Had this happen to me in the past, the good thing is that you'd still keep the merits, the bad thing is that you won't know where it came from, I mean if you're like me who opted to not use my email for notifications or my telegram account for notifs that is. Merits are irrevocable once granted, the sender won't be able to get them back, and the one that got sent merits with wouldn't be able to rid them of these merits even if they wanted to (and why would you want to in the first place).


I think the reason's just because it's way easier to implement something that's permanently granted rather than something that could be revoked any time, but I can see how your reason could be a possible motive for merits being permanent too. But if I rarely see someone delete a self-moderated post because they got cooked in the comments, most of the time they just lock the entire post to prevent further roasting which is a solid move from these people cause by all means, you have all the rights to rid yourself of the burning but they still choose not to, so props to that.

The way you said "humans" made me fucking chuckle, are you an alien from outer space crash landing on the planet a few years ago and now you're trying to make ends meet?? LOL

Kiddings aside, the very best solution for you is learning a skill that pays well, coding and webapp development/software development to name a few good examples, learning it so good you get certificates and degrees for it, and then starting your journey in a high-paid field. My friends who are in this industry chose cryptocurrency as their avenue as it's closest to home, given the fact that a lot of us are in here since the early days of crypto plus as a matter of fact, a lot of people in this industry pay their developers very well.

And even then it wouldn't really be enough, just right to "make ends meet" as you are saying. Thing is that depending on where you live, you may want to have two to three sources of income that are consistent or at the very least sustainable if you're going for investments. If you choose to just stick with one you're going to find it hard to just pack all your expenses for the bills, you might (most likely even) even not have enough money to even start up a savings account. Make your choice, live a comfortable life by not finding a new source of income or work your ass off and reap the benefits later?

While you are true, there's this thing that's called self-actualization. Not everone's born with the innate desire to become dirty rich and have all the nicest things on the planet. In fact, a good amount of people would rather just live contented with a pretty okay-ish amount of money in the bank, as long as they get to be what they want to be at the end of the day.

This is where those other careers come in. Engineers, Chef, etc. It's also possible for some people to get lost in the process and actually see these ventures as not only as a way to fulfill their dreams, but also as a way for them to earn money, which is also true since these careers are oftentimes part of the highest paid brackets. Plus, when money's already achieved and wealth is already secured, people are left wondering what to do next. If you don't know what you have or could do, you'd be left with bad apples and in turn use that wealth into something that's self-destructive. Drugs, Gambling, Alcohol, affairs.

So while earning money's tight and awesome, it's also fair for some blokes to actually reach for something else once you've got all your shit lined up already.

I think it's not just right, but it's a must for you to teach your children about investing and putting their money to work, and that of course, includes telling them just how much you're making, what that means, and how you guys are able to make it to give them a full overview of the magnitude of what they can make by investing their money.

Most parents teach their kids to save and call it a day, thinking that's all the money education they need to get by in life. That's simply untrue and a massive misconception, since all that's saving's teaching you is making sure you don't go broke poor when shit hits the fan and you can't get to work anymore. Investing on the other hand teaches your kids that if they play their cards right, they may not have to work anymore in the future. In my opinion children should be taught as early as 8 years old about the concept of money, how it works and how to make more of it. Most kids in this age would have warped senses of value and would literally think that money just grows on trees, so teaching them as early as possible about the implications of money would help destroy wrong insights they may carry until they grow old, and would heavily assist you in teaching them about investing as well.

Kinda sad that we can't really rely on the government for assistance when in the first place since History's oldest annals they were created for the sole purpose of helping the public, but you're damn right. You can't depend on a concept that is actively trying its best to deafen your screams for help and is constantly blind to your struggles.

So what to do right besides mutinying and making a living amongst the mountains with the tree people? Grind as much as you can that when things fall into place you wouldn't have to worry about how to find food to eat tomorrow. Living frugally is one of the best things you can do but if I may add up, you might want to learn a new craft or skill as well that pays great. If you're already in such a bracket then look into finding another job that would act as your side hustle. As of the moment you can't really rely on a sole stream of income to lift you out of poverty anymore, and that's true even for countries like Philippines where living expenses are a little bit cheaper than the rest of the world's. Find another income stream and use that to pile up on savings and investment ventures. Once you've accumulated enough wealth that your money-making systems are already sustainably generating income for you, you can drop it off and finally retire. That's the game plan today.

I'm not sure you get the idea here. ETFs aren't necessarily causing bitcoin's decentralization, cause if that was the case then it would've been decentralized years ago from the sole fact that MicroStrategy is buying off everyone's crypto holdings since 2014 if I'm not mistaken.

