Yes, exactly. The reason Ferrari are uncompetitive this year goes right back to the ban on their engine. The problem for 2021 is only very limited development will be permitted, so they will surely be uncompetitive again. Whereas 2022 is a complete reset for everyone. It makes absolute sense for Ferrari to put all effort into 2022, and the start of a new era. You can bet that other teams - particularly Mercedes - are already working on 2022 as well. That's when it all changes.

My hope is that the planned 2022 rule changes have the desired effect, and we get to see closer racing with results more dependent on driver skill than anything else.

It's a case of greed taking priority over logic.
If you bet $100 on a 50% coin toss, then win, you have $200. If you then put your $200 on the next coin toss, you may end up with $400 or $0. The point is that if you keep putting your winnings back in, it is 100% inevitable that you end up with nothing.
Walking away when you are winning is a rare skill, but it's the key to successful gambling.

I've never been remotely convinced by this argument. It's pure scaremongering. A small tax increase for the ultra-rich doesn't suddenly transform the US into a socialist dystopia where everyone is haemorrhaging money and it's impossible for billionaires to make a profit, and they have to spend vast amounts of money uprooting and establishing a base in a different country.

Not necessarily. There may be a considerable gulf between what Biden wants to do and what he can do. Remember that—depending on the results of the GA run-offs—he is likely to face a Republican-controlled senate. I know he's a bridge-builder by nature, but still, it seems unlikely he'd get any major tax overhauls past the senate.

There are definitely signs that this time is different, which should, as you say, lead to less rampant FOMO and subsequent panic-selling.
However... this does also depend on the scale and the speed of the price rises. Anything that rises quickly and dramatically is inevitably followed by some sort of retracement. I'd say there's next to zero chance that price rises will tail off into a period of stability. There's got to be a drop to some degree.

The 2017 rise was fulled by ICO fever and FOMO which was largely small-scale individual investors. The difference now is that we've had a few more years of history, and anecdotal evidence suggests that the current rise is backed to a much greater extent by institutional investors and other serious players - people who are less likely to panic, and are generally more astute in their investment decisions. It bodes well for the future.

Definitely, and the more this happens, the more bitcoin is seen as a sensible diversification option, and the more ultra-rich people buy in.
There is obviously the price manipulation element, too. A billionaire announcing investment in anything tends to swing the price upwards, as they would desire.

There is actually a simple strategy to maximise your winnings on lotteries. Certainly it is pure luck whether the numbers you pick are the winning ones, and there is nothing you can do to maximise your chance of winning. However, if you do win, you can maximise your share of the winnings.
For example, if the lottery is to pick 3 numbers from 1-10... if you pick 1,2,3 then you are exactly as likely to win as if you picked 3,8,10... but it's likely that more people will pick 1,2,3 than will pick 3,8,10... so if you win with the second example you get a great share of the total prize as there are fewer winning participants.
Depending on what the options are, it is advisable to avoid sequential numbers or other patterns, avoid popular 'lucky' numbers, avoid 1-31 as these can be birthdays, etc.

Maybe. We should remember that players can also become stubborn and arrogant after winning a world cup - they go from being good international players to suddenly being the absolute best in the world. But it is part of a manager's job to deal with this... so if the players did become arrogant and over-confident, Löw should have been able to bring them back under control.

I've seen a lot of threads over the years where Cardano has been hugely hyped, and there has been a lot of positive sentiment. Personally I think it's a good project.
I suppose one issue is that Cardano is more expectation of what it could be, rather than of what it has been so far... and there have been a lot of coins over the years with massive potential that have then failed to deliver. Anything that is unproven and hasn't really been battle-tested is going to provoke a degree of skepticism, given what has happened with other highly promising alts.

Not sure if people will find it useful, but I've expanded that table to include how likely each hand is compared to the immediately better hand (in the row above) and to all  better hands (all rows above).
We can see for example that the biggest jump in likelihood is Four of a Kind, which is x17 more likely than a Straight Flush, and x15.6 more likely than any better hand (Straight Flush or Royal Flush).
It's interesting to note that High Card is roughly as likely as all better hands... so everything being equal, if you have High Card and you're playing against a single opponent, it's roughly 50-50 whether he is also relying on High Card.

