Games in gambling are dependent almost entirely on luck. The few exceptions could be poker games where you sit at tables with other players. Over there it's not just luck, but also how other players strategize their moves and how you plan against them.

But to say that skill is involved in gambling is just a misunderstanding of how chance based games work. Over time, the house edge just gets to you. No matter how patient or strategic you are, casino games have to be sustainable. So if you keep playing, you will go bust. Sadly there's no other way for game operators to keep running their games. House edge gives the casino this advantage and nos strategy can beat it.

Αν ερμηνεύσουμε κυριολεκτικά αυτά που λέει ο satoshi εγώ κατανοώ πως σε καμία περίπτωση δεν τον ενδιέφερε η αποκεντροποίηση με τον εμμονικό και ωραιοποιημένο τρόπο στον οποίο κάνουν λόγο οι χρήστες του bitcoin. Φαίνεται να δίνει έμφαση στην αδιαβλητότητα του bitcoin αλλά ήταν έτοιμος να θυσιάσει τμήματα της αποκέντρωσης για να πετύχει ευκολία χρήσης προς το ευρύτερο κοινό αρκεί να μην μπορούσαν να λογοκριθούν οι συναλλαγές και πάλι.

Speaking in smart contract terms, this just seems like a front-running bot. It's very common in smart contract enabled chains, anything ERC-based.
Basicaly whenever someone would execute a token swap through an automated market maker's smart contract, if it was a valuable transaction, someone could execute what's called a sandwich attack, essentially sandwiching a transaction between theirs and raising the price before they buy, only to sell again at a higher price after they do, all in the same block.

This being done with BRC-20 tokens doesn't stifle their volume on chain, only increases it. It raises required sats/vByte to get in each block and also incentivizes token creators to get more competitive with how they deploy tokens. This bot might take out a few tickers here and there before there's any trading on them, but eventually the BRC creators will find ways around it, and that would create a fee war. If the BRC craze continues we might see sats/vByte requirements like never before.

What I really don't understand is why would Ratimov go ahead and try to delete an quality post that he made. I haven't seen anyone doubting that his debit card list thread was useful and also original. It really doesn't help his case to go ahead and say that he was pissed when someone went ahead and "forked" his now erased thread to bring out the information and keep updating.

The accusation of merit farming holds more ground if he stands against people releasing information freely just because he had formatted a thread about a certain topic earlier than others...

I honestly thought this day would never come. Linux mailing lists were the top place for high level technical discussions. So many projects that contributed hugely to society came out of there. Why stop it so suddenly andw here will all these projects go now... Sad.

Απ' την άλλη ο satoshi είχε φτιάξει και το bitcoin client να έχει μέσα δικό του miner και άφησε το τελευταίο του δημόσιο μήνυμα πριν εξαφανιστεί μόλις λίγους μήνες αφού είχε βγει ο πρώτος GPU miner. Σίγουρα η κατεύθυνση που είχε δώσει στο bitcoin σίγουρα ήταν ώστε να το κάνει εύκολο να μπορείς να τρέξεις το full node client με πλήρη αποκέντρωση και όλα τα features που έχει να προσφέρει στον προσωπικό σου υπολογιστή. Αλλά δεν ξέρουμε τι αντιμετώπιση θα είχε στις εξελίξεις που ήρθαν.

Απ' την άλλη στο παραπάνω quote που βρήκες ο satoshi απαντάει λίγο σαν Πυθία.


Απ' την μια μας λέει πως υπάρχει δυνατότητα οι χρήστες να έχουν πορτοφόλι χωρίς full node. Το είδαμε αυτό αργότερα με το Electrum ας πούμε. Μετά μας λέει πως αν είναι δύσκολο να χτίσεις ένα node τότε θα υπάρχουν λιγότερα [2] και αυτά θα είναι "server farms"[3] ας πούμε μεγάλoi σέρβερ δηλαδή.

Αλλά για να πάμε στο 3 απαιτείται και το 2 και δεν καταλαβαίνω αν αυτό ήταν το επιθυμητό αποτέλεσμα ή παράδειγμα προς αποφυγήν. Υπόψιν βέβαια πως ο satoshi μιλούσε και για έναν καιρό που δεν υπήρχαν wallets χωρίς το blockchain. Καν δεν υπήρχαν wallet χωρίς miner μέσα κιόλας δηλαδή...

