I bought ripple 2 times. At first it was when it cost about half a dollar. I then sold it soon, when the price went up to $1, making a 2x profit on very small bankroll. But then I was stupid enough to buy it close to ath at $3 per coin! When the market crushed, I didn't know what to do and thought the situation will resolve itself in like a couple of weeks. Since then this very expensive ripple is still mine and now I don't really feel like selling it, unless one day the price goes up to $100 or something (crazy, I know). I do think it can reasonably skyrocket back to ath, because it is not a dead project, there are serious banks supporting the technology. The tech seems great, transactions are fast and centralized, so it is kind of a compromise between govermental control and cryptocurrency ideology.

My country has a population of about 40 million people and is called Ukraine. While there are tons of local crypto exchanges, some draft laws on full crypto legalization and some events on cryptos in big cities, it is hard to say how familiar people generally are with bitcoin. Fortunately, I managed to find some researh conducted to know how many Ukrainians know and use cryptos. The results are astonishing. According to a poll made by Kantar TNS Ukraine (TNS is a very solid thing, I guess), only 3% of those people who were asked about cryptos never heard of them before and 72% said they know what cryptos are. 13% of people admitted to own cryptos!  There were 1000 people aged between 18 and 55 who participated in this poll. 88% of those who have cryptos have bitcoin, 25% bitcoin cash and 18% litecoin. Source (in Ukrainian): https://www.the-village.com.ua/village/business/news/273185-skilki-ukrayintsiv-volodiyut-kriptovalyutami. Yeah, even though my country is not too known in the world, cryptos are very popular here. From time to time I can even see local stores accepting payment in bitcoin here.

I would agree on that and also add that IMO tokens are usually representing something else as securities of a kind. ICOs mainly have tokens that allow to perform some part of their project or something and investing in it is like investing in the project itself. Coins, on the other hand, are more like the name 'cryptocurrency' suggests. They are used to pay for things (including payment to buy tokens).
While most of tokens probably are the erc20 ones, there are some created on Waves, Neo and pure Ethereum, so the erc20 thing is always a token, but a token is not always built on erc20. Token is just dependent on any other platform.
They are indeed often confused, but I can't think of anyone saying 'bitcoin token' or 'ethereum token' when talking about these coins. At the same time, it seems more common to call tokens 'coins', because the latter sounds simply more general.

A lot of people start gambling, because of having problems in their real lives. Feeling lonely, they seek company of people who are going to understand them instead of pulling them out of society even more. Land-based casinos are attractive, because you can be offered champagne and be comforted by others if you lose a lot. As online casino cannot possibly do the same thing, life chat is a nice alternative. At least one can talk with people this way. Come to think of it, I guess it would be a good feature of online casinos that require ID anyway to send some very expensive beverage and/or food to those who lost, say, over one bitcoin. It would not really cost much for them, but might cheer up unfortunate people a great deal.

Pending withdrawals are terrible, but is it just about withdrawals, or do they scam people? From your previous experience, they did send you the money eventually, right? And at least they responded politely here, so I hope the issue will be resolved soon. This casino's reputation is very confusing. On one hand, there are some good reviews and people saying they enjoy using it. On the other hand, there's so many comments from people who couldn't withdraw their money (and yet nobody can be sure, maybe the amtter was resolved later, but people didn't bother to mention it). A lot of people say they are waiting to withdraw money for weeks: https://www.bestbitcoincasinos.net/websites/cloudbet-com/!! And yet the official account has an even slightly positive trust...
CryptoBrainy, please tell us how this matter resolves. I certainly hope that you will receive the money soon. If you are risking a big amount of money, you can set negative trust to the Cloudbet account until you get your money back. IMO, it would be fair enough and will provide a good motivation for this casino to give you your money back asap.

Lightning cannot solve the problem, but is rather a way of postponing it. The problem with transactions is generally a problem of blockchain. Finding blocks becomes more difficult and time-consuming, and the more transactions occur (and that's a natural process of coin's adoption), the more expensive and long it takes to perform one. What can really be a game changer IMO is the DAG technology. It actually works in an opposite way with transactions getting verified faster and cheaper (when the price is even there) when more people are in the system. Why? Because all of the users give some of their computing power for this process, thus making it work and in a way paying for transactions.
Anyway, cheap transactions will not circle out even other blockchain cryptos, because it's not just about speed and price. Many projects are far more than a decentralized platform and they will leave as a way of monetizing some business. Moreover, bitcoin is simply not good enough for some things people already got used to. It's impossible to create smart contracts, lauch ICOs or create tokens.

