Crazy that still some people believe Bitcoin could be dying. It's nice to see that we are on the similar levels to 2011 where people expected Bitcoin to die and not anymore close to the negative year of 2017. Bitcoin has been around for so many years that I feel like there shouldn't be any more negative people trying to push against crypto currencies. With the BTC price ending 2023 of likely above 40k USD we are in a real good shape for 2024. Maybe some websites just try to get attention and want to make some flashy headlines, but why not talk about potential bear market? Talking about Bitcoin death is way too extreme is never going to happen. Even if 90% of the Bitcoin investors would leave the market, the price would never drop to 0. There will always be a few HODL investors never giving up their coins and holding on to the Bitcoin dream.   

   

Trading is something that has been around for hundreds of years and I would say it's even part of human’s nature. Not everybody owns the same things, so people need to come together and exchange their assets for people to get their things they want. As part of that trading there will always be a winner and loser, even if the difference is only small. Making a profit in trading has been a profession for a long period of time. Back in the old days, before planes it was the merchants that would sell part of their ships to investors that want to make a profit. That profit is based on the risk involved, as there is no guarantee that profit is going to be paid. Evaluating that risk and making sure we remain profitable over a longer period of time is difficult, but I would never say it's a Ponzi scheme. As long as we are learning from our trading mistakes and make sure that we don't repeat them it will be alright. There is no trader in the world that is 100% correct with all his trades. As long as we achieve a 55-60% success rate on our trades we will be fine. Also, there is no real alternative to trading and investing, because the savings account will never make enough return to offset the inflation rate. 

Volatile times are when there are the best investment opportunities. It doesn't really matter if it's stocks, bonds, real estate or crypto currencies. Large changes in price means that some investors are going to lose a lot of money, whereas others are going to make a big gain. The main difference between real estate and other assets is we usually have to use debt to buy a property. Once there are large amounts of debt involved we are stuck with the interest rate for a few years, but that will change eventually  over time with the Fed decisions. The high interest rates are going to turn a lot of new property deals in a loss and there will be some cheap deals to be made for investors with enough capital. It's all about the willingness to take the risk of buying when everybody else is selling and vice versa.

With hindsight it's always easy to make the best possible investment decisions, but we shouldn't be too hard on ourself. The past is gone, we can't bring it back and shouldn't be felling bad about it. We need to remain realistic, look towards the future and learn from our mistakes. For me there is a clear difference between money for saving, trading and investing, and money used for gambling. Investing is to build a large portfolio over time, save money for retirement and have money for emergencies. Gambling on the other hand is for entertainment, I am not going to mix the two and try to avoid thinking about missed opportunities. It's like calculating how much money I would have saved if I didn't go to restaurants and only prepare cheap meals at home. There will always be situations where we could have saved more and used that money differently. Now putting debt on top of everything things will be much worse. I would never use debt for gambling or investing, better to first save the money and spend it, not the other way round?

This comes as a bit of a surprise to me, why would casino owners prefer to create a new business instead of promoting their current casino more? If you already have a well established casino with a well known brand that it's unnecessary to create a new business. Many gamblers are cautious when it comes to new casinos and would prefer to stay at a website that they are used to and know that is reliable. Wouldn't it make more sense to run new promotions on your existing casino than to create a new one? I can understand that different countries have different regulatory requirements, so you might want to have one casino for Asia, one for Europe and for the rest of the world. Keeping everything separate makes it easier for the regulators to give the necessary licenses and if there is some issue not all the business is at risk.

That's exactly the point, if someone is used to gambling and places bets regularly before owning his own company, than he will probably keep doing it. There is a difference between money we earn through our work and how are we going to spend it. Just because someone owns a casino doesn't mean he doesn't have things a likes to do for fun. The advantage is also that the owners know exactly where there money is going and even if you lose your bet, you will end up with higher profits in the company. Tax wise it doesn't make sense to use taxed personal money to gamble with, because we would have to tax it again if we take money out of the company. But if you had to choose to bet at your own website or at the competition, I think most people would prefer their own.

What? How do you come up with this stuff? First of all there is not going to be a war between Europe and USA. Why should there a war between western countries when the tensions are high between the middle east, China and Russia? There are so many big wars more likely than a USA vs Europe war. Secondly, why would central banks be buying bitcoins and other cryptos? It might be the case that the people lose all their trust in Euros and Dollars and would start buying cryptos. But once the price sky rockets I don't think it's going to keep attracting more investors. Also a war is never a permanent situation, eventually the war will be over and things will go back to normal. A price of 1bn for BTC seems unrealistic, even with high inflation for a few years.

