Now that it has a card, it suddenly worries you? Then I can picture you not ever having an ATM card or a credit card as that will be hackable according to your logic. There probably is going to be a 2FA and/or a pin code when using a bitcoin debit card. We're all about safety and security here.
Yeah, but an app comes with a phone which already costs you a lot of money even when they weren't able to get your coins. Not everyone puts password in their phone. Not everyone puts password in their bitcoin apps. With a card, it will probably have a pin code since it doesn't make sense to not have it.
Probably so that we will be able to swipe our cards to scanners and be able to pay with our bitcoins with whatever we are buying. The total will be converted into how much is it in bitcoins and that will be the amount that will be deducted to your card.
Exactly, but whenever you're using an exchange, that creates centralization right away. Even online wallet creates centralization. There are small circles of centralization happening and people don't really realize that it's happening. They think that bitcoin is decentralized but it's only the ones that aren't in any institutions or third-party wallet/companies.

I've never heard that saying before, "Never trust anyone poor." That's a little wealth-ist. I personally wouldn't trust anyone at all with my money. That's why I keep my money in a place that no one else knows. You can have a friend that's richer than you, but upon discovering that you have a lot of money, he's going to start blackmailing you. It really is hard to know which of your friend is loyal and which one will betray you. Sometimes it's the poor that's loyal and it's the rich that isn't. So don't judge people just because of their financial state.

AFAIK, the hacks happening in the altcoin world is due to the person's negligence such as uploading their private key in some website, mistakingly copy+pasting their private key to a form, or simply saving a file of their passwords somewhere that turned out to be unsafe. It's not a hacker who did the "hack". It's the people's fault and no one else. They just call it a "hack" even when it's not cuz "I got hacked" is way more cooler than "I sent my private key to someone in the web."

It is not 'constantly' connected to the Internet is what you should say. At some point you're going to need to connect it to the Internet because that's what you need in order to send funds to another address. People go crazy over hardware wallets. Trezor devices are so expensive and people really do set aside some money to buy one but I don't see it more secure than paper wallet or a pendrive wallet. It might even be more dangerous because what would happen if someone found an exploit to all Trezor devices.

I really wouldn't rely on such connections. A friendship that is bonded by a bad habit can easily be broken when you decided that you don't like that habit anymore. Sure, you'd find good people there. But your "friendship" can only go as deep. The only shared interest that you guys have is that you are both gamblers. Other than that, it really is hard to find someone who has the same interests as you. If you're gambling for social connections, I'd say go out more with the people that are in the same field as you are. For example, if you are in the fashion industry, go out for dinner with your other fashionable friends and make them bring their friends. Simply befriend your friends' friends that have the same interest. This way, your social network will be a lot more specific. It will be a lot more targeted.

And since you're spending money in gambling just to have social connections anyway, you might as well spend that money to treat your new friend a meal. People really do love it when you take them out for a meal and you say that you're going to pay for it. It's like free lunch is the new social currency.

But the sole reason why gambling is fun is because it's rewarding and the reward comes in the form of money. I wonder, since people don't wanna focus with the winnings, what would happen if we remove money in the scenario. Would it be as rewarding to bet on dice games without the money? Like, you're just going to bet and see if you've bet correctly and then that's it? Will it still be fun? I personally think not.

What's funny is that gambling isn't even contagious. A contagious disease is something that can be transmitted to another human by contact. I've never heard of a story where someone accidentally touched a gambler or drank in the same glass as the gambler and suddenly he became addicted to gambling. Initially, we all had a choice in addiction. You can live in a family where everyone does marijuana but you can be that someone who thought it was wrong and so never tried it.

After watching documentaries about addicts, drugs, gamblers, alcohol, and food addicts, it opened my eye. Those people are simply hurt. They are using their addiction as a way to momentarily escape life. But it's gotten to the point that what they had to cope to was so huge that they had to rely on these vices in order to carry on with life. Girls flirt with men and then leave them just so they can feel better about themselves. Men crash their wive's skulls just because they had a bad day at work. Now, why are we ashamed of the addicts, those who chose to harm no one but themselves?

In order to help someone, you have to understand them. That's why I never really judge people. There's always an explanation as to why they are like that. An addict is more than addict. They are humans who are hurting inside, just like us. They just have a different way of coping with it. Something not socially acceptable unfortunately, that is.

You have to remove the newbie rank for each and every row of the table, not just in the abbreviation.

Done updating my signature.

Our greed roots from the idea that as humans we can become happy when we finally become wealthy. Social media plays a huge role in this. You scroll facebook, you see your friend just bought a house, you see someone selling his phone to buy the most recent one. We are constantly bombarded by the idea that we have to own things in order to be happy. "Just look at the guy in his selfie with the new bokeh effect of iPhoneX, he seems so happy. It's probably because of the phone." we always tell ourselves.

