Exactly. The OP can't do math, yet keeps telling others they're wrong. eh.

I agree with the OP. I don't know why so many people automatically assume that halving mining rewards would double the price.

Personally I think this is where bitcoin will prove whether it'll succeed or fail. If it doesn't get past the halving, it'll fail. If it does, I think it's very unlikely for bitcoin to fail afterwards. And I'd certainly be willing to take any amount of loan to buy as much bitcoins as possible then, if someone offered to loan me money.

This is also false. The distributions are not the same, even though the end effect is the same.

Consider one family with a 1.80m tall father, 1.60m tall mother, and a 1.70m tall son. The "expected height" of the family is 1.70m.

Consider another family with a 2.00m tall father, a 1.60m tall mother, and a 1.50m tall child. The Expected height is also 1.70m, but obviously the distribution is different.


It's the same thing with gambling strategies. The EV is the same, but distribution is different. In the case that you want to win 1BTC and EXACTLY 1BTC, no more, no less, with EXACTLY a 7BTC bankroll*, there are two optimal routes**:

1. Bet all-in at high odds
2. Martingale with a BASE BET of 1BTC.

These result in the same odds for earning exactly 1 BTC. Any other variation of the martingale would result in a lower chance.

*Any difference in ANY of the variables would change this conclusion.

**There are possibly other routes that would arrive at the same % chance, but these are not within the topic of martingale vs all-in.

You're still not understanding me. I don't know why you guys don't understand such a simple point.

Martingale with 0.1BTC as the minimum bet does NOT YIELD THE SAME RESULT as martingale with 0.2BTC as the minimum bet. So to say that "martingale has an X% chance" is wrong.

Either you're confused yourself, or you just didn't express yourself properly.

Expected value factors in risk. Expected value includes everything. You aren't better off under any strategy, they're all the same.

What changes is the distribution of possible outcomes. With bets of smaller amounts, you have a higher chance of losing smaller amounts, but also a higher chance of winning lower amounts. With larger bets, you have a higher chance of losing larger amounts but also a higher chance of winning larger amounts.

That's all. There's no "better". It just depends on the individual's definition of "better".

Actually, if you were really to truly work on faucets every single day non-stop for a week, say 8 hours a day, you can make quite a bit. Not as much as a job, but it's probably more than you'd think.

I would guess that you could make about $1-1.5 per hour with faucets. So 56 - 84 per week, ~0.23 - 0.35BTC/week.

This involves NOT wasting ANY time at all, so you can't lose focus, go to the washroom, drink a cup of whatever, etc.

I'm not misunderstanding you, you're misunderstanding me. Your calculations are wrong, because martingale doesn't give the same probabilities for different starting amounts.

Your calculations are wrong. How did you calculate this?

The thing is, with different martingale systems, the result is different. For example, is your starting bet 1BTC? Or 0.1BTC? Or 0.01BTC? Or 0.5 BTC?

The probability of obtaining a 1BTC win (and only 1 BTC) is different in each of those scenarios.

So I just got the inspiration from the OP. Well, let's see what would happen if we tilted the chart about 40 degrees?



Wow, it looks like we're going to the moon!!!


*Not mocking the OP, just thought this would be fun*

You guys need to stop being bitcoin cultists and look at this objectively. Using bitcoin gives 0 benefit over fiat to the vast majority of people. Instead, they'd have to pay fees to exchange it, and to transfer the bitcoins to their own wallet, then again when they're using it. If I withdraw cash through interac, I don't pay anything. I don't pay anything extra when I'm paying the merchant either. With credit card, I can pay on credit. It's also extremely easy to use.

Why would I spend the effort to obtain bitcoins? The answer is that there is no reason, unless you're a libertarian bitcoin cultist. Seriously. Stop saying "You can obtain bitcoins by doing this, this, this, this, this, this and this". I can obtain fiat without doing all those steps. I get no benefit from doing those steps. Why should I do it?

Again, whether something is complicated or not depends on what that thing is/does. spending 1000 hours working to become an olympic champion is easy. Spending 1000 hours working to buy an Aero bar is extremely stupid.