Hand    |	Distinct Hands |	Frequency |	Times more Likely than Above Hand |	Cum Freq |	Times more Likely than ALL Above Hands
Royal Flush	1	4		4
Straight Flush	9	36	9.0	40	9
Four of a Kind	156	624	17.3	664	15.6
Full House	156	3744	6.0	4408	5.6
Flush	1277	5108	1.4	9516	1.16
Straight	10	10200	2.0	19716	1.07
Three of a Kind	858	54912	5.4	74628	2.8
Two Pair	858	123552	2.3	198180	1.7
One Pair	2860	1098240	8.9	1296420	5.5
No Pair/High Card	1277	1302540	1.2	2598960	1.0

I'd disagree with this. Whilst we can calculate the static odds of a certain hand, it is extremely difficult to calculate on-the-fly, in the middle of a game, what your chances are of getting a certain hand - and of other players getting certain hands. The people-reading is certainly a key part of being a successful player, but the ability to even approximate the odds in the middle of a game is a vital vital skill. I think I'm an okay poker player, not bad but not great, and I do try to estimate very rough odds whilst games are in progress - it is an extremely difficult challenge.



I think this is a cheat, really, I'd not be in favour as it takes away some of the player's expertise. It's like if there was also an on-screen counter showing running percentages of how often each player has bluffed.

This happens again and again. 2017 to now is just the latest cycle. Look at the historic price charts, but use a log rather than linear scale. Because we've had order-of-magnitude price changes over the years, previous cycles are not visible on a linear scale, they're smeared to a flat line. But on a log scale they become startlingly apparent. Each high is higher than the last, each low is higher than the last. Bitcoin is often described as volatile, but the more you zoom out to a longer-term view, the clearer the pattern becomes. Log scale is crucial for understanding historic behaviour.

Yes, the 2017 bull run was based on insane levels of ICO FOMO, and was never sustainable. Despite the losses during 2018, bitcoin has proved its resilience, and is attracting new interest - particularly among institutional players who are well aware of the deficiencies of fiat (which have been brought into stark focus as governments respond to the pandemic).
It feels more sustainable this time. Let's hope it remains fairly bullish and doesn't become full-blown boom-and-bust FOMO again.

Assuming for a moment that bitcoin does go stratospheric and hit that almost unimaginable $300k... there would be an inevitable huge pullback. Nothing can rise that far that quickly and then remain there. Slow and steady growth is far more sustainable in the long term.

It is somewhat hysterical, yes. But Trump is undeniably a (thankfully metaphorical) loose cannon, and Trumpism a loose canon, with nothing of substance beneath the aggressive and populist soundbites. His past record suggests that his response to an election defeat is to never acknowledge the defeat, rile up the base, and then direct the angry mob at his opponents. Fraud! Lock him/her/them up! Stand back and stand by! Standing by, sir!

It is the greatest in extent, because it is the empire of the modern age, and has the tools of the modern age at its disposal, and has learned well from the imperfections of previous empires. The system has matured and has been refined. Beneath that, though, people are people. People running an empire are people running an empire. I doubt that people running previous empires were any less perfidious, grasping and self-serving than those running America right now.
Trump is of course not really running America—he's a tool (both common and slang)—but he's carved a route to power that is unprecedented in America, and Republicans and those shadowy figures behind the scenes* will be willing to an extent to indulge him. Trump may be a lame duck, but Trumpism is alive and (probably) kicking. He knows that he personally is on the way out. Expect the last couple of months to be concentrated essence-of-Trump (now there's a stocking-filler for Christmas). The question really is how loose his leash will be.


*Why are they always shadowy? Surely they'd be more effective if completely invisible?

Selling at the peak and then re-buying at the lowest point obviously gives you the biggest gains, but is easier said than done. Just holding is certainly a reasonable strategy if you're - as most of us are - in it for the long-term, and hope to see bitcoin change the world.
My intention this time is to sell a proportion once I think it is about to peak, and then re-buy later... but I'm too risk-averse to sell it all.

We might not get the chance to say anything afterwards. Probably best to get it out of the way now: It's all Trump's fault.

Hate to answer my own question, but here we go, from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/us/politics/trump-iran-nuclear.html

It appears that Trump is aiming for a nuclear holocaust as his legacy. Whatever his faults, you can't say he doesn't think big...

The weird thing is, that whilst stimulus checks might be used to buy bitcoin and so boost the price, the bigger justification for an expected bitcoin price increase is the fact that the checks are issued at all.