While we're gambling, we're so eager to hit the jackpot. We're thinking that finally everything will pay off. We're imagining that one day, you'd win so big that you've recovered all your losses, be able to pay all your family's debts, and maybe even give your family a good life. It's that one happy scenario in our heads that keeps us motivated. We're thinking that one day we'll hit the jackpot and you will hear those who turned you down admit that they are wrong and that you were right all along. Sadly, to most of us, it stayed like that - an imagination.

Gambling sites and casinos do not care how long have you been playing. They only care about the profits that they can squeeze out of you. There are no timers in casinos and once you reached x amount of time, they're gonna have to let you win and let you hit the jackpot. All of the rounds you're playing are completely unrelated to each other. Thus, no matter how long you've been playing, there's no increase in your chances of winning. There's no "progress" in gambling except your win/lose chart or the chart that lets you see how much you've won or lost so far.

If gamblers really do want to make money in the long run and they are willing to invest both time and money, then they should have registered to Lynda.com and enrolled on a business course. This way, they're going to have knowledge about business and the real gambling can finally begin. You're going to be risking but your chances of winning depends mainly on your research, your timing, and most especially luck. It's a lot more thrilling IMO. And if ever you lose? It's okay. You still have the knowledge about business. You still made yourself knowledgeable of something. You can now talk intelligently about business and maybe even get a job out of it.

They always say that they are going to die anyway so might as well smoke. It's fun and funny to hear until they get lung cancer at a really young age. The people with addictions rather have their brains rewired. It's an awarding experience for them to do gambling, drugs, or smoking. Some justifies their habit by thinking that they are only doing it in small amounts. But this small amount slowly grows or at some point becomes larger. For example, a smoker who smokes 2 sticks a day might start smoking a lot more than that when he's in a difficult situation. Their addiction is their way to remove themselves from reality and be able to escape a little. Now that they are in a depressing situation, it requires more to be able to escape.

Those who have not done drugs/smoke/gambling in the past is a lot less likely use it to cope with their situation. They've come this far without having to do those things so they probably have developed other coping techniques. Those who do drugs/smoke/gamble are more likely to use it to cope with the situation because the option of resorting to such habits is available to them and they know how to do it.

This also explains why a lot of people have been a victim of an HYIP and cloud mining in the past. They see other people enjoying their cash outs and profits from investing and so they invest as well. They see people making money from it so they're like "Oh this might be actually be legit." And of course they get talked about it by people who are looking for people to sign up under them. They sugarcoat the whole thing and not say that the money from the people are the ones that they use to pay out the old members (the nature of a ponzi).

If an individual did try to do understand the nature of it, then they will ask the question "What would happen if there is not enough new members to pay the old members?" Sadly it's the same thing with those huge networking scams. The only difference is that they have products to sell which kinda blurs out their ponzi-ness. But what can we actually say, people are lazy and they are willing to take advantage of another person's gullibility just to make money.

In bitcoin, though, there's none of this. The only thing that people don't understand that causes them to lose money is that bitcoin isn't a surefire way to make money in x amount of days. It's something that has to grow in order for us to make money from it. Sure there are some who were able to actually become rich from it but those are the ones lucky enough to buy bitcoin in its early stages. People don't understand that they have to hold longer than they thought and so they get impatient and sell their coins at a price lower than they bought it.

I don't know about loaning crypto because it might be a little bit of a risk. Supposed that the day the loan was issued, the price of bitcoin was $6000 and (for simpler examples) the loan amount was 1BTC, the collateral will be worth $6000. Loans can be long term such as months. What if after a couple of months, the price of bitcoin has skyrocketed and the person then decided that he's just going to let the lender get the collateral and not pay back. Pretty much the lender could have made way more if he just kept on holding his coins. The price of bitcoin has skyrocketed, but the collateral's price did not. What then? He just lost x amount of potential profit just by holding bitcoins. It's not like all loans are getting paid back and it's not like we can make the person sign a contract that they have to give more collateral when the price of bitcoin increases by the time the loan expires.

What might happen is that the collateral will be a lot more than the loan so the lender will have protection from such bitcoin-suddenly-skyrocketing dilemma. Which then discourages people to do crypto-loans as they will be safer just getting a loan from the banks where the currency's value isn't that volatile (although continuously inflating).

Also, why should there be new loyalty programs from the customers who are paying with crypto? What's so special with accumulating cryptocurrencies from such transaction that you're going to give them their very own loyalty program?

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And that "completely different market" consists of how many people? The amount of people that the entrepreneur will attract by accepting cryptocurrencies is so little that it's not worth updating their payment system just for that.

