Yes for sure, during every Worldcup I am betting against my country. In my opinion it's the perfect strategy to bet your club and has nothing to do with loyalty. Some people might not understand it, but it has pretty easy idea behind. You basically use sports betting to hedge your emotions. So when your team wins you feel happy and don't worry about the small loss. As a real fan the win is always more important than the money. And when your team losses you feel bad, but at least can be happy about some money you won. After a devastating loss you can buy drinks from your bet. It's like getting drunk for free after a big loss. That is why I always place 4-5 bets on the top favorites at the start of the world cup and not bet on my own country. Only during some later matches I bet on them if it makes sense and they have a good chance of winning.

Obviously 1 million dollars, education is not so important for that kind of money. With 1m you can already get a decent asset manager that is well educated and will setup a good portfolio for you. Once you have a portfolio that plays regular dividends then you can just sit back and enjoy the side money. If you would pick the education instead it means that you paid 1m for the education which is way too much. The problem for even the best financial education is that if you have no capital to start with than it's really hard to make big profits. Reaching the first million is the hardest with and without education. Another thing is that if you are well educated than you are able to get a good paying job, still reaching 1m USD with a good salary is going too take a long time.

I am glad Vitality managed to win the Paris Major and remains the top CSGO team in the world. It's such a pleasure to watch them play and with a very one sided final it was also a nice way to make some profit. The next big CSGO tournament coming up is the IEM Dallas 2023 with the grand final next weekend. On Monday the group stage starts with a lot of good games coming up. For the first round I will stick to matches with a clear favourite to keep building up my bankroll again. Heroic vs 9z is one of the these matches, where I don't see any chance for Heroic to lose the game. The same goes for G2 vs Nouns, where G2 is going to win easily. FaZe vs Evil Geniuses is also very one sided and should be no issue to win for Faze. In my opinion it's always better to find a couple of these low risk / low payout matches to bet on instead of putting all the money just on one match. There is always the tiny chance that the clear favourite is going to underperform and lose the match with the best of 1 games. The closest match of the day is going to be Team Liquid vs Astralis, two very similar skilled teams. In March the two teams played each other and Team Liquid won 2-0, that is why I am going with a small bet on them for higher payouts.

No so far nobody has threatened me to stop gambling, I don't think this a very healthy way to end the relationship immediately because of it. On one side I can understand the wife, she feels betrayed by your friend that he his keeping such a huge secret from her and that he is losing a lot of money with it.   However, threatening to end a marriage over it seems a bit extreme to me.No idea how they run their household, in case they have separate accounts and both of them are working full time, then it seems fine to have some spare money to gamble with. But if they are low on cash and have bigger plans in life than it could be a huge issue to lose larger amounts of money. There will always be issues in a marriage and ending it all because of it seems wrong. A healthy relationship is realising there are issues talking openly about them. For me trust is one of the most important things in a relationship, that is also why I don't want to keep my gambling habit a secret. My advice would be to talk open about the topics in the future and don't keep big secrets from your wife.

That is an interesting idea, but I think that sitting 12h a day investing or grinding a video game is not a healthy situation. Any person above 30 is going to struggle with such a lifestyle for a longer period of time. In high school or university we have a lot of spare time, that's why so many teenagers and young adults spend countless hours in video games. But the human body is not made to sit in a chair for 12 hours, or stare at a screen for so long. When it comes to making money we need to find something that we can do for a long period of time and with a good reward/salary. Most jobs only are 8 hours a day. And if we want to trade for a living, so we really need 12 hours a day? It's hard to keep concentration up for so long. Maybe 6 hours well spent are enough for a decent profit and the other 6 hours only give a small additional bonus.

For the bull market season is definitely preferred over the bear market. When all prices are falling across the board it's hard to find good opportunities to invest in. In many cases it makes more sense to sell everything and switch into cash during a bear market. And once prices hit the bottom we can rebuy all our previous coins at a lower price. For long only investors like me, I don't really like the risk of short selling, a bull market offers so many more opportunities. But cycles can be quite long and always selling everything during a bear market can have risks by itself. When we are not invested we can always have the problem of missing out on short term price gains. That's why HODL investing is so attractive, you don't worry about the current season and only focus on the longterm trends. It's also a great way to reduce the time we need to spend on analysing and worrying about the market.

