In relation to the topic, has anyone actually seen any sources for that 90% figure (of bettors losing long-term)?
I tried to find it but hit a wall. There are few articles claiming that only 3%-5% of sports bettors are successful, which sounds about right, but they're not citing any specific sources but are only referring to "different studies".

If anyone has seen any actual study and could provide a link, that would be great.

Could work for short-term storage but definitely not a great idea for a long-term one. It might sound safe at first it has some big security risks.
First of all let's start with that 2 words (out of 12). I'm fairly sure that if someone intercepts the first 10 words, brute-forcing the remaining 2 words would probably be doable. Especially if the thief knew that it's a 12-word seed and that the missing part are the last 2 words.
And memorising 2 words is obviously easy, but forgetting them is even easier. Most of people experienced suddenly going blank on something they remembered for a long time. Human memory is fragile and not reliable. We're not really "wired" to remember cold data, but rather to memorise experiences.

Second of all, whether or not that solution will be secure largely depends on how/where would you store the written-down phrase. Storing it on a piece of paper bears the risk of it getting: damaged (fire, flood, eaten by a dog etc), accidentally thrown away, lost (it's not hard to forget where you put it), stolen, or risk of the ink fading away over time or paper decaying etc. I wouldn't do it unless you have a home safe or bank deposit box.

WhirlWind have now also increased their pay rates to $6 per post, that's for any rank. So Senior/Hero/Legendary are all paid the same.

Obviously Costa has not cancelled the fight with Aliskerov himself, it must have been UFC's decision. There's no way they'd make him fight twice in a span of less than 3 months. And yes, it would be extremely hard to hype up his fight against Chimaev if he were to lose to Aliskerov, especially when both of them represent similar styles/backgrounds. So it was either Aliskerov or Chimaev, not both.

Myślisz o tym trochę w zły sposób, bycie MS to nie jest żadna zaszczytna funkcja, nie masz z tego żadnych zysków dla siebie (bo sam siebie nagradzać nie możesz), po prostu bierzesz na siebie trochę odpowiedzialności za to jak to forum się rozwija + możesz pomóc wartościowym, młodzym rangą posterom wskoczyć na wyższy poziom.

Jedyna "trudność" to napisanie posta aplikacyjnego, potem z górki. Jeżeli jesteś aktywny to i tak czytasz posty, więc nie będzie to wymagało żadnego ekstra wysiłku. Dosłownie kilka/kilkanaście kliknięć miesięcznie więcej.

Do tego nawet nie musisz się przyznawać że jesteś MS, to czy zostałeś zaakceptowany czy nie możesz zostawić dla siebie (np. jeżeli boisz się że ludzie będą żebrać o merity w prywatnych wiadomościach itp). No chyba że coś się zmieniło i te dane są teraz publiczne.


Ja już kiedyś byłem MS ale straciłem tą pozycję przez nieaktywność. Nie wchodząc w szczegóły, nie mam pewności czy w najbliższej przyszłości znów nie zrobię se dłuższej przerwy. Do tego nie będę ukrywał, że gdyby nie uczestnictwo w kampanii, to byłbym pewnie o wiele mniej aktywny, więc niekoniecznie byłbym dobrym kandydatem.

@cygan - metodą eliminacji: jako jedyny (z aktywnych członków) nie odmówiłeś zdecydowanie, więc wypada na ciebie  . Do tego masz najwyższy BIP rank z nas wszystkich.

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Pierwsza 10-ka wg aktywności od początku 2023 (wg Ninjastic) wygląda tak:

1. Tytanowy Janusz [168]
2. wwzsocki [96]
3. cygan [89]
4. pawel7777 [67]
5. adamvp [53]
6. GazetaBitcoin [18]
7. FantasticPangolin705 [13]
8. garlonicon [13]
9. vjudeu [12]
10. PawGo [11]

W pierwszej 5-tce mamy jescze Adama, ale jest nieaktywny od miesiąca.

