В принципе согласен с данным посылом

Здесь даже не столько на Америку интересно смотреть, ибо там постоянно кого-то убивают (Линкольна, Кеннеди, Освальда, Малькома, Кинга, не говорю уже про регулярные массовые расстрелы в местных школах), сколько на остальную публику, вдруг забившуюся в истерике относительно прав национальных меньшинств (зачеркнуто) чернокожего населения Штатов

It must suck to be a good vacuum cleaner

I see your point

You basically say that to scam a scammer still requires you to be a scammer deep down inside ("to have it in your DNA") even if it can be justified on some moral high ground. However, if it is a good thing in its own right and serves a good end, you might try to reframe it. For example, disobeying an unlawful order:


The trick "I was only following orders" doesn't work out in most cases. And we can draw some parallels here, i.e. not scamming a scammer when you are able to pull it off can be thought of as being involved in the scam. If you look at it from this angle, your conscience should remain clean and intact

I wouldn't call that fun

Rather, it looks more like a rush (as in getting high from drugs or weed). When you are losing money and start to chase losses, this can hardly be construed as fun anymore. And that should be used as a fine line to distinguish between real entertainment and when it turns into an obsession (read, you mustn't cross it)

This seems to be a good place to start out (you should have probably made it #1 item in the list)

It is obvious that traders filling your orders are unaware of the fact that your bot went nuts. Moreover, they themselves may be using bots. In this way, you can't call them scammers or cheaters. And even if it looks like something went totally wrong on your side, there is no certainty of that. To sum it up, in trading the answer is pretty straightforward. You cannot call scammers those people who are filling your allegedly wrong orders as there's no knowing

Indeed, it is more complicated with casinos as little doubt arises when something is totally off, e.g. when you start winning all of a sudden and that is definitely not due to a streak of luck. With that in mind, there are two major choices to be made. If you consider the casino in point as a legit and honest one, then exploiting the bug will be cheating (I don't think scamming is an appropriate term here). However, if they are themselves scammers (e.g. refuse to pay out jackpots or anything to that effect), then cheating on them can be morally justified (as I see it)

That's because new money gets pumped into it

But this can't go on indefinitely. And if the current situation doesn't change for the better, we should see an abrupt readjustment, to the downside obviously. I'm not so worried about stock markets as about Bitcoin since there's been lots of correlation between cryptocurrencies and traditional assets recently. And if the stock market goes into a free fall, crypto is likely to follow


Spending seems to be supported by fiscal stimulus now. When it runs out, things may quickly turn from bad to worse

Myself, I wouldn't advise anyone on investing in anything, Bitcoin or otherwise. Basically, you can't give exact instructions on how to make money (as there are none). Then, if something goes wrong and your friend loses his precious shekels, he will blame you even if he won't reveal his feelings in the open. He will inevitably and unwittingly feel a grudge against you. If you now feel responsible for the feasibility of your advice and how it is going to play out for your friend (which you should), you can expect such an outcome

But ultimately, it is up to you, of course

You can't remove fear

It is a basic emotion and only severely disturbed people don't have fear. The good news is that it is not the amount of fear you have that counts but what you do with it and how you can handle it. Further, I don't think it is a good idea not to hate losing money, either, as it essentially amounts to love of losing money. Probably, what you wanted to say can be rephrased as not to be penny wise and pound foolish. That I would certainly agree with

Well, personally, I would use a different terminology, more specific one

Bitcoin can be used as either a means of exchange (payment) or a store of value. The use that interests us here is that of a means of exchange. So the right question to ask is whether it can be used as a self-sufficient means of exchange in the economy of a whole nation without relying on fiat (provided we discard technical limitations like transaction costs and times)? Yes, it is volatile. However, it is volatile in some other fiat currency (mostly, the American dollar), and this volatility can be attributed and assigned to the volatility of that fiat

I can't quite agree with this view

Although it can be claimed (with some reservations) that anyone is capable of becoming a good trader (even though we may disagree on the exact definition of a good trader), we should also take into account "opportunity costs". What I mean is that it may be more rewarding both in terms of money and in terms of satisfaction to get engaged in some other activity, more suitable for a particular individual

But what is meant by a free market here?

As in free from what exactly? If it is about being free from regulation, well, that may not necessarily be a good thing (though opinions vary). And the gold market is heavily regulated, just in case, very much like any other traditional market out there. If it is about being free from manipulation by the deep pockets, then Bitcoin has never been free from that. Moreover, it has become famous for being extremely vulnerable to the whimsy of big players. So what is free about Bitcoin as long as markets for it are concerned? 

There's definitely a certain optimum point on the profit-generating curve

For simplicity's sake, we could basically agree that this curve takes the form of house edge values as a variable. If the house edge is, say, 5%, this is an onerous rip-off indeed. However, making it too low, e.g. below 0.5% would (allegedly) hurt the casino's profits without a sufficient increase in their client base (whether it is actually true remains to be seen, though). So, the house edge went down over the years to some optimal value established experimentally, which seems to be around 1%, with some options like rakeback pushing it even lower

What do CBDC's have to do with this transition?