You clearly are not getting the point. Are you willing to drive 3 hours, give out all your personal information, wait for confirmation, just so you can buy a more expensive and shady knock-off of an Aero bar?

Is it "that hard"? It obviously depends on what you're trying to do. For that amount of effort, if I could cure cancer, cure old age, and earn a billion dollars, yeah, it's not hard. For a freaking bitcoin? Of course it's complicated!

Uh, no it isn't? I'm a Canadian citizen, but I'm in China right now. I can buy food, or clothes or a laptop or a tv or even a house. But I can't buy bitcoins, because I need all sorts of proofs, phone authentication, etc. I don't have any of the services you mentioned above (except swift through the bank), so I'd have to register for those and then register on local bitcoins, and then find someone who is trustworthy enough, and somehow make them trust me. And even then, the closest people on localbitcoins to where I am now is an hour away. And I'm in one of the largest cities in China. That's not "really easy", lol.

For a normal person, if I can just get cash through an atm or pay with a credit card, why would I bother spending so much time and effort and fees to get bitcoin?

But people have lot a lot of money through internet scams. If you think about it, bitcoin scams are a part of internet scams as well.

It's quite sad, seeing as the people with the technical know-how of how to hack these systems and remain anonymous would probably be able to start very profitable legitimate business that benefit the world.

Bitcoin certainly isn't that complicated to use, but it's quite complicated to obtain/buy.

Other than things like love, street food in Asia is a good example.

We always compare bitcoin with the early personal computer, or the early internet, or the early automobile or electricity. We say how there were many people who were against these inventions, but they ended up changing the world. These were the success stories.


How many such potentially world-changing technology did not make it past that stage? Is the success rate really 100% or close to it? On one hand, that seems to be possible, given the world-changing nature of it. But if a potentially world-changing technology didn't get past a certain stage, most of us would have never heard of it anyway, so we don't know that it failed.

It's kind of like how we only hear of the successful entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, but in reality many more fail.

This question brings two discussions.

1. If the success rate of world-changing technology is actually not that high, can we really be confident that bitcoin will pull through? Of course we're under the assumption here that bitcoin really is a world-changing technology.

2. Are we, as humans, potentially hundreds of years behind where we could've been, had all the potentially world-changing technology became mainstream? Maybe we'd be all living lives we can only dream of now. Think of how many great opportunities you missed in your life, and how that would've changed your life. Perhaps those missed opportunities are completely insignificant compared to the missed opportunities of man-kind. And it's not like how we don't yet have the technology to create a perfect AI, or cure aging. Rather these are opportunities that could've happened. Someone really developed it, but we, as humans, simply failed to see the benefits and threw it away.

People who are trying to use the current price of bitcoin to answer the question clearly lack reading comprehension and common sense.

Oh my god thank you so much! I have never seen such concrete and unarguable proofs in my life! This is without a doubt the truth.

actually there are professional gamblers... they're called casinos.

And of course there are poker players as well.

Even if banks have a worse reputation right now than any other point in history, banks in general still has a better reputation than bitcoin. The current bitcoin doesn't provide a practical benefit for the majority of the people.

No, they don't give about centralization. I never said they did. You're falling into the logical fallacy of assuming the converse is always true.

Your point that humans are lazy is exactly the point I was trying to make.

I also agree that it's not the only selling point. In fact, I would say it is the biggest disadvantage and obstacle in an otherwise great technology.

Look, I think you guys are misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying bitcoin will fail. I'm saying if people keep thinking that bitcoin will succeed without anyone doing anything because decentralization is so freaking amazing, they're being delusional. For bitcoin to succeed, there needs to be thousands or tens of thousands of people working hard to make it more usable, more secure, and bring benefit to the average person. It won't succeed just because it's decentralized, and there is a long and tough road ahead. It's not hard for banks/governments to make the media write negatively about decentralization and telling people they need banks and the government, and given how stupid/lazy normal people sheep are, they'll just believe it without researching anything themselves.

It's a really tough road, and we should be doing all we can to get it going, to make it go mainstream, if we really believe in this technology. Because it's not going to that by itself.