Which is exactly why they shouldn't start using cryptocurrencies. It will simply become an eye-opener to the people and once they have become familiar with cryptocurrencies, they are just going to move into using a different currency. It's like the government went through a lot of trouble just to end up giving their people a choice to be free from the government. Besides, the government already have their very own version of cryptocurrencies. It's the digital form of your fiat money which you can find on your bank account, credit card account, and Paypal account.

It seems to me that the only way for the government to prolong the process of mass adoption is to not say a thing about cryptocurrencies. They simply have to ignore it. In my country, bitcoin was actually once on the news. It actually just increased the population of the bitcoin users in my country as everyone wondered what is it about. And of course those who have researched enough were able to find out that bitcoin is not a scam, in contrary to what the news says. There were also viral articles that explains why cryptocurrencies aren't a scam. My fellow bitcoin users don't really mind these news because we know that we're making money from it and aren't scammed, in any way, so why be concerned of some video that was flashed to your television, right?

I definitely agree. The major reason why countries wouldn't issue their own cryptocurrency is that there's a lot of major issues going on and a lot of problems that they have to fix. Simply put, the nation doesn't call the need to have their own cryptocurrency so why would they?

But gold and fiat isn't the same thing. Gold, silver, copper, and bronze were used as a currency before because they are precious metals and have to be mined. It serves actual purpose. These metals have their different uses and they are also priced on their scarcity. Fiat, on the other hand, is literally just paper. The only thing that gives it value is the belief of the people that it has a value. But when it comes to its use as the material that it is, it's just paper, nothing else. It's not like gold which can be used in the components of our devices. It's not a good electricity conductor either. Sadly but this meme posted by @nikflossus on Steemit is so true:

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But the thing about fiat is that once people start using cryptocurrency and you're left with fiat, you're basically left with a piece of paper. Its value is based on our belief that it has value (like I said), so once that belief is gone or is moved to a different medium, then fiat loses its power and goes back to what it actually is, a piece of paper.

At first I thought you were talking about the government being able to pay the nation's debts by printing more fiat. So I thought yeah, bitcoin can't do that since we can't just create more bitcoins out of thin air or simply print it. It has to be mined or bought. But your point went on about progression in a person's life and you started talking about loan. In issuing loans, the blockchain system surely doesn't have that. But fiat system doesn't have that to. It's the banks that issues the loans, not the system of fiat itself. It's not in its nature as both bitcoin and fiat are just mediums for transacting. In fiat, there's an institution that offers the loan (not fiat system itself) which is the bank. We can have the same thing with bitcoin. We can have an institution that grants loans as well and it's probably going to be banks again. It's just a different currency.

I don't think that's true at all. I live in a rather isolated province, rural area, and we still have multiple banks in here. There are also small scale banks that offers loans. In case of sending money, there are multiple ways that you can transfer money to another person now. Even small general stores are offering this service as it can easily be done with a phone and the phone doesn't have to connect to the Internet.

Also that begs the question, "Will the person he's transacting to is using bitcoin?" which begs the question "Will he be able to use it to do transactions with other people?" At the end of the day, the bitcoin has to be converted into fiat so we can use it to buy something. We're just still not at that point that goods can be bought using cryptocurrency, there's just not enough users.

I was once in a family reunion and someone poked me saying that a relative wants to talk to me about bitcoin because he thinks that it's a pyramid scheme. First of all, why do people feel entitled of my attention just because he think bitcoin is a bad thing and that's what I spend most of my time on. I ended up not approaching the person simply because it was a waste of my time and saliva (for talking). It's not like I'm going to earn money if I was able (which I know I could) to convince that specific person that bitcoin isn't a huge pyramiding scam.

Personally the reason why I stopped sharing my love of crypto to people is that I feel like I'm being taken advantage of. Whenever I sit down with people, all they want to talk about is what I do in front of the computer for 10 hours a day. And I'm just sitting there thinking that they know that a huge part of my day is already spent talking and learning about cryptocurrency so why would I want to talk about it for my free time.

Another reason is that people think I'm rich. I have money but it's all for my future plans. I once planned a meetup with a cousin. It was a simple lunch out, you know, just wanna catch up. And then, he replied "Will you treat us (him and his wife)?" and I said, "No." He said, "Then we're not going." I don't understand why do people think that it's my responsibility to feed them simply because I have more money than them. That's when I realized that they weren't interested in catching up, they are interested on free food.

"Money destroys people." That's what they say. What it actually does it destroy your relations with people because they start to think differently of you. That's why I'm staying lowkey as possible now.

The problem in trading groups is eventually it becomes a toxic group. I've been in a trading group before. At first the ones who are earning the most are actually sharing insights and experiences about trading. You can learn a lot from them. And IDK why but they seem to be giving teaching other people a lot of time. Months have passed and these people were able to buy a coin at a really low price. That specific coin, they have millions or hundreds of thousands of that.