All of the major companies rely on bonds to finance their operations. For the last 15 years the companies got used to cheap money, paying only 1-3% interest on most of their debt. Without the debt market there would be a huge issue for the companies to create new projects and invest in the future. The problem companies will face now is to roll all their existing debt into much higher interest debt for the next 3-10 years. This is going to put a lot of pressure on the financing department and will likely lead to some bankruptcy. Which is why the Fed already stopped raising rates and will likely lower rates again. If the whole economy is suffering the politicians will demand lower rates again, even if this means rising inflation again. The alternatives for us are bitcoins and gold, but gold is already at the ATH, I am not sure how much upside potential is left.

Sticking to sports betting and learning everything about our team, the league and the big tournaments will eventually give us an edge and should make us long term money. Everybody needs to decide for himself how much money he is willing to risk. Having a fixed budget in relation to our monthly income makes a lot of sense and I would only consider gambling more if my income or my bankroll goes up. It's all about statistics, because the more we gamble the closer we will get to our expected values. This doesn't mean that we can't get lucky and get a big win. It's just that the number of gamblers achieving that is very small, similar to the number of gamblers getting a big loss. The majority of gamblers will land in the middle of the distribution, either getting a small win or a small loss.

I never bet on virtual sports and will probably never do so in the future. For me it's all about betting games that I enjoy watching myself. Betting on something that I see, follow or watch the highlights after seems wrong to me. This probably also comes down to that I only bet on sports that I follow regularly and watch. In university I had a few friends that where all about fantasy league sports games and would actually bet money on it. Somehow it never interested me, because there are already so many different live games happening each week. It's also makes it harder to control our betting history if we bet on a wide range of games.

1. Yes, I definitely read casino reviews and try to get as much information as possible about new casinos. In case it's an older casino where I have been playing for a few years without any red flags, then I am not too worried about a bad review. Because there can always be a person that lost large and wants to say something bad about the casino. So, for me reviews are mostly important about new casinos that I never heard about.

2. Yes, some casino reviews are useful. When it's about new features or new promotions that I haven't heard about. Also, reviews that warn about delayed payments or issue with the support staff are very important. Any red flag that could lead to serious issues down the line could be a problem.

3.  A casino review should contain all the parts of the casino, how are the games, how is the process to deposit money and withdraw it again, how many promotions are there from time to time, how is the support staff and can you quickly to talk to person when there is an issue.

I think casino reviews are a bit tricky, because we don’t have any verification that all the claims are true. When it comes to the internet people can claim a lot of things, without being accountable for it. That is why we should try and read as many reviews as possible, because the more people share similar experience the more value we can put on them.

I have been gambling for so many years that is hard to tell which of my character traits are coming from gambling and which not. I would say that everybody changes over time depending on the things they are doing. The real question would be now if the changes where good or bad. The whole topic of anger came to me at a much younger age, probably around 12 years of age when I started gaming online. Especially when playing Dota or CSGO I got a lot of frustration after losing and needed to learn how to cope without getting angry so quickly. Which is probably why I never got angry later when I started gambling. Something that I learned through gambling and which helped later when I started to trade, was how budget my gambling money. Building a long term bankroll is very important especially in poker. Playing too quickly at higher stakes tables can lead to going broke during a losing streak. It also helped to work towards a long term plan and get some patience.

I think it all comes down to if you can trust someone or not. If a good friend for example tells me about his gambling experience and he mentions that he was lucky and won a good amount, then I definitely believe him. What is there for him to gain by not telling the truth about his gambling endeavours? In case I would find out that he was lying then our friendship would probably be over and since I know most of my friends for more than 10 years, I believe they will tell me the truth. And then there is the complete opposite, where strangers online sharing their gambling experience. If I don't know someone than I would be very cautious believing in how well they are gambling. A lot of the people on the internet are only after attention and in many cases don't earn their living through gambling directly, but rather the advertising people watch to follow the so called "influencers". 

It's true, there are definitely two types of debt, the good and the bad. I would make the classification a bit different, bad debt is the one that we use for consumption. It doesn't provide any additional value for us except a quick boost in consumption, but it won't make our long-term outlook better. The good debt on the other hand is going to create income and returns in the future that will make our situation better. In most cases I think that debt is unnecessary and should better be avoided, but there are also situations where using debt is unavoidable. For example, when buying a house or apartment the majority of people will be unable to make the purchase from their savings alone. For such a large purchase which we only make a few times in our lives we need to use debt. The debt in such a case should always be consider in relation to the benefit we get from it. With our own apartment we would save on paying rent which we then can afford to pay back our loan. So, we should be only using debt if we get something from it and if there is a benefit in the future. The only exception would be if we need money for a medical treatment, health is everything and comes before money.     