During better times, I experimented with $10 worth of btc 'bankrolls' on different exchanges. I tried buying and selling small amounts of coins. While being interesting and possible, it didn't bring me any luck and I lost most of the money (well, it's still in coins, so maybe one day I could say I won it. Exchanges like bittrex and hitbtc have low trading fees, so trading doge could be perfectly easy there IMO. Yet other people might be right that withdrawal fees might be too high in comparison with a small amount of the invested money, which might make such experiments useless. And yet I really doubt that the fee for withdrawing doge will be significant anyway. You shoulkd explore policies of different exchanges and choose the most suitable one for you. Trading experience will be useful anyway.

As a matter of fact, it's easier to find famous positive predictions with btc going over $25k in 2018, than famous pessimists. W. Buffett is pretty negative about bitcoin, he keeps saying it's a useless thing, because it's not representing any real product in contrast with stock. I couldn't find any specific price predictions made by him, though. I also found this Nouriel Roubini economist guy who said back in February that btc will go down to zero. This guy is pretty serious, he has a Harvard Phd degree in Economy and there's an article on CNBC oh his 'noted economist's' views, and yet we all know how wrong he is probably going to be. I choose him as my famous pessimistic guy.

Well, while bitcoin is and may continue to be the king of cryptos, blockchain is not just about cryptocurrencies. It is a way to form a database with chronological changes with elements and inability to change the state of a specific element on a specific stage. It should not necessarily be a way of monetizing projects. Blockchain can be used to store data on characters and objects from an rpg, weather forecast, banking information etc. The tech is actually pretty universal and its application number is limited mainly by our imagination. People focus on cryptos and bitcoin specifically, but it can also be something extremely different from that and yet not less awesome. So surely blockchain can part ways with bitcoin and move forward, expanding from cryptocurrency usage into other areas.

I chose the first option, because if bitcoin is going to have a higher purchasing power than right now, then not many coins are needed after all. If btc doesn't get massively adopted, holding a lot would make no sense, since one won't be able to actually use it. I don't understand what's the reason to possess a lot of btc. The more people possess small amounts, the more decentralized the system is. And besides, if we want cryptocurrencies to be considered as money, we should not own any of it for long. Money is not created to be stored. It is designed to be in constant circulation, exchange for actual goods. If it is not exchanged, it isn't even there in a way, because a person with a dozen of bitcoins might forever live a poor life, never using the savings and then probably dying without anyone knowing the password or private keys.

Why when I see threads like this do I always get this feeling that those members who replied before are working for the thing advertised? Cryptassist wants to have debit cards for users, but I bet these will be useless if they don't get an agreement with mastercard or visa. If they are planning to burn the coins, I wonder who is going to lose them? They would either burn the coins of users and I don't think the latter will be happy about it, or the team will possess a crazy amount of coins and will basically regulate the market, thus giving up decentralization. the tech they use is getting more and more popular these days, while being mostly known from IOTA and Byteball. Let's see if they manage to overcome this problem with DAG that a lot of users are needed for transactions to get checked.
Oh, and a quick question about a thing I might have just misinterpreted: I read on their website about an approximate supply of 75 million coins with maximum supply of 88 million. When I googled their token, I found this disturbing info on etherscan, showing possessions of more than 10 billion of this tokens already: https://etherscan.io/token/0x111c5980cb9df2305e1c0c702062829d86b3faf7!!! Any comments?

Ethereum has fallen a victim of a general negative market trend, which is now still due to SEC postponing decision. However, there's also a specific reason for eth's drop as well: ICOs selling it. I read in one article, than since 26th of July Atonomi sold 12k eth, AppCoins 4k, OpenLedger 5400, Status 4800 ethereum. This means that no serious reason for the price falling was out there. Eth just probably returned to the price which is not hyped by ICOs and thus actually got cleaned. I think that buying now is a very reasonable action, but maybe it's better to see what the next fork will bring us and whether people will not start abandoning the coin along with miners.

This can surely happen and, as others said, it is already moving that way. But this is very wrong and we should wish it won't be this way. We currently have fiat and all the governments are trying to keep the track of how much money is circulating out there in comparison with goods that can be bought with this money. But all this money is fiat, of course. Cryptos are forming a huge market which is not taken into consideration by the govs. With time, there are likely to be more shops accepting btc and more safe ways of transferring btc into fiat. Let's imagine a citizen X, who supposedly has about 700 euros per month. The gov thinks about stuff this person can and cannot afford, some social help he/she might be eligible for etc. What the gov doesn't know, is that apart from 700 euros salary, citizen X also earns about 300 euros in bitcoin each month, or has a couple of btc in savings. Anytime, this person can just spend this money, while the amount of goods stays the same and this person is not supposed to be able to buy some stuff he/she actually buys. Now, if that's just one person, this is totally not something to care about. But what if in country Y each third person has this unaccounted income or savings? This can crush the country's economy, cause inflation and crisis.
That's why, even though both cryptos and fiat can stay, they should not exist parallel, but should be both equally acknowledged and considered by the governments. Underground economy is always a risky thing to allow and neglect.