Jak nikt się nie zgłosi po dobroci to chyba trzeba będzie zrobić losowanie 

Opcje kupna w bitomatach, giełdach bez KYC czy P2P zostały już poruszone, ale dorzuce jeszcze opcję kupna za pośrednictwem zweryfikowanego na giełdzie kolegi (jeśli kwota nie jest wielka).
Poza tym, jak wspomniał Janusz, możesz po prostu zarabiać (lub bardziej dorabiać) w krypto. Jeśłi masz jakiś fach, to możesz dorabiać jako freelancer i brać płatności w krypto, i nie musisz się wcale ograniczać tylko do forów/portali Bitcoinowych.
Ale jak już masz konto na Bitcointalk, jeśli będziesz aktywny i będziesz też pisał na głównych, angielskojęzycznych forach, to za jakiś czas (choć raczej niekrótki) będziesz mógł się załapać na kampanie sygnatur, z których czasem można wyciągnąć całkiem fajne pieniądze małym nakładem czasowym. I choć stawki nie są porażające, czasem trafią się ładne bonusy (np. w jednej kampanii rozdawali jako bonus tokeny, które potem poszły mocno w górę) albo tego typu kwiatki:

Dzięki śliczne jeszcze raz.

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To jak panowie? Ktoś chętny do aplikowania na MS ku chwale naszej małej społeczności, abyśmy w końcu przestali być na szarym końcu statystyk?

Przypomnienie zasad aplikowania:


W razie czego, chyba wszyscy możemy pomóc w wyszukiwaniu 10 wartościowych postów (chyba nie jest to wbrew zasadom) no i oczywiście poprzeć kandydaturę.


A czemuż to nie? Nadajesz sie idealnie.
Myślę że powinien to być ktoś z waszej trójki. Ktoś chętny? Nie każcie sie prosić 

Wow, that's bold. Thanks a lot! And thanks to all the others who merited.
Just for the record, I didn't start this post to ask/beg for merits but just to flag the need for a merit source to the forum admins. But I'll do my best to share the merits I received on my local board. And since I received quite a lot and the activity on the Polish board is not very high, this should be enough for at least a few months.
I can already tell the merit activity this month is already MUCH better than it was in June.

It was announced yesterday that he'll be fighting Paulo Costa at UFC 294 in Abu Dhabi in October, so yeah, they were saving him for something special. If he wins, he could even get a title shot for the middleweight belt against Adesanya (if he wins against Du Plessis). Or he could fight for the welterweight belt if he chooses to go back down.
McGregor is fighting Chandler next, it was rumoured to be in December, but probably won't happen until early 2024.

Still, he looks pretty lean and doesn't seem to have much body fat, so I think this weight was intentional. He probably expected Tybura to show up much heavier than the current 246 and didn't want to be too far behind.
I'm more surprised at how good Tybura looked. You can say straight away that he takes this fight seriously and is interested in more than just collecting his cheque.
This fight could turn out to be much more interesting than I thought.

Yup, Dana White confirmed it today, Costa will be fighting Chimaev and yes, you guessed it right, Makhachev will fight Oliveira again for the title defense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsd1FY6J7dw

I disagree, career-wise Chimaev is a way better opponent for Costa than a relatively unknown Aliskerov. He'd be an underdog in any of those fights, but it's much less of a shame to get defeated by Chimaev, who currently has a reputation of an absolute destroyer. So all Costa needs to do is not to lose in too embarrassing fashion (i.e. survive at least 2 rounds or lose by decision) and he'd still be high in the ranks. Plus, the money and hype will be incomparably better.

Pretty much. For active use, you'd obviously need an online wallet (or hard wallet). It should still be a bit safer to generate keys offline, but if you need to transfer keys to an online wallet, that renders the air-gapping irrelevant.


Nope. As Loyce said above, if you ever connect your device to the internet (after generating keys) it's no longer air-gapped.

Also note that air-gapping is just one element of creating a secure address. Offline machine won't protect you if the random keys generator is not truly random, i.e. if keys are generated according to some pre-determined pattern, the attacker could recreate them and steal your coins.

I do understand where you're coming from but few things to consider:
- Merit history is publicly available, so when you have few people sending all merits between each other that could actually work against them i.e. they could get rejected from signature campaigns if a manager cares to take a closer look.
- This is not unique to local boards and abuse (or in-group preference) could happen outside of local boards.
- Finally, the idea is (or should be) to have every board "covered" by someone who is a merit source, this doesn't mean that local board participants who are sources have to distribute all their sMerits there, they could do it on other boards. Distributable merits are not earmarked.

