First time I'm hearing that, and normally Bill Gates favors crypto, so maybe that's out of context, or the source is not valid. Anyway, it doesn't really matter because fiat is still by far the most used system to support terrorists, so no point in blaming bitcoin for that. Even the FBI has already reported several times, that the bitcoin txs used for criminal actions is minimal, compared to fiat, or even other cryptos that are more private than BTC.

Really nice thread, and a very important theme of discussion in my option. At least if someone is serious about sports betting, and not just betting to get more emotion when they are watching the game.

I do the standard as well. My bets vary according to my confidence on the game (that is usually expressed by the odds as well), so I go from 1% to 5% of my bankroll, depending if I really think I will win or not. The goal is to "stay in the game" for long, so that in the long run I have profit because I'm making good decisions, and since I don't bet my hole bankroll on one bet, I will be able to keep going, even if I was unlucky on that bet.

I also make adjustments on my stake on a monthly basis, and not on a bankroll increase basis. Like I said, for me it's all about the long run. So after a month I adjust my stakes to my current bankroll. Of course that if my bankroll is decreasing, then I adjust it early, but if my bankroll is increasing I prefer to give it more time before making the adjustment. It normally gives me more confidence this way.

Most of the times I prefer betting close to the start of the game, because I have more reliable information at that time. Like you said a team might end up losing a key player due to injury, and that might affect the price. Of course that if I see an odd that I think it has value, I will take it, but I will never forget that bet and let it go in play without checking it's price again and the news.

I'm used to do trading, so I have no problems in closing my bet pre-live either with profit or a loss, depending on how the odd changed. Even if I just bet closer to the start of the game, I normally see the game live, and make more bets to lock profit or reduce loss, depending on how the game goes. I'm not a true punter, and I know a will leave a lot of money on the table, because of this, but I also get out of some bad situations.

It has been working for me so far, so most of the times, I make multiple bets on the same event, and it looks more like I'm trading than just betting.

You are completely correct about this. I'm not really paying to much attention to those details, because like I said I'm only doing this out of convenience, because I just want to find easy access to discussions I might enjoy participating in.

Since you touch on those points, I would like to say that I completely agree with you, and I felt everything you said when I first got on that post. It really needs better formatting. (I know you comments weren't for me, but I decided to say I agree with them, maybe it will have even more impact on cerebro415)


Hello again A Confused Shoe. Thanks for sharing, those are threads that I will definitely be interested in. Will engage in the discussion as soon as possible. I will also "pin" those threads for now, and see how the discussion goes.

Thanks for spamming the same information 3 times on the same day. I don't really see how that piece of information affects bitcoin in any way.
Craig Wright is not a bitcoin supporter for a long time. He is known in the community as the "fake Satoshi", and I guess that says a lot about him. Also, we all know he wanted to go for the segwit2x, so like I said, he parted ways with bitcoin a long time ago, and just follows his own personal interests.


For this I suggest you to see this videos from Andreas. For me it makes much more sense what he is saying, but maybe you think differently. You have the right to your opinion of course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4TjfaLgzj4


I don't really recall saying that, and it doesn't really seem like something I would say, because I don't follow FOMO either. I gather information, and I make my own decisions. I believe in bitcoin potencial, and I buy more every time I can. I don't usually tell people to buy it based on price, because I don't want soft hands on the market. I tell people to learn it's fundamentals, and then decide what they want to do. That's how investment should be done.

As for "FUD = truth" like you said... well you have the right to your opinion. A lot of the news presented in this thread, on the FUD section are just plain fake. Others don't influence bitcoin in my opinion. People can read it and think for themselves. That's all I want.

Thanks for sharing your links.

It's a bit of all to me. I enjoy the potencial profit it brings, since if bitcoin succeeds as a currency then it's value must increase a lot. I do believe in the tech itself, because bitcoin has an amazing potencial to become a top coin/currency to be used as store of value because of it's decentralized and scarce nature, and it's incredibly secure and "easy" to use (comparing it gold on being easy to use, because I do think that it's interface needs to improve a lot, before everyone can use it as a payment method).

It has a strong and solid tech base behind it, and it could bring amazing profit as an investment compared to the risk it holds.