I agree with others that the impact on the crypto market is probably insignificant if it's even there, but the usage by country might get affected. In Ukraine a major national currency devaluation occured 3 years ago. Dollar used to cost 8 hryvnias while the current price is pretty stable around 25-30 hryvnias. There are literally dozens of crypto exchanges into hryvnias here and I'd say a lot of young people at least heard about cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Analyzing the number of users per country is close to impossible due to the whole decentralization thing with bitcoin. I also looked at legal status of btc in the countries the op mentioned, but there are both crypto-friendly, rivals and undecided ones there, so I got nothing from that small research.

This website is brand new, so if you want people to try gambling here, you probably should offer some welcome bonus, set a faucet or at least provide a 'free' mode, where everything works, but without any money. And I don't see any roulette or even a roulette table with options to place bets:.
Is it supposed to be this way, or some graphics is just not displayed on my computer? And also "You acknowledge that winsbit.com virtual currency is not redeemable for any sum of “real-world” money from us at any time", so once money is a specific crypto is deposited onto the website, you can't even withdraw something different from 'winscoins' or how does it work? And why is there such a limited (and fixed in USD) number of options to deposit money? Why not to set a minimum and maximum amounts in each accepted crypto instead?

I believe the situation is different if you bet with 50/50 probability on both. Let's talk about betting on red and black. Say, you think blacks are going to win and you put 10 dollars on black. At the same time you put 5 dollars on red just in case. You spend 15 dollars. In case black is the winner, you get $20 or $5 of pure profit. I case red wins, you get 10 out of initial 15 dollars back. So, you either win or lose 5 dollars. If you only put 10 dollars on black, you lose them when the outcome is red, but win 10 more if the opposite case. The risk is higher with one bet and I kind of makes some sense to put money on both to lose less. There're some roulette strategies, but I believe that eventually you come to this rare case when something keeps going wrong and you lose everything, just like with martingale.

I also came by bitcoinstrip as a formerly nice website on casino statistics. I didn't manage to recover any pages through webarchive, but I did found some info from it, which actually appeared on this forum in 2016 in a screenshot format, posted by the bitcoinstrip account: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1523281.0. I also think this article is very useful for the subject of your interest, because it analyzes previously accessible info from this site. I don't think there's much good info for you to look at, but maybe if you contacted the new (or old) owners of that website, they would allow you to work with their old stats.

This is a bad idea, mate. You want to give people money and then take a solid amount of it back in case of winning, but, as others already mentioned, it is likely to lead to people scamming you. However, you could avoid it by investing into some top poker players or sport betters. And yet I still think it's not worth it, because letting others to manage your funds you are just trying to avoid responsibility, while de facto still staying responsible. If you are not willing to take the risks yourself, maybe gambling is just not for you. Others should not feel guilt when losing money, because it kind of was yours. And you are not to blame anyone but yourself. If you still want to do it, at least don't give the money to anybody, but choose successful people instead. Check out website like this,  this or this to get the general idea about this option. I got them from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubg0HS3_hO8.

Where do you take these numbers from? Are there any specific examples of coins with such marketcap and that number of employees? And it is also very important, how much was put into promotion and development of a project, because if the capitalization is 10 million and even more was spent on making it happen, it's a complete loss. And besides, it's not like this bunch of people owns the coins, so they probably don't have anything close to 10 million anyway. Surely, though. sometimes it's hard to believe, how much money do some projects cost. I think that the capitalizations are truly unimaginable, I guess people overinvest a lot. But not just in cryptos, since, looking at the marketcaps of top stock companies, I can see that they also have huge caps and 10 million would be nothing.

Let's create a comparison between similar cases to see if Hotbit token is promising. The funds on Hotbit exchange are summing up to 20 million dollars, while Binance has 1.2 billion dollars. HTB will be something like BNB on the respective exchange, so we are talking about a pairing token for trading. BNB's initial price was about 10 cents and the top price was as high as 24.5 dollars, which is 245x more (goodness me, I never noticed how much this coin skyrocketed!). The question is whether 40x growth can happen. Hotbit is financially 60 times worse than Binance and if the growth of the domestic token's price is proportional to the money traded, then we are not likely to expect growth above 4x. It's still very good, but 10 times less that the op is asking about. Of course, the exchange might become more popular and the token's price might not be in such correlation with funds, but I'd say it should be about right, if only not less in favour of HTB.