Sorry to hear about your family trouble, it's not fair how your uncle reacted and I hope you will learn from it for the future. My family is a bit different, we see each other regularly and are very close. Everybody in my family knows that I invest in crypto currencies for several years now and they don't really judge me for it. In the beginning they were worried that I would lose all my money. And after the big crypto hype they wanted me to sell all my coins. It took quite a long time to make them understand that I am in for the long run and not going to react to short-term price movements. By now they are all fine with my choices and accept them. For me it's all about being honest within the family and not getting judged by them. In case my uncle would react the same way like yours I would probably reduce the contact to a minimum.

Utopia Review by Mauser



Initial thoughts
I am happy to share my review of the Utopia P2P Ecosystem here with everybody. From this forum I heard for the first time of Utopia and their all-in-one program to include cryptos, communication, online browsing and shopping with secure payments. Any new software that offers anonymity and security in the online space is interesting to me and has a huge potential to attract a lot of customers. From the website I got a good initial overview of Utopia and what is all included in their program. They have a very easy to access and get around website, with the download button in the top right corner. The layout reminds me a bit of some older computer games and makes you interested to explore what they are offering.



Installation
The installation was straight forward, via the website you download their program in a few seconds which was around 200MB. I always prefer to download the whole file at once, and not have to wait during the installation because there are many more files being downloaded in the background. With Utopia it's not the case, you only need one file and installing it goes really quickly too. At the end it asks you if you want to open the program when the PC starts, which is nice because most other software just goes straight into startup without notification. After the installation you need to setup your profile in the App, where it directly asks for the location of the backups that will be used to store all the information secured by a password. That is a great way to already add a layer of security for our personal data.



Software
The Utopia software has a very intuitive design that doesn’t require a lot of time to get used to it. You can jump between the different sections at the top of the program and all information will be stored in its own windows. It’s a great way to combine a lot of different functions into one overall software. The first windows are the Channels & Chats windows, where you can talk to support and other users. The chat reminds me of the good old days of IRC chats, you see all other user that are online at the right side and can easily send private messages to each other. On average there were 100-200 online users whenever I was in the channel. The third window is the uMail where you can send longer messages to other people, here it helps to create different contacts and folders first to keep everything organised and stay on top of things. The next window is the All Channel window that shows us 3900 available channels we can join to contact other people. There are a variety of different channels, for special topics like mining or music and also language specific channels if people want to communicate in their own languages. The most important window is probably the Wallet channel where we see our Cryptons CRP holdings, which you can use to pay and transfer money around. The program also offers us the chance to convert CRP directly to the Utopia USD (UUSD) coins which seem to be a stable coin. And then there are two games on the platform itself Chess & Poker that we can play against other users. Chess I didn’t manage to test yet as I had no other person to play with. The Poker room was more interesting for me, there was one table open which had buyins above my league so I couldn’t join. To still test the features, I opened my own room with my own rules and could choose much lower limits. It took 3-4 minutes for some other player to show up and we managed to play for half hour. It’s nice to see so many different things being combined into one single platform.



Improvements/Open Issues
The software seems to be already running quite smoothly and I am not sure how much it can be improved more. One thing I noticed however was that the internet traffic is quite high when it idles the software, this might be the case due to some mining in the background. But for some people like me that only have a limited internet access sometimes that can lead to some problem. Maybe it could be nice to give the option for the users to allocate a certain bandwidth limit for the App itself, so that it doesn't slow down other internet usage. Another issue that I found when going through the large number of merchants working together with Utopia was that some website where not active anymore and others where blocked by my antivirus program. With such a large number like 1856 different merchants being available on the Utopia network, there can always be some companies that stop existing. But maybe you could make periodical checks on the companies to exclude all the ones not active. Especially when on the first two pages of stores in the sub categories websites are not working it feels a bit strange. One way could be that sort your merchants based on the number of clicks they receive, so that the most popular ones are always on top. That would also let everybody see where the other spend their coins. Also, another thing is that some merchants are only available in certain countries, so maybe it could be worth it to add a filter to only show merchants that work in countries we live in.