Well, if the price is starting to go up, why would you sell? If you want to trade, then it's time to buy or hold your positions. If you want to be really safe about it, it's time to move up your stop losses for example. If you are in it for the long run, then selling is not an option right now, and since we are coming out from the lows, buying is the way to go.

For me, bitcoin enjoyed the news from circle buying poloniex, because it brings trust to the markets. I think we will form a lower high, on the daily time frame, and then enter an tighter equilibrium pattern, and should break either bullish or bearish from there. This set up should take a couple of days to prepare. I think the markets are favoring the bulls right now, so if we don't see any bad news, then we should break the $12k level, and make it as our new support, before the attempt to test the $13k or $14k levels.

Yes I've heard that, it's crazy, and I think it somehow legitimizes bitcoin. Mining is necessary to keep the network safe, that's their main purpose, and to see how much money is spent just to secure the network, shows how valuable it is in my opinion. They were even more profitable than nvidea, how crazy can that be. No wonder samsung is getting into crypto mining as well. Let's see how it goes (it will at least bring some good competition to the industry, which is always good).

Hi u9y42 thanks for sharing. I was aware of the pizza news, and it's quite interesting because of the "history" and "mean" it carries. I do hope that this is comes back to us in a few years from now, just like the purchase of the other two pizzas for 10k bitcoin did.

I need to see the rest of the links carefully, but I don't quite have the time right now, so I didn't add anything to the main post yet. I did check the link with the number of nodes and channels in the Lightning Network in real time, and that was pretty cool. I will definitely add that one for sure. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for sharing, I've read your post and it's a discussion I will probably be interested in participating. Can't do it right now, because I need to read the thread to see how the discussion is going, but I intend to do it later. Thanks for sharing.

@A Confused Shoe thanks for sharing. I did like your post, but the interest in fantasy sports never grew in me. I would give merit to your post, but I need to be picky, since I don't have that much merit to spent.

I think that using ethereum for gambling is just a very bad decision. Ethereum was not made for that purpose, it's suppose to serve as a platform for investments in crypto startups. It's not really supposed to be a currency. I guess you can gamble whatever you want, and people even bet houses and cars when they gamble, so it's ok, but it's not that convenient in my opinion, or at least it feels unnatural.

Personally I would use some private coins, if I think privacy is important in gambling, or other coins that are meant to act as currencies (so bitcoin, litecoin and dash would probably be my choices).

Well, since bcash fork I haven't claim any of my forks. Well I have claimed them, but I haven't sold the coins. I will probably do the same with this one, but I don't think it will as big as bitcoin. Don't forget that bitcoin will increase it's privacy with the lightning network, so although bitcoin private might be a good coin, I don't think it will be a rival to BTC, as most forks aren't.

I don't really agree with this point of view. I would accept it, if you mentioned high fees, but although price volatility might seem to be a problem, and it would be if the change was to rapid, I think that most merchants could just sell bitcoins as they get them. So they would just need a script to keep the prices accurate, regarding the latest changes, and then convert the coin back to fiat as soon as they got them. I'm sure there are many services from the major wallets, that would provide that service to merchants.

For instance, when you deposit bitcoin in neteller, you will get an exchange rate, and you will get fiat in your account. That service, that in this case is provided by bitpay if I'm not mistaken, could easily be used by any merchants, so the only problem I see are the fees and not the volatility.

Of course that right now, not even the fees seem to be a real problem, because segwit adoption is increasing, and LN is being developed at good pace, so things will get even better.

I did merit one of the posts, because it was a decent attempt to debunk the false argument that bitcoin is a ponzi scheme. Unfortunately a lot of people are miss-informed and for some reason choose to stay that way instead of searching for reliable information. You presented simple arguments that might help in that fight.

By the way, since you seem to enjoy participating in the fight against the misconceptions that rule the crypto space, I think you would like to participate in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2865338.0
Fee free to step by, and help the "fight".

(I will not pin any of the threads, because they are not what I'm looking for. I will also be deleting to post to keep this thread organized.)

From all of those coins you've mentioned I would definitely go for cardano, and I couldn't agree more that cardano is a coin for long term holding. Their project is very promising, but it will take a while to develop because it's very ambitious. It seems to be run by very competent developers, and their model of doing things is very professional, so I have very high hopes for this one.

