Not a big surprise that they majority people here on the forum trust Bitcoins over their banks. After the 2008 financial crisis with the collapse of several big banks I am quite careful when it comes to storing larger amounts of money at the banks. I am still required to use banks every day for my transactions, because I get my salary in FIAT money and also have to pay my bills in FIAT money. Our whole economy is based on using banks and quite a few stores are stopping to accept larger amounts of cash. Before the covid pandemic I only used to pay with cash and leave my debit card at home, but now it becomes harder and harder to only rely on cash. It would be nice to switch to only use Bitcoins, unfortunately most stores still don't accept cryptos. I do get a lot of scam mails every week from my "bank" which wants me to open suspicious links. But since my bank has their own App, I would never receive such legit emails directly. From crypto hackers I didn't receive any emails so far and I am trying to be cautious as much as possible. Banks are definitely not as safe as Bitcoins, my solution for that is to spread my money out across multiple banks and never rely only on one bank.

No I don't think I have a gambling problem. Even though I have been enjoying casinos since I am 18, I wouldn't call it a problem. Gambling for me is not my main focus in life and I can still control my spending habits. My finances are okay, my family knows about gambling activities and my mood is good after I finally managed to quit smoking and cut down on my alcohol consumption. Looking back at my younger days it's crazy how much money I spend during a night out on the weekends. Comparing 200 Euros for food and drinks in one night, to spending the same in a month on gambling is an easy to choice to me now. Especially when you have the chance to make a profit in gambling, whereas going out just gives you a hangover on the next day.

This is a tricky question and I would only consider it for a few good of my friends and even then I feel like it's not a good idea. In the past I got asked by friends for money for gambling and I normally don't have an issue with it, as long as I am getting paid back later. Participating on the potential winnings of my friends doesn't seem like a good deal, because then I could be just gambling myself. When I go to our local casino with my friends, we only take cash and leave all credit cards at home. This is the best way for us to make sure we stay within our limits and don't spend more money than we are comfortable with it. The only issue is if you go broke early in the evening you can't gamble anymore at all. Which is when you start asking friends for a small loan. In my opinion, this should be always small amounts to only give a few more bets at the minimum bet size. I had never any issues with it, because my friends will pay me back no matter what. Gambling should be financed through our normal job, where we can save some money each week and use it for our entertainment.

I fully agree with you, we should never be gambling at our job. The risk is just way to high that a colleague or our boss will find out about our other activities and we will have negative consequences at work. At my company we are not allowed to even check social media from our work laptops. There is some websites being blocked and there is also some checking on the internet history by the IT department from time to time. In case you really want to gamble during a long day at work, you should limit it down to your breaks at least. And even it then it seems not right, to just gamble for 10 minutes before going back to work. Why not wait to finish work and relax in the evening where we have more time and don’t face nay issues. For me the number rule of gambling is always going to be: Only use money that you can afford to lose.

Yes, I still have a demo account and use it from time to time to check strategies and also have a live watchlist. Demo accounts are free and in my opinion everybody should use them to get better at trading. When developing new strategies and trying out new ideas we tend to focus on past data and analyse it as much possible. Finding the best possible strategy for historic data is good, but it's no guarantee that the future prices are going to follow the same pattern. When testing new ideas, I would recommend to have some historic data test and also some live testing in a demo account. Before putting money into our new strategy, we can let it run for a few weeks in our demo accounts and see how well it performs. Also, in the demo accounts we can make small changes to our strategies without paying transaction fees directly. For me demo accounts are a free tool that I try to use as much as possible.   

Investing 100 USD per month in Bitcoins as a student is totally fine and you shouldn't be giving yourself a hard time about it. Since you don't have any income yourself and fully rely on your parents to take care of you, it's already a lot to set aside 100 USD for investing. I assume that is the money you could be spending going out with friends during the weekend or go watch a movie, have a nice dinner, etc. So, cutting back on your personal expenses to start building a crypto portfolio is fine and should lead to some decent long term profit. Don't worry so much about missing out on the next bull run, because there will also be the next bear market around the corner which will send prices down again. Crypto markets always tend to move in cycles and you will find another good time to invest in. Focus on your studies and then you can buy much more cryptos once you graduate and have a well-paying job. Another thing could be to find a student job that gives you additional income without impacting your studies. That additional capital you could be using to buy more Bitcoins per month.