It seems that most people here on the forum would prefer the reward to review your casino be in bitcoins, which isn't a bad option at all. It gives everybody the highest flexibility as they can choose to do whatever with their money. It would also be my choice of reward if I can choose freely. But given that you are operating a casino and will likely have to offer free games and a certain balance for anybody to review all your games, you are already giving out a lot of bonuses. Another approach could be that you only focus on giving every reviewer a higher starting balance. Instead of paying out a fixed bitcoin amount you could just let everybody keep his balance he has on his account after the review. For example, if you start with giving everybody 30 USD as an initial bankroll for people to check all your games, then people could withdraw the money they manage to keep in the end. This makes the payouts a bit more random, but offers the best way for people to check out all the games on your casino.

That's an interesting take on live roulette gambling and the user seems to have really investigated the topic. I have heard about it in the past that the roulette ball and wheel can be  manipulated to give one party an advantage. The question is would you risk your whole reputation to scam a few customers? I know from some physical casinos that also run online live roulette tables and they use the exact same tables as in their physical casino. If news come out the tables are not legit than the casino could close it's doors, nobody would visit again. I don't think the risk pays of for the casino, because roulette is already a profitable game by itself. The green numbers 0 and 00 ensure that long term the casino will make money with their tables. Hopefully this was a minor incident and won't be discovered at other casinos too.

For me it's the other way round, I introduced much more people to crypto currencies than to online gambling. Which is probably the case due to most of my friends already interested in online gambling before the crypto boom. Back in 2007/8 I heard for the first time of online poker, and during my university time 5 years later I spent a lot of time playing poker online. All of my friends had accounts at the big websites and since then we still play from time to time in the same tournaments. And now most of my friends have families where the wife would not allow them to gamble again. So there is strict split between guys that have been gambling for 10 years and still do so today, and more family orientated who had to stop and are only allowed to visit a physical casino one night in a year. It's kind of hard now to find new people who have no experience in online gambling, but would like to give it a go. As for crypto investing, there are many more people that have heard about it but have no experience and would like to try it. It's true that it involves a longer conversation as they want to know all the risks involved, but so far I didn't get any complains from friends I introduced to bitcoins.

I fully agree with you, gambling can't be looked at as a secure, constant and guaranteed way of income. By nature randomness is involved in gambling, and even with the best possible strategy we won't be able to always win. The professional Black Jack players only manage to shift the expected values from slightly below 50 percent to above 50. It's not like they are going to win now every session they play, it's only the more they play the higher their chances of making a profit. That is why it's so important to look at gambling as form of entertainment and not a form of income. Gambling is only a business for the casino and it's a job for the people working for them. When we only use the money we can afford to lose and don't rely on making a profit it's not going to be an issue.   

I noticed the same over the last few weeks and thought that it was due to me being categorized differently by the YouTube algorithm. Lately I watched more gambling related videos, like top slot winners by streamers and the laat big poker tournaments. Also because of the death of Doyle Brunson there were a lot of new best of videos from his long poker career. After watching all these videos I see now 1 out 3 ads are for gambling. But if other people here have similar experiences than it might be that the gambling industry is focusing more on video advertising on YouTube than on other social media. It's not a bad sign to see the gambling companies be more profitable and have more money for advertising. The only issue I have is if the companies take away the money from bonuses and focus more on new customers and not the existing ones.

So you mean that your friend told you become very rich by investing in bitcoin? I am sorry to tell you but the times where you can become very rich in a short period of time with bitcoin is over. Everybody in the world has heard of bitcoin by now, it's not a secret anymore. The times where you could mine a lot of coins or buy them cheaply is also over. Which doesn't mean that bitcoin isn't a bad investment, compared to other asset classes bitcoin offers a lot of advantage and should be part of any portfolio these days. It's important to have realistic expectations about the returns of bitcoin. If you are fine with making solid returns over longer period of time then you should definitely buy bitcoin, but if you are looking for a way to get rich overnight than you should be looking at the alt coin market and take more risky coins.