So it all boils down to whether the right people are chosen as sources and whether their monthly allowance is of the right size. And also to whether campaign managers are doing enough to fight spam/low-quality posts.


Massive thanks (and to others who merited). Much appreciated.

Sure, but existence of ETF doesn't prevent anyone from buying and holding actual bitcoins. ETF is designed for institutional investors or for those who, for whatever reason, don't want to hold it themselves. And we all know that ensuring that our private keys are created and stored securely is not an easy task.
I wouldn't recommend anyone, who got into bitcoin just to trade it, to keep their coins themselves. The risk of losing them would be greater than with keeping them in an insured (I assume) ETF.


I don't think there's anything that prevents big whales from manipulating BTC price currently, so I don't expect introduction of the spot ETF would increase that risk.
The higher the volume, the less volatility. Not being able to experience another x1000 pump might sound bad at first, but it's a god thing in a long run. Due to it's nature BTC should still be steadily increasing in value and become more of a solid store of value than a high-risk-high-yield asset.



How exactly? In theory, nothing changes in that regard. Except maybe that with greater value, there's a greater incentive for governments (or other players) to try to highjack i.e. by co-opting devs and miners.

This. I'd never try to convince anyone to put their money into anything unless they explicitly ask for my opinion. First of all, I don't have a crystal ball and can't know for sure if something will go up or not, and I would feel somewhat responsible if someone invested their money because of my recommendation (even knowing that every adult person is ultimately responsible for their actions).
There are other downsides, if they follow your advise and are successful - they'll come to you again with even higher expectations, and if they lose - you'd be likely to blame as people love to shift blame on anything other than themselves.

That being said, I have no problem in recommending bitcoin as an interesting concept and alternative to the fiat system and show them how it works (and explaining all the pros and cons).

No idea if/what is the official process for requesting this, but Polish local board could really use another merit source.
To my understanding, we currently have only 1 source (malevolent) who is hardly active on this forum.

The stats say it all (credit to Rikafip), it's the local board with the worst merit/post ratio, despite high quality posts:


So I'd like to nominate any of the most active (and well respected) top 3 posters:
Tytanowy Janusz
wwzsocki
cygan

That's true, in the UK and EU, trading platforms are required to disclose “standardised risk warning, including the percentage of losses on a CFD provider’s retail investor accounts.”, so whichever trading platform you go to, you'd see an information in a prominent position stating the percent of retail investors (aka average Joes) that lost money on that platform. This is almost always above 70%, sometimes going above 80%.
That's a good indication of what to expect when starting your trading adventure.

The better alternative to active trading (or day trading) is investing long term. If you put your money in a well-research asset with strong fundamentals, than it's not hard to make a profit. But you'll have to be patient and will have to forget about withdrawing regular profits.

Allegedly Paulo Costa is hinting (on his twitter) that the reason for his pull-out is that he got contracted to fight Chimaev at UFC 294 in Abu Dhabi (October?) and this would make sense.
His fight with Aliskerov was a poor match-up in my opinion. Aliskerov would gain a lot by winning, but from Costa's point of view, it was a high-risk-low-reward move. And from the UFC perspective, Costa is still a well hyped-up fighter, so why waste his earning potential like that? Setting him up against Chimaev makes way more sense money-wise.


Not really. I can't find even a sparring footage on youtube.

Mocno radykalne zmiany. Najpierw wielka podwyzka sporo powyzej innych, najlepiej platnych kampanii, a teraz wywalaja ponad 40% posterow. Hhampuz ladnie to ubral w slowa, sugerujac ze powodem nie jest jakosc postow ale "decyzja biznesowa" ale na koncu dodal "I'll accept some new members when doing the payouts this week, too" - czyli, jezeli bedzie mial jutro wolne miejsca, to znaczyloby ze jakosc (albo to gdzie pisza) jednak ma znaczenie.
Rzeczywiscie wyglada to na kopiowanie (a moze kontynuacje?) strategii Chipmixera.

This is nothing new, plenty of times we have seen trading volumes of altcoins being higher than Bitcoin's (that's not to mention USDT, which constantly has its volume around twice as high as Bitcoin's).
As you said yourself, this is obviously driven by the recent news, and things are already returning to normal. Looking at the CMC right now, BTC's volume is over x3 times higher than XRP's. So the "dethronement" was very short-lived.