I would add stellar to your list. It's a very underrated project in my opinion. Much better than ripple, and with a huge potencial, and already has some very good partnerships, where IBM is definitely their flagship. It can do so many things, light serving as a platform for new projects, just like ethereum, and is very good for micro transactions as well. I think it has great potencial, and it should overcome ripple with ease during this year.

I don't understand why people keep saying that a 10% drop is a crash, and that a 10% increase is an amazing bull run. People keep forgetting this is crypto, and that crypto markets are incredibly volatile. It's perfect normal to have these variation inside cryto markets, and this is just normal behavior right now. We had dips of 80% during these past years, but people keep comparing crypto to normal markets, but even in those normal markets, people seem to forget how volatile they were in the beginning as well.

Bitcoin might have around 10 years, but it's still in it's infancy. We keep hearing that, but everyone seems to forget it when they see 10% drops and increases in it's price. We still have low liquidity, and a lot of speculation because most people don't even know what BTC is. There is no reason to panic in my opinion, and if you look at bitcoin daily chart you would see that although those candles represent big moves (percentage wise), they look very healthy, and are quite similar to stock charts. Everything is fine with bitcoin, and there is no reason to worry.

You don't always need to have coins to participate in Airdrops, and I've actually participated in plenty of airdrops that only required you to make a registration in the airdrop, by providing your ether address. Some coins ended up with no value, bu others were quite good, and I still hold some, because they I believe those particular projects have potencial to grow further.

As for ICOs, I usually don't participate in them, because I prefer to see how the project evolves after the ICO finishes. There are to many ICOs out there, and even with research it's hard to pick one, because there are a lot of scams out there. I do participate in bounties for ICOs, since they are an easy way to get involved with the project.

As for the question of the OP, and think both methods are really good. ICOs normally provide more profit to project owners, since they work as crowdfunding. They are very risky, and maybe regulation will help in this matter, but they are very good options to get involved and support project development.

Airdrops are quite interesting as well, and they do have the potencial to provide some profit as well, because people will hold coins or even buy more coins so that they can maximize the amount of coins they will receive from the airdrop. When coins are freely given away, with no need to hold anything in order to receive the airdrop, it's still a good way of promoting the project, and allowing users to try the coin for free. If they see value in it, they will probably buy more and further support the project.

Thanks berrymenalo, it has good information, and it could be of good use to other users that don't quite understand how coin distribution works in the crypto ecosystem. I think you could make your information even better, if you added a few links with ICO and Airdrop alerts, since this way, they would not just know the difference between ICO and Airdrops, but they could also keep an eye on the actual dates of Airdrops, and get access to some ICO statistics.

(topic added to the 3rd post of this thread)

Well I guess that could be done, specially if anyone wanted to gather an exact number for statistic purposes or something like that, but I guess we all know that the spam would disappear, and probably a lot of users (mostly farmed accounts) would disappear as well. We can't deny signature campaigns are a huge business in this forum. Projects that run sig campaigns here, pay a lot to the users that are wearing their sigs. The payouts have decreased overall, but considering the number of users in each campaign, and the number of campaigns running, I would say it's a very big number.

If I go to the overview campaign thread, and look for the average legendary member payout, which I would say it's 0.01 per week, we are talking about an average of $360 a month for a few posts (considering BTC at $9k). This is not an over extended figure, so I would say it's really quite easy for a legendary member to get at least $360 for a few posts.

That's a really nice extra income, and in some countries that's actually quite a lot. If someone uses alts, they can probably win more here than they would on a normal job (again depending on the country they live). Given this, I would say it's easy to assume, that if this option would disappear, people would stop spamming.I still don't think this is the best way to solve the problem though, because advertising plays an important role in the crypto ecosystem.

Forum sections where it's not allowed to use sig are a good way to create good sections free of spam, and the merit system is a good way to promote good content and to prevent account farming. This is why I think we are going in the right direction here.

Don't know if more measures will be taken or not, but I would say these two alone, will help a lot.

There is nothing wrong with the price, and this is just normal consolidation in my opinion. The critical price for bitcoin is $8400. The bulls need to hold that level in order to try to continue with their target of breaking $12k, so that a move to $14k is possible. These things take time and although I would agree that markets are undecided yet, nothing is lost for now. Hopefully the $9300 was the bottom of our daily consolidation, and we will not start moving to the resistance level at $12k again, and try to break it.