This would be one way to exclude yourself from gambling with your current balance, but what about just depositing new money? I have been in a similar situation in the past where I tried to reduce my gambling size and it was hard to control myself. What has helped me a lot is to drastically reduce my bankroll and really force myself to only stick to that size I can afford to bet with. There were a couple of setbacks when I added new money to the account, but over time I got better at controlling myself. I think this is something many traders and gamblers will have to learn. Another feature many casinos added is the panic button, which let's the gambler log out instantly and even lock the account for 24 hours, 7 days or 1 month.

Not really, I like to see what is happening and closing my eyes or looking away doesn't feel like it's going to impact my luck anyways. In the past I had issue where I was playing scratch cards and threw away a ticket where I thought all my numbers missed. But actually, I didn't fully scratch away all numbers and I misread the winning numbers. Luckily my friend double checked my ticket out of the bin and I won 20 Euros. After such a mistake I am now always triple checking my numbers, to make sure I am getting all my winnings. The only person that I know that seems a bit superstitious is a good friend of mine and every time he places a bet in Roulette he turns away and doesn't look at the it. He is also the only person that I know that won betting on the 0 couple of times already, but looking at the wheel or not doesn’t make a difference. Doing so regularly will just tell our brain that we have influence over the outcome which isn’t the case.       

Don't focus so much on the moment, FOMO is always going to be an issue if we focus only on the small picture. It's better to take a step back and look at the whole story. We should remind ourselves where the bitcoin journey started and that it's not going to end any time soon. The bitcoin price had such a good last few months and seems to be holding his gains quite well. After the jump above 40,000 USD I was a bit afraid that many investors would take profits and dumb most of their coins. Luckily this wasn't the case and investors believe in higher prices in the future. There will always be a few people that need money quickly and will sell there coins when there is a good opportunity. For me, I would try to look at the bigger picture. We are still far away from the ATH, there is a lot of upside potential left in the market. Also, the halving is coming up next year putting more pressure on bitcoin to rise. On top of that is the economic outlook for 2024 not that great, if there are issues with economy or another crisis, people will have to put their money someone. Selling stocks seems like the instant reaction, but cash is not attractive with the high inflation and gold is at it's ATH. Crypto currencies and especially bitcoin seem like the only real alternative.

No, I would argue against high liquidity meaning high volatility. High liquidity means that there is a large number of buy or sell counterparts that would fill my order. It's not only about the number of traders, but also the quantity of traders. It could be that there are a lot of small buy or sell orders that would be filled by one single large trade and taking out all the liquidity from the market. Just because we can trade small amounts of cryptos all the time doesn't mean the exchange could handle a large order as well. Volatility comes into play when there are news coming out that have a big impact on the markets or economy. For example, the slow down of central banks to keep increasing rates means that risky assets become more attractive anymore. Many investors already expect rates to fall again next year to support the economy. When bonds and savings accounts don't offer interest rates anymore, investors will go back into stocks and cryptos. A constant rise or drop in prices doesn't mean high volatility, that comes from people taking profit and tryinh to get out of the market. Liquidity is people's willingness to trade and volatility is uncertainty and short term noise in the market.

Question 3 is a clear no for me, I will always gamble within my means and not spend more than I can afford to lose. I can't understand people that would gamble and recklessly, it just doesn't make any sense. Let's you are profitable at sports betting, why would bet more than you can afford. Just wait a few months and build up your bankroll from your winnings. And if you are not profitable then any additional spending will just increase your losses. As for the profit, I don't have a particular profit that I am aiming for, every win is great and I appreciate it. My focus is more on the risk, I want to avoid losing large sums of my bankroll. My bankroll depends on the type of game I play, for poker I have 500 USD and I only withdraw when I go above 1,000 USD. For sports betting I usually stick to 100-200 USD, except if there is big tournament then I might bet a little more.

   

I fully agree with you, having a mindset that focuses on growth is much better than a fixed mindset. The world is evolving every single day, new technologies are being developed and new products are being invented, which brings the world forward and we need to go with the time. It's so easy to get lost in time and think that the world hasn't changed much, but once you look at a review from 10 or 20 years ago, we see how far the world come in such a short period of time. A fixed mindset assumes that we learn everything important in school and university and after that we don't have to learn anything new anymore. Which is obviously wrong and will lead to us falling back as the world moves on. Standing still during a forward moving world is like going backwards, we should be trying to learn something new every month and go with the time. For that we need to a dynamic and growth mindset and not a fixed one. Once we become older and go towards retirement it’s fine to switch to a fixed mindset.