Bitcointalk Profile Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=854667
Bitcointalk Rank: Hero
BTC address for payouts: bc1qtx4fxqc2sezsyprgwyt76p8ttw09njsrn7jfyp
Utopia Public Key for CRP payouts: A932768A5E1565D5E9355E283C9B3F28051B755D85AF08C8A85F762AADDC0851

There is one big reason that ChatGPT can't help in poker and that is it would get banned by casino. Already in chess we have computers that are much stronger than human opponents and would make any form of competition unfair. That is why using software in chess tournaments is banned. In poker there might be a brief period of time where ChatGPT is allowed, but once the use becomes common the casinos will have to react. If ChatGPT becomes allowed permanently, then it would transfer the player base to only gamblers with computer support. Let's say you are an amateur poker player that plays a few times per month that only plays for fun. Usually you would only make small wins or losses over time, but all of a sudden you tend to lose large. If that happens a few times in a row, it's not going to be fun anymore and you will quit. So eventually the poker table will only be filled with ChatGPT bots, where nobody has the edge again. I hope that's not going to be the future of Poker.

I fully agree with you, it makes no sense to wait for the best possible time to buy bitcoins. If you have the desire to own crypto currencies you should at least make the first step today and not keep watching from the sidelines. Finding the perfect time to buy and to sell coins is like playing the lottery and can end up letting us focus too much on the details and forget about the big picture. In case we have capital that we don't need and is only held in a savings account than I would consider moving it into bitcoin. That doesn't mean we should be buying all the coins at once for our money. The best approach when it comes to buying cryptos is the DCA method, which means we are buying a fixed amount of our fiat money over a long period of time. That could be buying every week or month for a year our coins, depending on our free capital available. Like that we don't have the issue of worrying too much about the current price. The chances are much better to achieve a good average price over a longer period of time, than with one single price.

Maybe in 30-50 years, but not right now. The first step would be to get rid of physical cash and only use electronic money, the second step would then be to switch from fiat money to crypto currencies. The problem is that already the first step can't be done in a few years and will take probably 15 years. If I look at my grandmother for example, she only uses cash. All the banking and using her cards is done by my uncle, without cash she would be lost. I think that most elderly people can't be forced to stop using cash, and the politicians won't push it as they are afraid to lose the votes. With the second step to switch to cryptos it would be difficult to get all people to adopt them. If I look at my parents, they have heard of bitcoin but never owned any and are quite sceptical to use them.

All the big streamers have special contracts with the casinos they promote, because they can attract much more people than the average gambler through his friends and social media accounts. We can't really compare their attractive payouts to any standardized scheme that is for most users. First of all the casino will only reward us as a small percentage from the money our referrals bring in. In case our friends and social media contacts are not really into gambling than they won't be spending a lot of money and our referral bonus will be tiny. People who are watching gambling streams are already interested in casinos and gambling and are much more likely to actually spent money. The big streamers already have a target audience whereas most people would need to build it up. Also not everybody can become a big streamer, it's not only about gambling a lot and let other people watch. The streamer also needs to have an outgoing personality to engage with his viewers and keep them entertained.

I agree with you that taking away something that is already used by others is a bad idea, and is contrary to the freedom and independence idea behind crypto currencies. It took me a while to understand the concept of ordinals and still I am not convinced that they are really needed. Which doesn't mean that others can't see a great value in them. I also never bought any NFTs and found the whole idea of owning digital pictures a bit out of order. But just because it's nothing for me I don't want to decide for everybody else. My main concern is the impact of the transaction fees for bitcoin. If fees keep increasing because of the idea demand than it's a bad situation for all of us and needs to be addressed. We still need to figure out however how long lasting the whole idea is. With NFTs it was a huge initial boom that eventually quite down, maybe with ordinals it will be the same.