The games that have the best possibilities are those that are currently top in the eSports as some people around said. This is becoming really big in terms of market size, with growths that resemble those of Facebook and WhatsApp at its best. DOTA 2 and League of Legends seem to be the most played in tournaments with prices in the range of million USD. Betting should follow and you will no doubt be able to find reputable sites soon if they are not already there. Perhaps having a look at the organisers webs could lead you there.

An excellent game by Argentina. It think they should be paying Barca for leaving Messi in such a perfect shape and well rested after doing little during the Spanish league and letting Athletico win. I guess that Messi gets much more tv time and glamour winning the America cup than winning the Spanish league   Unfortunately, this win does not solve the Argentina perpetual crisis and political problems ... "Panem et circenses" as the old Romans say, that may keep the people happy for a weekend before going to the same old problems.

A joke: Do you know how to tell an Argentinian spy? - Just because he will have a shirt saying "I am the best spy on the world"  

Congrats guys, none of this should be taken seriously.

From a mathematical point of view, this is a very clear case for a rational decision making process  

- Evaluate your chances of being seriously affected by covid.
- Evaluate your chances of getting a nasty secondary effect from the jabs (growing a third arm or getting a trombo).
- Evaluate your chances of winning that lottery.

If you are young, you might choose not to get the jab. If you are old, you most likely want to go for it. The funny thing is that the chances of winning the lottery only have a minimal effect so this is all marketing.

I am sure most of you have played videogames of one short or another and many have noticed that may offer gambling in-game options - I am thinking mostly of Role Games and MMPORGs -  like implementing a casino or some short of fortune game. As an old example, Fallout New Vegas has an in-built game called Caravans, but you can play blackjack, roulette, etc... Newer games that are free to play or cheap to play offer lotteries that award prices such as unique or rare in-game items...

There is currently quite an effort on using these techniques in games that should not be about gambling or chances playing and some people may find undesirable. Is this going too far? What type of effect may this game on underaged players?

You are forgetting about something: mindsets, psychology, philosophy and culture. Even if the "experiment" that is bitcoin fails in economic terms, you have made millions of people more conscious of how money works, what is happening with their fiat reserves and how is actually possible to free yourself from being played with.

Another historic example - many railways went bankrupt, yet we still have them and we still use railways as a means of transport. It was the first time people of moderate means could actually leave their surroundings at a cheap price and discover that there was something else in the world apart from their villages. That changed culture (people of modest means did not vacation before) and made people more free. That is my point, this changes everything regardless of the economic incentives.

My personal opinion about any kind of trading is that if you have anything that remotely works you will not ask this question and you will certainly will not publish a youtube video "showing others how easy it is", etc... (not that you have done, just example). Other than that, it is the fastest way to loosing your money. Most trading platforms have to include disclaimers such as "most of our clients take loses" and the like - you surely get the point. Investing in crypto, as such, is not that different from trading except that you will trade much less. The chances of success are slightly better.

But the main point is something else: investing in crypto should be taken as investing in venture capital. Very high rewards for just a few projects, 100% loss for most and extreme variability in results. The only difference is that you normally have liquidity.

Recent news in various outlets are pointing out to companies in the US that have been victims of ransomware and other attacks not being able to get the help they need to get back on-line. Particularly, hacks that infect software companies that then spread the threats to other companies (as the recent Solarwinds which affected a number of major software providers). In my view, the equivalent to this is to be outnumbered by an enemy army - loosing a war because you do not have enough qualified soldiers.

https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/252494362/10-of-the-biggest-cyber-attacks

Europe & USA are not taking this seriously enough and are not regulating strongly enough the requirements. You may argue that these are private companies, but the fact is that they have an effect on the system creating a "call effect" to further attacks and creating caos in the economy.

Not an existential crisis at all, just the knowledge that existence is finite and that it is nice to know that somehow mine contributed to the future of humanity even if was an atom size contribution. I am aware that most people do not think in those terms and that many will focus their answers in the hypothesis (not the premise at all) that bitcoin could cease or become irrelevant - which is not at all the topic - but I am not writing for them.