Furthermore, ETFs aren't necessarily selling these people bitcoin, yes the investment firms hold a substantial amount of bitcoin to support their buyers but at the end of the day, these schmucks aren't getting anything besides a paper that says they hold "this much bitcoin in BlackRock's keep", which doesn't really inspire confidence especially if you're someone who's been in and out of the crypto industry already. It's not becoming a tool for the corporate, it's becoming a full-fledged financial tool as it was meant to be years ago. You gotta understand that if you're asking for global adoption here, you're also going to have to deal with companies and corporate agencies wanting to have a piece of the pie, and in my opinion that's okay than this industry becoming a joke outside in and a small group of people who understands only themselves and no one else.

A few years ago, when I realized that I was falling off the deep end and is becoming addicted to gambling, since then, I've been very calm and collected and have not felt the need to really introspect and discern whether I'm an addict to gambling or not.

It only happened a single time too, thing about me is that when I found out something about me is wrong, I immediately do everything in my own power to fix and revert the issue back to working status. So when I realized that I'm becoming addicted to gambling after hearing my friends tell me that they think I am, and after realizing that I've been giving gambling more attention than it needs to, I started looking into ways to fix it and gladly I was able to not only relinquish these bad behaviors, but also set up a regimen that would help me become disciplined first and foremost.

If not for the quick realization that I had in 2020, and a supportive band of friends that I have, I may have really lost myself and my money back then. Which is partly the reason why I always advocate towards telling people you care about the most that you gamble, so you can be checked on right away.

As someone who's worked with webapp development as a community and project manager, and with an offline product which pretty much works like a regular casino as well, here are some of my thoughts and inputs

1. Running an online casino is way different from running an offline casino. When you manage an offline casino, it's almost always expected that your maintenance and management fees will always be a top expense on their end, not to mention the fact that they are going to be paying off employees as well, which is something that online casinos have been able to avoid for the longest time.

2. Capital for the most part. Money doesn't grow on trees, and even in-house employees and developers would need to be paid regardless of how they got hired or if they are a diehard employee. Not getting the proper attention and funding will lead to talents looking elsewhere and capitals being lost, projects going bankrupt and owners left with little to nothing to work with.

3. Yup. Most of the very expensive stuff that these online casinos have to shell out money on lies in UI and UX development, as well as backend and frontend along with licensing fees. All of these could be paid in one-time big time basis if they are hired on-the-go, and even if they were paid on a monthly basis they still would count as the highest paid employees in an online casino.

4. Online casinos all the way. most of the stuff that you'd have to really do that's major is make sure everything works and that you market the casino properly. Other than that you're good.

My heart goes towards those people who got injured, and fuck you to everyone who takes it too far when you watch games. Fuck all these parasocial relationships you're making up with your idols, and fuck you if you justify this type of behavior. It's one thing to love and show support to a team that you've stuck with for a long time, I myself have favorite teams in every ESport game that I chose to be a master of. But it doesn't fucking mean I'd walk the wire for them, let alone kill someone just because they were offending my favorite team.

At the end of the day these are people who got nothing to do with you. They probably don't even know you exist and you're out here hurting other people just cause they don't like your team? that's stupid. You're wasting your time and your life away for someone who's not gonna do the same thing for you, keep that in mind, everytime you get into a heated argument with someone who just talked shit against your team. Be sensible, be civilized. be a fan but don't be a dickrider. Know your limits and set boundaries against yourself and each other so you don't go out there stabbing people who you don't agree with. This is just insane man, how people can go out there and waste their lives all because of a fucking game of all things.

Not my win, but a close friend of mine and I was there to witness it.

We're just about to go on an out of town trip to unwind and actually mobilize plans for a bootcamp that we're trying to setup with our closest friends and smartest acquaintances, and for the lols, after buying enough groceries for 2 days on a local chain/mall we decided that we'd play some scratch cards and see who gets closest to winning. In the Philippines we have this scratch card game called "Scratch it" that, along with the added benefit of knowing whether you won instantaneously or not, also gives the player the chance to claim his winnings right then and there should he win a prize.

Unfortunately I didn't win shit, but that friend of mine won what I guess would amount to 60 bucks in USD, which is not really a lot but still is the highest amount of win amongst our friend group. He won and treated us to some food that day.

To digress a little bit, I think the reason why we don't have scratch card threads in this board is because there's very little to talk about them. Unlike other forms of gambling that are unified and systematic, scratch cards are fragmented and each provider may offer a different spin towards scratch cards, this and the fact that you instantly know when you win or not just makes it not worthwhile to talk about in my opinion.

