetoric, right? Even though you chose this chart yourself and then proceeded to bash ETFs like they're nothing, just sending money between themselves and the fact that half of their income doesn't come from GBTC is nothing, let's ignore it and move on.

No, experience has nothing to do when it comes to being allowed to gamble or not. In fact there's no way to check it. It's like you were demanding driving experience before someone can buy a car. That person could've passed their license 20 years ago and never driven and they will still be able to buy a car and drive it out of the dealership.

A casino won't ban you even if you're mentally ill because they can't confirm it. You'd have to mail them scans of your psychic evaluation or something.

That's correct they most likely wouldn't do it because they want you to spend your money. They are not a charity and they aren't going to protect you if you don't protect yourself.
This means that you can have almost any pattern of financing your habit and you can be losing 90% of your games and they'll still let you play there.

Some f you don't understand that often you don't lose money to the casino but to other players, like when you play at a poker or blackjack table. Usually someone wins and your money goes to that person. THe casino has its fees and it makes money on that, so it doesn't care if you win or lose, as it will always make some money as long as you keep playing.
It's a bit different when you play against the house, but we're talking about casinos in general here and in general you have higher chance of being banned when you're lucky than the other way round.

Let's say we ignore that bitcoin goes up in price and focus on other things. It increases your standard of living by being unconfiscatable. Nobody can take it from you unless you allow for it to happen, by giving up your private keys and wallet passwords. Nobody will know you own bitcoin unless you admit it or get clumsy and do KYC.

You can go wherever you like with your bitcoin. They won't take it from you at the airport or when you cross the border and you don't have to ask for permission to spend it.
Don't know about you but I call that a better safety and a better life

Not really. If you look closely, you can see that GBTC held 620k up to Jan 13 and then 605k on Jan 16. The largest dumps took place on Jan 12 and 13. In that time GBTC exchanged only 15k BTC.
At the average price of $45k that's only $675 million.

This is confirmed in a few articles like this one, where the author shows that on Jan 12 GBTC sent coins worth $200m to Coinbase, so sending 600m in 2 days seems to add up.

According to various news sources, including pretty decent ones like Reuters, combined inflows of all ETFs in the first 3 days neared $1.9 billion.
BlackRock was leading the way with 1 billion in volume on its first day of trading, although this number includes GBTC, which according to Yahoo Finance had a volume of 474m on Jan 12 and 399 on Jan 13, but this is both buying and selling, as some of it is people converting from Trust to ETF, which makes sense again if the other  numbers are good. $675 m in outflows and (873-675) $198 m inflows into their ETF
https://www.theblock.co/post/272123/blackrocks-new-spot-bitcoin-etf-tops-1-billion-in-big-first-day-of-trading

The same source shows Ibit at 1B on the first day and FBTC $483 m, so these two alone bought ~1,5 billion dollars of bitcoin on their first day and on that day GBTC sold ~700 million.


I really don't see how less than 50% is "most" and I'm generously assuming that all of the unconverted coins on exchanged by GBTC on the first 2 days of January was sold OTC directly to other ETFs, which might not be the case.

As for miners, Check when the miner supply started dropping. It was exactly before the launch of ETFs, so they were selling into the FOMO, on 10 January and later, yet it did not cause a serious drop in price.
Also, the drop in supply held by miners in January was AFAIK the highest in the last 12 months, so what proof do you have that they did not sell to ETFs? ETFs acquired 50% of their coins in the first few opening days from someone else than GBTC, so who might have that much coin in stock? My guess is miners, which coincides with the supply drop in January.

For those interested, GBTC supply can be found here

I'm a loner, so I talked about it within my small group of friends and 3 of them got into bitcoin. 1 of them became "big." He has lass than me but still a very large sum in fiat terms at current price.
One held for 2 or 3 years and hard to sell because he had a child and needed money. He had less than 1 bitcoin but sold in 2021 half way through the bull run. There's also a third guy who also bought a little in 2019 and still has it stashed somewhere.

I've never tried to push anyone to invest because investments like to jeopardize friendships. That said all the people who listened to me made a lot of money and I never heard no from them. People who I talked to were always suspicious but curious. Never in denial like some traditional investors on social media.

I'd probably move out West to be as far away from Russia as possible, preferably at least 10k km, so maybe Spain or Portugal?
Other than that I had no need to live and I'd rather spend my money here, but the EU is becoming a really strange place set for both being eco friendly and producing firearms and other war supplies, so I don't know if I'd stay if I had a lot of money.

The US used to be one of the best places to live, but not anymore. Australia and Canada are crazy when it comes to civil right and government control, so I honestly don't know where I'd go. To a desert island I suppose.

This is tricky because people will often ask you about bitcoin and if you own some and I like to talk about it because bitcoin is a part of my life, my hobby, so I want to talk to people and share what I know.
In a discussion it often comes to them asking so you've been around for a long time, how much do you still have, or how much did you have in year X and I want to tell them because it's a part of this narration that we all used to have a lot but we didn't value it as much as we should have.

Anyway, I understand what the problem is with telling people how much you own, but at the same time when you don't say anything it's going to cut the conversation short because most people will feel like you have too much and are afraid to talk about it because you're a millionaire. I had people ask me if they should buy, if I'd help them buy, how much to invest and it always ended bitter because I didn't want to get involved.

Not true. If you look up some stats, it's actually miners that have been holding bitcoin when it was below 40k sold the ETF news on Jan 12. There's a chart showing coins held by miners, you can look it up, and that decreased by a lot in January, while before that it was growing for months.