Regardless, if some government decides to get rid of cash money completely, people will start to use a foreign currency instead. If all currencies across the globe turn into cashless fiat, people will start to use something else. All in all, it looks like you are putting the cart before the horse, i.e. cash is going to die only when people no longer need it en masse. Until then, any government trying this out will only hurt itself

To make it clear, I don't want to say that "this is my job and income"

What I actually want to say, and in fact always said, is that you can earn money consistently and reliably with martingale once you account for the time period within which you intend to keep playing (a month, a year, a lifetime). Whether you actually will be able to make a living out of it, I don't know, as it all depends. But if not, that will be because of the limits imposed by the casino (like max bet amount) and not due to martingale inherent limitations. And let's be honest here, it doesn't make a lot of sense to plan further into the future than a few months with any particular casino

That's what I've been trying to get across in every attack on martingale

But that's only the tip of the iceberg. I'm almost certain that everyone who questions the viability and utility of martingale as a general stratagem consisting of many very different approaches to utilizing it in practice once tried it and failed. Well, maybe not just once but still failed, probably miserably. I for one lost 1.5 BTC for using it recklessly

And then, on this account, they proceed to conclude that it is not a working strategy. It is indeed psychologically easier for one's ego and more convenient overall to pretend that something doesn't work at all instead of accepting one's personal failure at it (aka shifting the blame). Though I'm not sure if it is the right place to delve into such complications here

It is the same as everywhere

A series is just a certain number of consecutive, i.e. following one after another, tosses (aka outcomes). In dice, that would be rolls. "A series" of one toss is just that one toss, i.e. either heads (H) or tails (T). Then, a series of two tosses can be HH, TT, HT, and TH. A streak generally refers to a series of same outcomes like HHH in coin flipping or LLL in dice

I think we can further reduce the task to just one toss. The chances of seeing either heads or tails are 0.5 in one toss, and they would be that on average after, say, 1 million tosses. Statistically, it means that in every two tosses we are going to see exactly one head and one tail (as the odds of either are 0.5)

With that said, though, there is no certainty that we are actually going to see either in any given series of 2 tosses. The idea is that in practice there will be long streaks, and thus we can't say that we should always see a head in the next two tosses, or any two tosses, even if the probability of heads is 0.5. But if it is not 100%, what are the chances then?

Let's take a simplest example of two tosses

The probability of 2 heads (HH) in a row is indeed 0.5x0.5=0.25 in 2 tosses. The other possible outcomes are HT, TH, and TT. And if we make 1 billion tosses, we will come pretty close to that probability (0.25 for every couple of tosses). So this point is not challenged here. However, it is not at all set in stone that after we make 2x4=8 tosses (4 possible outcomes in 2 tosses), we are going to see the HH streak for certain even once. But if it is not a certainty, what are the odds then given that they should be less than 50% anyway?

Well, this topic looks into a different aspect of coin tossing

It is not about the probability of either outcome, heads or tails, as it is known for certain to be 50% on average. Put differently, it is either heads or tails, while the odds themselves are equal, and no third option is possible. So it is necessarily 50%. However, I'm trying to assess a different type of probability here, i.e. the odds of actually seeing, say, heads in the next 2 tosses (as 1/0.5=2) or any other particular streak of tosses, for that matter (say, 2 heads in 1/0.25=4 tosses). As it turns out, the odds are less than 50%

You are looking at only one side of the coin

It is indeed a well-known fact that expansion in money supply should be accompanied, and ideally even preceded, by economic growth. However, this analysis is not all-encompassing as it doesn't include every possible situation. And while what you say is true in general, it is not necessarily true under current circumstances. That is to say, you don't take into account the sharp decline in consumer expenditures due to the quarantine

People don't work and thus they don't earn money. Then, they can't buy (as much as before), and that, if left unattended and allowed to develop on its own, would cause deflation. To avoid this, central banks are injecting liquidity into the system. In other words, the fiscal stimulus is to make up for the lost income and, by extension, the loss of demand. If this policy is carried out wisely and cautiously, it shouldn't actually lead to unbridled inflation, if any inflation at all

Okay, I've been thinking about that, and here're my thoughts


If we assume that the probability of seeing a streak of n heads or tails is equal to 50% within N tosses (as we are talking about coin flipping here), we should then accept that the odds of seeing it in the next N tosses are the same because tosses are independent, and we can't and mustn't distinguish between the first sequence and any other sequence of N tosses

However, that would mean that the probability of seeing that streak in these two sequences (i.e. N*2 tosses) is 100%, which is obviously a wrong assumption. It might well be over 90% but still not certainty. Then we necessarily come to the conclusion that the probability of seeing the streak in the first sequence of N tosses is in fact below 50%

On the other hand, it could be argued that we can't really assess these probabilities as such assessment cannot be made in the same way we can't assess the probability of an event that has already transpired. In the latter case, we can't even say that its probability is 100% since there's no probability

This is important to keep in mind