Since then, whenever there's someone new in the group, they just tell them to buy that specific coin. It has become toxic. The trading advise that you can get from them now is just so that you're going to buy the coin that they have so much of. Their coin managed to go to the top market cap and now, they are conducting seminars about the coin. They make people who have zero knowledge about crypto buy the coin. It's like a new HYIP but in the form of a crypto coin. And of course, now that they have accumulated enough volume, they already have dumped the coin.

I never really see myself trusting trading verdicts again after witnessing all this. Oh, and what do they do to the people who try to expose them in the chat room? They kick them out. So pretty much their chat room is consist of people who are their victims, those who just watched the whole thing unfold and not mention a thing, and those that are holding the coins as well.

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My advice in investing in crypto is to not rely to anyone. Only rely on a friend but always do your own research about whatever he's telling you. Not only does this allow you to make sure of the information given to you, but it also allows you to dig deeper about the subject.

Which is honestly a terrible use of time and an unhealthy coping mechanism. In this modern day, we were taught that we have to focus on other things to keep our mind off of things. But that's just avoiding the problem rather than addressing it and fixing it.

Introspection is a necessity for all of us, yet it's not tackled very well. There's a picture in our minds that someone who is alone must be hated and must be a lonely person. On the other hand, solitude is needed so you can balance your life. It is only during solitude can you do introspection. During introspection, you get to take a step back and be able to reflect on things better. And this is where you can actually improve your life. You can't do that if you're going to gamble during the time that you have nowhere to go. You can actually do a lot of things. This includes planning about your future, coming up with a creative idea, reading a book, and pretty much just enjoying your time alone.

One of the things that I've been reading a lot in addiction threads outside this forum is that the addicts aren't really doing what they're doing because they are "addicted" to it but rather because they have nothing better to do. It's a Friday night, the week has been tiring, what do you do? You gamble, you fap, you do things that makes your brain release dopamine when you could have done something better.

To that, I'd say there are really no people that has nowhere to go and only have gambling to do. It's just that they haven't realized that there's so much to do in this world a lifetime isn't even enough.

Sportsbetting is an example of a gambling game that you have data that you can analyze. You can research the teams and see who's more likely to win. It's even better if you're already a fan of such game. You are already familiar to the teams and you have already seen how they play. There are also prediction threads out there that you might be able to rely on. Tons of discussions on reddit as well about the teams and the upcoming matches on different types of sports.

On the other hand, this can actually be a bad thing. This type of game gives you the illusion that you are in control of the situation. You're thinking that if you do due research, if you looked at different prediction threads and they obviously say the same thing, then you can win. But anything can happen at any given moment since the actual battle has to happen in real life and it's not just about statistics. The team that you bet on might have a team member that gets sick at the day of the battle or the other team simply gets lucky. Thus, relying on the ability of the players might not be 100% the safe way to go.

Results in gambling are totally unpredictable and because of that, humans tend to try and gain control over it which is an illusion sportsbetting offers. So when it boils down to it, gambling in general (even sportsbetting) might actually be just 100% luck.

I think you mean "Get rid" of it, not "Get red". The bad thing about those who are setting limits is that not all of them are able to not cross the limit. Most of them are consumed by their greed and that makes them feel frustrated. It makes them think that they can never get rid of their gambling habits as they can't even follow a simple limit in their bet amount.

And one of the reasons why it's hard to quit gambling is that our brain responds to losses more than our wins. We always want to try to win back our losses. Even when we've won $10, when we still have $100 loss, the win means nothing as we're not in the winning side still. We are so eager to win our losses back but we know that we are doomed to lose our money again and so we end up being in this never-ending cycle.

Another thing is thinking that since we've been in a losing streak, then we should win soon. The problem with this is that each bets are different from each other and the losing streak that you've had doesn't affect, in any way, the chances of you winning the next round. This line might ring a bell, "I've lost 7 times already, so this 8th bet HAS TO BE a win." and so we bet more because we think it's about to be a win.

Good for you, then. I'm like you, I used to gamble but I was able to stop. On the other hand, not everyone's like us.

Others have become emotionally dependent on gambling. Whenever we win, our brain releases dopamine which feels really good. It's a feeling that gamblers are looking for that's why they keep on betting. Over time, our brain gets used to this feeling and we are needing more 'dosage' of it. Your brain has already built up tolerance. It's pretty much the same as drug addiction where druggies are needing higher dosage than before just to feel the same rush that they initially had. Stopping the supply of the dopamine will result to withdrawal and depression. The brain of an addict has been rewired and now that the supply of dopamine has been stopped, it's trying to go back to normal which feels really unpleasant to the owner.