When looking at the activity ranking it would be fun to have a column for "latest post " (to see when this member made their last post on the forum). Seeing if a member has posted in the last 2 weeks or not would help you get a picture if their activity is going to rank up in the next period or not. Also, I don't see why the hourglass indicating inactivity isn't shown next to usernames in this ranking. This page is where it's the most relevant.

I'm making the distinction because for a poor country to have many people addicted to gambling and losing more on gambling than they can afford, it's going to have an wider effect than in a country where the state is already fully developed and in a good economic situation.

Moreover, it's an interesting phenomenon to observe how in poor countries people tend to gamble more than in other countries, at least proportionally speaking. Seems like people in dire situations can be more prone to vices somehow.

I was looking at gambling statistics for my country the other day. People in Greece lost 22.5 billion EUR only in 2021, and 29 billion in 2022 and that was only on licensed establishments.

That's around 10% of Greece's GDP wasted away towards offshore companies... This is a very hard issue to deal with and to think that it happens at such a scale even with the licensed casinos is unthinkable. Essentially governments sell a casino license once and then these casinos are given free reign on how to advertise, how to be promoted, what claims to make... No limits to how much they can earn.

But governments sure as hell are there to profit whenever a gambler wins anything, heavily taxing big winnings... What makes me even angrier is that these licensed casinos do very little to offer gamblers resources to play responsibly, and do nothing to educate gamblers about house edge. Also, none of their games run on provably fair algorithms. And yet the government does very little to regulate them after having sold them a license...

And Greece isn't a rich country by any means. Many families are facing hardship, unemployment is high, youth emigration is rising etc... Things don't look particularly good for the economy in general.

What do you think about this issue where people gamble too much in countries where the vast majority of the population isn't well off? Should governments step in and restrict casinos more perhaps?

It's worth pointing out though that 30% annually is extremely unrealistic. You can't expect such returns anywhere, let alone in a dice site that takes public investment and could very well turn negative. At that rate you would become a millionaire in a few years even with an investment of 100$ initially.

Hopefully OP is going to find some more realistic ways to make his calcolations.

I really liked your original thread and appreciated its contents.

The ideal scenario in this situation would have been for you to never delete the thread. I don't know why you did in the first place actually.
If your thread was never deleted/locked, nobody could have copied it as it would have been a duplicate.

To me it doesn't make sense to have to ask for permission to create a thread about debit cards just because you did it before. It's just public information. The importance is in updating the info. Not collecting and formatting it... Likewise I had a thread about debit cards in 2015 but got bored of maintaining it. And after I abandoned it I didn't go after anyone creating similar threads.

Honestly I don't see why all the fuss here. Threads on bitcointalk don't make money anyway so no reason to get upset at someone for wanting to spread information. But if you want to restore your original thread, I would be supportive. What matters is to have information available. But if you restore your thread it would indeed be the true original and hence no duplicates could exist unless NotATether made significant and meaningful contributions to alter it.

Users above said their result came out to a 54% annual yield but when I input 1 BTC to a year I get the result of 0.33 BTC profit, that amount to 33% annual return. Which sounds insane but still is different than what others had as a result.



Makes me wonder how this site works out the calculations.
I also wonder if there was a single year where investors in a dice site had returns of 33% in BTC. Normally some data should be used to calculate returns but I don't know any website having data on dice side investments other than dicesites.com, and even for them I'm not sure if they make the whole raw data public.

No miner should be banned. But since they're avoiding to engage in any discussion there could be some meaningful pressure towards them too.
We know from bitcoin's past that it's possible for users of the network to signal their support for certain changes to it without having to fork the network.

This in today's situation would mean that users can run a modified bitcoin full node client that doesn't store or propagate ordinal transactions. Of course, if a miner includes ordinals in their transactions, the nodes would have to accept it unless they actually want a network fork to happen.