Of course, the sea piracy is not only helping the pirates themselves, but also the families behind them and with all the new money they get and spend in their country this will also help the government. When it comes to the countries where they pirates are based, there is usually a lot of political turmoil and no stable leadership. Small factions fighting against each other and also relying on sources of income that are usually either selling precious resources or like in this case sea piracy. The insurance sums the pirates can get for these large container ships is huge and will be life changing that makes up for the risk they take. Just recently the whole pirate issue got worse again when the Houthi rebels from Yemen started to attack ships in the Red Sea with missiles. It's one thing to try and steal the whole ship, and something else blocking sea routes by attacking container ships. In any case the response is very costly as either several military vessels need to be dispatched, or the ships would have to take longer routes. 

Tricky question, I think that going with Bitcoin is the key at the moment to take advantage of all the upside potential that will come with the halving next year and all the new BTC ETFs being created. The question of course now is when another price jump is going to happen. So far, the Bitcoin journey in the last few months has been awesome and it's hard to say if the short term trend is going to continue like that or if we are seeing a price correction before the next bull run. Which is why I would probably prefer to use the DCA method to invest my BTC, but not with 100 USD per week which is too low. To invest our 10,000 USD at 100 USD per week, it would take us close to 2 years to get fully invested in Bitcoins. The weekly purchase rate should be better around 400 USD, so that we would be fully invested after 6 months. 

This is a good summary of the difference between trading and gambling, but I think you can get entertainment from both of them equally. Both trading and gambling can be done freely whenever we feel like it. There is a difference between building a long term crypto portfolio where we don't need to do much trading and can enjoy watching our balances grow, and a more risky short term portfolio where we need to be more active and trade regularly. The big difference between gambling and trading is that with gambling there is no coming back of a failed bet. Once we place our money we quickly know if we won or lost, there is no in-between. This can be entertaining if we win, but once we lose all our money this is devastating. In trading we still own the coins and don't need to sell at a loss, there is still a chance for the next bull market to recover our positions. So, for small amounts gambling might be more entertaining, but for large amounts and our savings I would always prefer trading and building a large crypto portfolio.

While it’s true that the average person can get access to crypto currencies quickly and without much restriction, I wouldn’t say that someone without financial background can get access to endless liquidity. Why would anybody lend money to a person he has no information about, if he could pay back that money? We need money to build up a crypto portfolio and in most cases that money would come from our job which is likely being paid in FIAT money. I agree with you the in capitalism the majority of people are not going to become wealthy, but so is the case in all the other economic system as well. In communism or a dictatorship, it’s only a lucky few people who hold the power that will become rich over time. The majority of people are just going to work all their lives and not become rich. The real question would be if there can be a system were everybody is rich or at least living a life without hardship. Theoretical it might be possible, but in the real world there will always be people trying to take advantage of others and accumulating all the money they can get their hands on.

The gambling industry is a very lucrative business, especially for online casinos it's quite easy to create a new site without much work and since you don't need a lot of staff or other operating expenses, I can understand that people would like to run their own casino, because they think they will make a lot of money quickly. In the end it's up to us gambler to decide where we want to spend our money. For me personally I would always prefer to gamble at a well established casino that has been around for a longer period of time than a completely new casino. I like to check reviews from other users as well and for any new casino I am a bit sceptical how legitimate the first reviews are.

This weekend the BLAST Premier World FInals 2023 are happening with some nice matches coming up. NaVi played a good tournament so far and managed to reach the semi finals facing Vitality. I am hoping their initial struggle to get used to CS2 is over and we will see more high performing NaVi like in the good old days. They managed to beat G2 and ENCE to reach the semi finals, but lost their first game against Vitality 2-0, which NaVi is the clear underdog today. Vitality with ZywOo seems like the stronger team and I will put my money on them to reach the finals. The other match today is going to be FaZe vs MOUZ, where I will put my money on FaZe. They are clearly the strongest team at the moment in CS2 and I think they will be playing the final tomorrow against Vitality. MOUZ is a strong team as well, but they lost their last 2 matches against FaZe during the CS Asia Championship. So the final tomorrow could be a mirror of the BLAST Premier Fall Finals where Vitality beat FaZe 2-0. Vitality looked really comfortable in that finals and I think they have a good chance to win the tournament this weekend. 

Reading the full terms and conditions of casinos can be really iresome and I am not doing it anymore. In the past I used to spend a lot of time reading the full terms and conditions, but now I am more relaxed about it. It feels like most casinos have very similar ToS and T&C that I can only focus on the important things. For me the most important part is about withdrawal and the bonus programs. I want to make sure that I fully understand how the withdrawal process works so I don't face any issues later on. Same goes for the special promotions for new customers, it's important to reading the small parts about how to claim the bonus and to take full advantage of it. The more money we want to deposit at a casino the more time we should spend on the terms and conditions.