I am not being gloomy, it is exactly the opposite, I am happy that ... I am here doing this, and I am happy whether I personally get richer or everything fades. Some answers to the post lead me to think that some people do get the point, others don´t.

Mmm.. more or less. Valuation is not really value, but rather the price that someone puts to having a share on a company or project. Value is the intrinsic utility or the increment in utility over that of the raw components (value added). So the team, the community, the apps, even the hype builds value, but not the valuation.

So I mean that assigning a price to a company or project based only of the highest bid for just a partial acquisition is not really correct, that is irrespective of small or large players.


Certainly, that is a problem in these cases, because many times the buyer includes a clause by which the stock cannot be later sold to others at a lower price.

Me da a mi que con China y lo que llaman "El Gran Cortafuegos Chino", en ingles "The Great Firewall" que hace referencia a la Gran Muralla China como broma, está pensado para que el estado tenga un control bastante potente sobre que se ve y donde. Las VPN por supuesto están bien vigiladas y si son las típicas me da a mi de que ellos las bloquean antes de que tu puedas encontrarlas si vives por allí. No se si hay alguna manera tecnológica de saltarse esto pero incluso si lo consigues corres un riesgo personal importante.

Valuations of this kind must be carefully understood. For example, you call unicorns to new companies that reach a valuation of 1 Billion. That does not mean that someone has actually paid 1 billion for it, as the fact of reaching a marketcap of 1B does not really mean that someone would buy 100% of the project for that price.

How does this really work then? Easy to understand with this example:

You create a company with venture capital. The owners and the team have 100% of the shares and there is no real valuation of the company at that point. Your company is doing great in growth, but, as usual, it is burning through money. The owners decide to raise more money. It could by by floating, IPO or a financing round - does not matter for our example.

The owner manage to get a deal selling 5% of the company for 50M USD. The valuation of the full company at this point, since there is only one deal, is set at 5% for 50M, thus 100% (all the company) is valued at 1 Billion. That´s it, it is "an unicorn".

You have probably noticed that this is not fully true. This means that someone has effectively valued the company at 1B and paid a 5% of the share at that price, but this does not mean that anyone would be ready to pay 1B for it or that other people would offer the same valuation.

This is the same when a project floats a small amount of crypto. The price may get very high if there is not that much liquidity and many people want to a have a bit, but saying that is the real value is a long shot.

Short answer... if US inflation is at 4% and a large part of it is due to commodities and construction goods, prices are likely to grow even more. COVID disrupted production strongly and until things go back to normal there is no way global commodity prices are lowering. This is despite China mobilising their strategic commodities reserves. The fact is that not everything in the economy can be solved by printing massive amounts of monopoly money.

This is not about the governments doing something, it is about the market rebuilding the offer side and that takes years.

It is fairly obvious, but there are people out there that have written 200 pages self-help books and made a fortune out of them by simply stating this simple fact of life: "you can invest your savings. If you ain´t got any, you ain´t gonna invest". (I admit you could argue that you can borrow but still nobody ain´t lending ya if you ain´t gonna givvet baksh).

The basic concepts that will save you a 15 bucks book:

- you invest so that your money works for you. Even if you cannot drop your job, you can still live a bit better with extra income.
- Investing is sacrificing something today to get something tomorrow. This is just a definition. You save x today because you want 2x tomorrow or in year or whenever.
- The first step to invest is saving part of your income. No savings, no future.
- If you have credits unpaid (other than mortgages or other asset backed credits), you pay those first because they charge you a lot.

And from here we could start speaking on how are you going to save regularly, if it is going to be 10% of your income, or 5% or 50%, how are you going to learn about investing, etc...

Many people are arguing that investments cannot be compared. Actually, they can. Bitcoin is relatively volatile, limited, has been around only for a while,... you should compare it in those terms with alternative investments and even with alternative crypto.