And for example, given that Taproot was implemented without a hard fork being required, a patch could be pushed to disable certain OP codes until they can be re-implemented later with proper spam filtering. Still all that without a network fork. If these changes are popular and are let's say pushed into bitcoin Core, miners and pools would have to make a conscious choice of supporting the most popular client and including transactions according to its rules, or running their own version of a client to profit off of expensive ordinal transactions by including them in their mined blocks.

I think that least for now, having fewer miners push these spammy transactions could alleviate some of the pressure on the network.

Alright, on to a new match day!



Starting tomorrow we'll see some interesting matches.

This match day there's no Derby of the eternal enemies as it's called in Greece but we actually have some strong teams against ones lower in the standings.

PAOK, AEK and Aris probably are in for easy wins.

To me it's a miracle Volos is even int he 1st division.  The stars really had to align for this to happen given that they aren't really that strong of a team.


So I like the odds betting on Aris to win here.

Another bet I like is over 1.75 on OFI vs. Pas Giannina


Both teams have been investing a lot in offense but OFI especially judging from the last match even with my prediction above (lol) doesn't do well in defense lately! But also OFI had scored some wins against bigger teams earlier on so a score above 2 goals seems likely.

It's very much correct that FTT has absolutely no value at the moment but still some people continue to speculate on it for some reason.
It doesn't seem to make any sense at all to be honest but perhaps some people expect FTT to be favored in some way by bankruptcy court? Still that's not realistic. There's a ton of other priority claims and having bought the coin on the open market doesn't change any claimant's position. So yes, sooner or later it will go to 0.

Welp, here we go...

Over half of bitcoin transactions are Ordinals:
https://geniidata.com/user/orddata/ordinals-transaction-share

This takes into account data from Yesterday. And to those saying that this will pass... Think again! Okcoin exchange literally integrated an embeded dashboard that users can utilize to create and mint ordinals as well as sell them all within their platform. They literally made ordinal inscriptions easier than they make it to withdraw BTC off their platform... Exchanges and "NFT Artists" don't care for the well being of the ecosystem.

Us the community should consider that if some malignant miners want to profit off of an attack on the protocol perhaps we should cut them off because not only is this not the first time this happens, but this time also it seems bound to continue getting worse.

Damn, I didn't expect Olympiacos to be losing today at all!


That second quarter Olympiacos really underperformed and lost it against Baskonia. Amazing how they were able to tople the result like that, albeit in a narrow finish in the end.
That surely was not the result people expected given Baskonia's season so far but surely they turned the tables good. Big congrats on this well deserved win. Sadly it's surely going to make qualification chances a little harder for Olympiacos.

Lightning network has so many CVEs to work on, I don't think the devs will have time building more features given how large the backlog of critical things to fix is.
Regardless, saying lightning will solve everything isn't a solution. We're dealing with a fundamental issue on the L1 level. Attack vectors have to be addressed before more features are built.

Today we have Greek teams Olympiakos playing Baskonia and tomorrow Panathinaikos playing ALBA Berlin.
Since I'm Greek I know from heard that both these Greek teams have had good performance on the European level in the past.

Moreover Olympiakos has had a better performance in the last few games played and they're also playing at home:

It makes sense that the odds currently heavily favor Olympiakos because they're also playing at home.
These odds don't look bad at all:


Panathinaikos is having a clean sweep on their national league which is probably what favors them to win as much. But  nevertheless Germany is a more competitive league so it's not a certain result by any means.

Small detail but it's an important distinction to make that there's a lot at stake for miners.
Current block reward is 6.25 and even set to halve in a few months.
That means that there's currently ONLY around 900 BTC mined every 24 hours (1440 minutes / block time of 10* block reward of 6.25.

So let's compare miner revenue to fees.

Miners based on current prices earned 37.14M USD worth of BTC on the 8th of November 2023:
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_miners_revenue_per_day

Miners also earned 4.180M USD worth of BTC from fees on that same day:
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_total_transaction_fees_per_day

Also look at the above chart and observe that the ongoing BRC-20 boom caused total fees to skyrocket 10x!

So with BRC-20 only currently being supported by SOME of the exchanges, and a single wallet, already ~10% of miner revenue comes from the fees it has created.
This is bound to get worse unless somehow addressed.