I got a couple losses incurred all because of my slow internet connection, forcing my very impatient ass to refresh the page and see that the bet went through but the game/platform automatically tagged it as a loss, or in some cases literally losing internet connection on a whim, which arguably is the most uncontrollable yet the most annoying situation for me.

In the former case I got no one to blame but myself, personally being impatient and not waiting on the loading screen to really go through even though most of the time I have all the time in the world is what really causes me to lose these otherwise controllable games. I blame myself, I move on, I bet again. On the other hand, when my internet connection completely dies out on me, that's when I get the most angry about. Not only because I know I'm about to lose the bet/game I've been gambling on, but also because if you have a little bit of a background as to how the Philippine internet connection system works, every downtime like that you should expect to wait for a few days to have it reinstated, it's just how subpar the internet system in here is, so at the end of the day it's not really about the bet itself but the premise of not being able to access the internet and all my most visited sites and platforms for a few days.

In my opinion, and I already saw someone talk about this, it's not about winning or losing, at the very least it's all about gauging yourself whether you're still able to go the distance and gamble more, or if you've had your fill and are already on the verge of breaking down. It's not about how many you've already won or lost, cause in most cases this oftentimes lead to sessions that are dragged out longer than they are supposed to be, and a gambler that's already down on his luck and exhausted through and through.

I oftentimes get my fill of gambling after getting three wins or three losses, and this didn't come naturally, I literally forced myself into building a discipline that would allow me to get to this state. I found this magic number out by listening to my body and my mind whenever I gamble. Back before this strict gambling regimen, oftentimes it would tell me if I already am good for the day, but since I'm very stubborn and I always end the day on a positive note, I do not listen to it and end up spending more than I am supposed to for the day, exhausting me physically, mentally, and of course financially.

This also inadvertently lead me to becoming a gambling addict for a while, and if not for my friends who caught on it early and myself who's willing to rehabilitate, I might've been a goner now. So yeah, do not base your boundaries on wins or losses, depend upon your body's ques if you want to stay afloat.

I guess it could work but what's the point?

Personally, I get a rush of adrenaline whenever I play or wager my money on betting, that's primarily the reason why I bet in the first place. I live for the nervousness and anticipation that gambling brings and betting without using real money just takes the fun out of the game in my opinion. I mean in some cases and for some people, it could work well especially those who are trying to recover off of their bad gambling habits, as this allows them to still be able to enjoy gambling without having to spend money in the process, but for the rest of us who are gambling as responsible as we can and are literally just gambling because we want to take the edge off sometimes, this is not going to work.

I guess it's just another case of to each his own since again, this wouldn't really work for me, but even if it was there's just no reason for you to do so in my opinion. If you're having bad gambling problems gambling more wouldn't solve it, even if you take the money portion out of the equation.

For the hell of it, yeah.

Thing is, and this may not fall that much in topic since we're talking about football teams here, I'm an avid Valorant ESports enjoyer and viewer, and one of the biggest teams that I root for consistently is always Sentinels. They won the first ever official Valorant tournament back in 2021, but since then they have fallen from grace and have lost multiple games and tournaments due to bad playstyle, irrelevant tactics and a general sense of losing the competitive drive they had when they first played in the LAN servers(and only until recently did they start to show that they are one of the best teams on the planet for this game). Despite this I have remained an avid fan of them, and have made pub bets with friends in favor of Sentinels even though I know they have little to no chance of ever winning again.

The thing is that it doesn't even do anything to amp and increase the morale of the team whatsoever, I just do it because I love the whole roster and I want to support them whichever way I can even if it doesn't make sense. As of now, they have been making waves and have been getting their comeback storyline recently. Hoping they show more prowess the rest of the tournament.

It's pretty much like that US law where prostitution is legal, but if you were caught getting paid in money as a prostitute, you're going to be jailed. It's pretty much a way for the country's government to either pass up laws that wouldn't necessarily violate some human rights, or in this case in particular, to literally solve a fucking problem.

As somenoe who's gained access to the Filipino internet community's trends and setups, I knew for a fact just how massive online gambling ads are in this fucking space. Every micro-blogger/internet vlogger you would see out there is either sponsored by an unlicensed online gambling platform, or is a direct partner of theirs, luring and leading people into thinking that they can earn quick cash by playing in their site as compared to the regular casino's discretion of warnings, (you'd literally see these people saying how easy it is to earn $200 on a single session of betting, and to top it all off, they don't require any form of KYC) so yeah, glad to see that for once the government is looking at an issue at hand and is doing whatever they can in their power to solve a running problem.

saw this a few weeks ago and while I wouldn't really recommend the same stuff for the regular joe, if I'm not mistaken this one's pulled from a reality show and they basically had the opportunity to rig it in the guy's favor some way, couldn't find the proof for this as well so don't quote me on this, besides, that's not the point of my reply anyway. This video is a testament at just how deranged people could be when given the opportunity to go nuts. He knew he didn't have to bet his entire life savings on the line, the casino/banker even told him the same things albeit non-verbatim. He's pretty much had all the cards laid in front of him telling him to not do it and yet he went in with no lube towards a 50/50 chance at living like a broke college student once again. Luckily it all paid off in the end but we all know what happens when we do the same thing, we lose and we become the bums of the planet Earth.