I have my own theory about how bitcoin could be considered a decentralised business, but that is just my thinking, what is certain is that you can invest in bitcoin as a network and get returns by investing in mining operations if you whish to treat this as a revenue generating investment. You have a budget and you decide what works best for you. Bitcoin does not provide dividends, as gold does not provide dividends nor orange juice concentrate stock produces anything. If you look to speculate with bitcoin, gold, or commodities is just the same: speculation.

This forum does not seek to convince you of investing in crypto. Its main purpose is to have dialogue in the community, disseminate information and, as a possibly unintended effect, allow business. Having said that, there are good reasons why some of us have crypto, but you need to do some research of your own to find them. I am not here to sell it to you.

If I am getting you right, you mean infinite in time or in value? Nothing man-made is infinite in time. Bitcoin like any other creation will live for a time and then become obsolete, change into something else or simply disappear as everything in history except human stupidity - but that was given by the gods   I understand your question is merely philosophical, in practice bitcoin will last for a period of time, but it may be quite a long period indeed. Being first matters a lot in terms of trust and community and bitcoin was the first reasonably successful attempt at creating a decentralised digital mean of exchange.

If you mean infinite in value... well, just do not take The Simpsons as financial advice. Even if they do not have a disclaimer about it.

Most people in the world do not get the chance of doing anything remarkable in their lives. Many may do things that are significant for them, but usually, chances of doing something that will change humanity, its culture and its way of thinking are remote. People involved in the French Revolution, artists in the Renaissance, philosophers in ancient Athens, ... they did things that left the world changed.

Most of us have some bitcoin. A few have a lot of bitcoin. Just think that for any reason, in 5 years or 10 years, something happened that dropped bitcoin value or made the network unusable or whatever event or combination of events made it impossible to use it any longer. As far as I am concerned, I can say "I was there and, at least, it was something great and I was part of it". When bitcoin fades, the way people think about currency, self-governance,  trust in a system will have changed forever. And you will have been part of it and be able to say "I did something great and it changed the world".

Muy bien expuesto. Además está plenamente respaldado por datos: La UE realizo unos sondeos preliminares para conocer la opinion de los ciudadanos de a pie sobre un posible Euro digital y la mayor preocupación resultó ser... la privacidad. No ya que un estado absolutista o distópico pueda bloquear las cuentas de forma automatizada (creo q en USA las cuentas se bloquean sin mucha dificultad si es tema de drogas), sino q la UE sepa cuando y que compran todos sus ciudadanos en cada momento.

Tal como dices, yo no me fio un pelo de los políticos ... vamos q si les dejas gestionar una lata de sardinas, tienes q estar todo el rato mirando la lata o las sardinas desaparecen.

Being rich comes from many sources, including being born with it, being lucky and being in the right place at the right time. If Bill Gates had been born in Sudan, black and woman he could not have said his famous sentence about being born poor is a a question of luck, dying poor is your fault or something like that. The fact is that there are situations in which there are no opportunities and no matter how many rules you apply, you are doomed to fail.

Anyway, becoming rich, whatever that means to you, is not about following 25 rules or 30 or 10. In fact, some people just do something that works over and over and that works well because they are excellent at executing that plan.

The problem with this declaration is that it encompasses a number of buzz words that also should be interpreted in the right context. Vietnam has gone trough a very expansive stage of their economy in the last years, with massive increases in value to local companies. The government possibly wants to keep up this momentum and use it to attract foreign investment, so all this mentions of bitcoin, crypto mixed with other buzzwords should be an amber flag for people and taken with a pinch of salt.

bitcoin is not really intended to become the "only money" at all. As said by other posters, that it technically nearly impossible, not just for the limitation of the network, but because the mechanism to float the value of goods in different countries is nowadays solved by having all currencies float respective to each other. If that did not exist, you would need to change the price of goods almost every minute in every place.

Bitcoin can however become the dominant way of transferring value for transactions of certain value, across borders, international commerce,... There is no particular need to pay for your coffee with bitcoin as there is no need to pay for it with gold bullion coins.