   


While this is a good advice for future traders to have more experience than spot traders, I would also recommend to not wait too long if you really want to give it a try. In case you are having a strong opinion about a project it's good to take risk and invest in it. Using futures always means to trade with leverage, as we have larger positions than our money would actually buy us in the spot market. This increases the risk a lot of trading, but also gives us much more upside potential. Waiting for the right time to buy and sell is going to make us a lot of money, and futures is going to increase that. We can spend a lot of time waiting for the optimal opportunity to enter our trade, which we need to take into consideration. In economics everything is about opportunity cost, we should do the same in trading. Our time has a value and if we spent too much time not doing any trades and just overthinking the market, we could be earning money in different ways. So, if we really want to try out futures trading, there are demo accounts where we can get familiar with the new assets and also try out strategies before using our real money. 

      

No I am not really wrapping up my gambling sessions, because they sometimes are quite short and I don't want to spend more time than necessary with it.  prefer to just quit gambling when I reached my goal, or lost my gambling limit for the week. Instead of thinking about my gambling session or making a summary of the evening, I rather spend 15 minutes watching some youtube videos to clear my head. There are other ways for me to clear my head and clam down after a long gambling session. Taking a shower or doing the dishes why listening to some music helps me to forget about the evening again. Especially after a long poker tournament where I get close to the final table only to get knocked out before making any real porfit, I need some time to clear my head before going to bad. It's hard to make a fixed schedule for gambling, because there are so many things that come up without notice and I just try to find the time whenever possible to gamble. In the end it comes to whatever works best for people, some want to make a quick and clear break, where others want to wrap up their session to wind down.

How do you come up with these minimum wages? 3500 Euro minimum seems like a lot to me,    so even the most easiest cashier job without any work experience or school/university requirements is making 42,000 Euro per year. This would likely push inflation higher again and many smaller business would struggle to even pay such kind of wages. In my opinion over regulation from the government in the labour market is not a good idea as it will limit business and reduce employment in the long term. The same goes for the regulating the whole economy, like rent, energy and food prices. Why would the government be able to set better prices than an open economcy that is based on supply and demand? A landlord that wants to rent out his aparment for a certain price, might think twice about doing any refurbishment or investment in the property if he can't get his desired rent income. Also there is no guarantee that the prices set by the government will actually be enforced. In high demand housing cities where there are almost no flats available, the tenants could try to pay a higher rent in cash than actually allowed, just to be able to live closer in the city center.

It's nice to help others and the first step should always be to teach newcomers about the risks and benefits of crypto currencies. Helping people to understand the goal of crypto currencies is going to make them see the long term benefits and why everybody should atleast hold some coins. Which would also be the next step to help others with doing their first purchases. Right now crypto prices seem quite high, but if you don't own any coins at all you are not going to profit of future price rises. A small purchase to start the crypto journey is fine and will teach a lot about the process of crypto trading. Which would lead to the third step we should teach others, the safe long term storage of our coins. It's important to choose the right wallets and store the keys properly.

I would say this is a risk everybody face after a longer session of wins. Getting used to make a profit in gambling could make us feel that we earned and deserve it and that it's going to repeat itself all the time. This is unfortunately not the case as all the games are independent from each other, it doesn't matter if we won or lost the round before, our chances are going to be the same as every round. Which is why we should be having a strategy before gambling on how to react after winning and losing. The two big mistakes are chasing loses, where we spend too much money in an effort to try and turn a bad night into a good night. And the second big mistake is to not quite while we are ahead, gambling to too long for our win to turn into a loss again. The best solution for me here is to take a profit whenever I make a big win and save it for another day instead of using that money to keep gambling with more that same night.

This probably depends on the severity of the gambling addiction. For a serious case where someone has struggled quite a while to lower his gambling acitivties I would say that cold turkey is the best approach. Having failed several times before to stop gambling is a sign of a serious issue and that a new approach should be tried. In my opinion there is a difference between addictions from substances like alcohol or drugs and a gambling addiction. One type is something that our body got used to and there will be severe reactions when we don't take the substances anymore. That is why there are so many different type of drugs to try and reduce the effects of stop taking the serious addictive drugs. With gambling and other addictions that come from our brain, it's better to break the cycle we have going cold turkey. We need to find a way back to a daily life without gambling, maybe then after some time we could slowly start to gamble again without falling into our old patterns.