For an institution to buy OTC there has to be someone willing to sell OTC and if they're willing to buy over 1k BTC they're not going to contact normal people like us, but mining companies who have the supply to satisfy their demand.

Also, GBTC sells using spot bitcoin exchange, while BlackRock and others buy OTC, so your theory of GBTC selling to BlackRock doesn't hold. If this was happening we wouldn't see such a large negative pressure in January from GBTC because they'd sell everything OTC to other funds.

IMO even without the US Europe would be able to protect itself from Russia with ease and it's not like the US would sit this one out if Russia attacked. They are helping Ukraine and they would help if it was Finland or some other country. They'd use this opportunity to weaken Russia.

Lets face the numbers though. The EU without any help from the US has nuclear strike capabilities that Ukraine does nowt, so Ukraine was an easy target for Russia, but EU countries are not. Furthermore, combined forces of the EU have both more modern ground and air forces than Russia, even if Russia had full support of Belarus, which it won't have because the citizens of Belarus do not support this war and would be against any aggression towards the EU, unlike Russians who largely support the war.

In case of a RF-EU conflict Putin would be on his own, with maybe North Korea at his side. China would not jeopardize its good relations with so many countries, so it would not help and the only way Russia could have a chance against the EU or NATO is with full support from China, or if it used its nukes because that's the only thing Russia has more than the EU.

You know you're in a bull run when someone makes a thread about bitcoin touching a price and a few hours later the price is above that level.

What can I say, we've been in a bull run since January.
There are diferent metrics people use, but usually the most important ones are:
-price reaching consistent higher lows
-staying above 200 WMA
-being above 50% of ATH. For me it's the final confirmation, as usually we don't do that until the beginning of a new bull cycle.

Their goal is to attack bitcoin from every angle and you have to realize why this is being done.

Biden doesn't understand bitcoin, this is too much for his old head, so he's given up and allowed "his people" to do what they want in this matter. These people struck deals with banks who want to slow bitcoin as much as possible. At first the goal was to ban bitcoin, but all the attempts to do so were stopped early. Their latest failed achievement was an act that was supposed to make all the wallet providers assign addresses to names of their clients, which was so ridiculous that it exposed their true intentions and lack of knowledge. It's of course impossible for wallet providers to make clients disclose their private information every time they make a new address and if introduced such act would mean that no wallet software would be available for US citizens. Unless... that's exactly what they wanted. They knew how this works and wanted to slip a ban through the Congress, thinking that not enough people will notice what it really is.

Time is running out for Biden and his team of crooks though. The awareness is rising among politicians and there's no way they can get the majority to ban wallets or mining in the US at this point.

Just like what Putin is saying is one big lie. He keeps lying every time he opens his mouth. I just can't listen to Russian propaganda because it's so far from reality that they aren't even trying to fake it. It's just like they're telling you the Earth is flat because it is and whatever argument you give them it doesn't matter, it's flat. Even if you took them to space they'd still say it's flat.



In other words: Russia is not the enemy, even if it knocks on your door with a barrel of a gun. Just open and it will all be fine. We'll come in, take what's ours, because we don't take what isn't ours
This is the moment when we bring up videos of Russian soldiers breaking into homes, stealing fridges, and toilets, it all belongs to them after all, right?

I'd also like to remind Vlad that his soldiers were murdering unarmed civilians by shooting them in the back of the head, just like it was done in the Soviet times by NKVD. They also castrated some of the POW's and I know a confirmed case of a soldier who committed suicide after enduring such torture from Russians. These words by Putin are meant to be an insult. He's not trying to stop the war, he's spitting his enemies in the face by saying that he did not attack them, they attacked themselves by provoking him.

The main fault in the way people see it as inflation hedge and then get surprised by sudden ups and downs is that people who trade stocks also trade bitcoin and treat it like a stock, or a commodity.
If all stocks and commodities get hit by central bank's policies, so is bitcoin because people who invest in stocks get hit and have to sell everything they own, which includes cryptocurrencies.

If bitcoin was limited to being traded by normal people on exchanges and there was no demand from institutions you'd see much less stock correlation, but both average and top price would also be much lower. It's either this or that. You can stay in your little sandbox that bitcoin used to be in when the only exchange available worldwide was Mt.Gox, but then you'd still have low liquidity and would have to convert to USD first before you could buy bitcoin.

Before you come to conclusions like that, try testing it. Choose a casino and deposit let's say $100 and divide it into 2x $50. Log in to a fresh session on a given day and keep playing a raising bet in a pattern of your choice, like $1, $1, $1, $2 and again $1, $1, $1, $2. Check if after a few such rounds the $2 ones were always lost, while most $1 rounds were won. Then take a break, start a fresh session and play $2 all the time for the exact same number of rounds and compare.

I think that you have a feeling that when you rise the bet you lose, but the reality is a bit different. You did that maybe 2 or 3 times and felt like it's a pattern, but it's not.

The question is ambiguous.

What is "more?"
Are we talking about more in terms of percentage net worth or more in numbers? Of course a rich man can and will bet more in numbers than a poor guy because for a poor guy spending $100k in a casino is impossible when he doesn't own that much. When it comes to % net worth it's also pointless to compare because I know poor people who get $100 in allowance every month and they can sometimes bet half of that and if they lose they beg for help. For a rich guy matching that and betting 50% of his net worth would mean some crazy numbers like $10m - nobody bets that much.