That is why I love watching people like him who make the stupidest bets on the planet. Not because I want to see them suffer or lose money, but because in some way or another it eases the itch in my subconscious asking me to make these bets for myself for the lols. Watching these people makes me feel like in some way, I made that bet myself, with the added benefit of course that it's not on my dime.

You got a lot of things about gambling wrong. First off, gambling is never 50/50 in the real world. In an ideal world, where people are good with playing fair and not winning what they could acquire through brute force or technicalities they imposed upon the game, this could be the case, but we all know it doesn't work that way, if it does then casinos wouldn't be a surefire successful business venture in the first place. There's a certain level of edge against the house or the opponent no matter how you look at it, sometimes it's explicitly mentioned to make sure they don't get hammered by the law, sometimes it's kept a secret from the player since they deem the prospect of the money worth more than the jail time they may suffer.

You also got the idea of risks wrong. Risks are ever-changing, and in the case of gambling highly-dependent on your capacity. In practice and in paper, you increase your risks by betting large, and lessen the risks you take by betting small. That is why it's always a bummer to lose a grand, and negligible to lose a dollar. You can earn the dollar back easily, you have to work for your paper if you want the grand.

The idea of the juice being worth the squeeze is a little too vague as well. Cause at the end of the day how worthy something is, solely lies upon the person and what they deem as worthy and not. In summary, this post is nothing but a baloney in my opinion cause you're blabbering things you don't know and saying things that are otherwise not true. what the hell man.

The confidence of a person on a casino doesn't lie on how much their bankroll is. It lies solely on whether they are fun to play in, are they accommodating, and/or are they reputable in the industry. once a casino reaches these three criterias it's always a surefire shot that they'd be successful already, no more need for them to be liquid or whatever.

Besides, a successful casino wouldn't have to prove to their players that they can pay them, after all the intent here is to show the players what they stand to win, not the other way around. By showing the players that they have the bankroll to support their winnings it may even come across as them compensating for a massive flaw, which may deter users from gambling since why in the hell are you telling your people that you can pay them, it's like a rapper flaunting benjamins on a music video.

There's no need for casinos to flaunt or to inspire confidence to their users by means of showing them they are liquid. It may even be a detriment to the casino in many instances, and it doesn't really inspire that much confidence amongst the users as much as first-hand experiences do.

I'm a gambling man (at least I think), I've taken far greater risks than this that I could say with full certainty I wouldn't be too fazed by the prospect of a bitcoin. But in the face of getting a guaranteed reward with no strings attached against a higher reward with the catch of putting it into chance, I'd choose the guaranteed one all day. There's just no question about it. You as a gambler know that it's always better to get guaranteed rewards than putting it all into luck and chance-based mechanics, and even though 1 bitcoin's smaller compared to 5 bitcoin, In the face of a large amount of money it doesn't really matter anymore, regardless of if you didn't get the 5 bitcoin, by choosing the former choice you're already setting yourself up to a little over 70k USD, which is not so bad if I do say so myself.

I wouldn't persecute the others who chose to gamble their luck and play with the 5 bitcoin gamble, it's just not my cup of tea and perhaps have you made a more compelling comparison I may have chosen to play bets with you but it's just so easy, you're giving me all the things to work with and none for you, the choice is simple and I think a lot of people in here would agree with me too.

Too many choices geez! Although honestly don't mind being indicted into the DGAF/Thick Skinned Gang lol. I personally think of myself as someone who doesn't really get riled up when discussions get heated and I get called an idiot or whatever (although it may come as if I'm trying to be defensive at times)

How do we get into this massive mafioso cryptocurrency family though? Lol!

Do we have like a feature up for implementation where houses/affiliations or clubs are to be structured? Because if that's the case then it could become one of the most important Quality of Life changes in this forum. Just knowing that you got a closely-tied family in here makes it worthwhile to grind and be just as known as the top members in your clan if that would be the case.

if it's not the case, then it's a bummer, but I surely hope we live and stand for what the families you think you belong to is representing at the very least lol. Can't be part of the Thick-skinned gang and be a crybaby whenever you get called out in posts or whatever lol.