I would be very careful in your case when investing larger sums of money in Bitcoins because of the illegality in your country. As long as the political situation is unclear in your country it might be hard to convert the Bitcoin back to Fiat money again. Maybe there is already a political movement that wants to legalise Bitcoin and it's only a matter of time before things change for you. It's still a big risk right now and I am not sure how the laws are for you about money from illegal activities. Could it happen than when you want to transfer money back to your bank account from selling Bitcoins, that it will be confiscated? Also don't be fixed on a specific time frame when it comes to Bitcoins, it sounds a bit that you expect a price of above 100k USD in 2025. There is no guarantee to for it to happen, it could be that it takes a few years longer to reach a new ATH. Just make sure you don't invest money that you need in the near future for your university fees or other important things.  

In my opinion the whole idea of public advertising is going to shift more in the future and taking down gambling ads from football T-shirts is not going to have a big impact. Having flashy big advertising on TV is nice to promote a company, but haven't we all already heard of the company before? It's not like we see it for the first time. Usually the TV ads is just one part of their whole marketing strategy, which is likely going to change more in the next year. It's all about having ads reaching directly the people who are interested in the topic.  These big football matches have millions of people watching the games on TV, which all has to be paid for by the company to display their company logo, even though many of the viewers are not even interested in gambling. It would make much more sense to have advertising on the phones and internet which focuses on people who have gambled in the past.

Do you mean multiple trades within one asset or across multiple different coins? I don't really see the problem with running multiple trades and strategies in the bitcoin market as long as you can fully understand them, stay on top of them and most important you make money from them. But if you are running multiple strategies with different crypto coins than it could become too much to handle and staying uptodate in all the markets at once is difficult. In my opinion it's better to fully focus on one coin instead of spreading out our time and money if we are trading actively. In case we want to invest only and not touch our positions for a while, I would recommend to spread our money out. But in the end it comes down to what suits us best and where we are the most profitable. From what I read from you it sounds like your friend is struggling in his current setup and it would make sense to change his trading approach.

I am no expert on green energy, but I looked into solar energy for my dad who thought about putting some panels on our roof. The main problem with green energy is that it all depends on the location where you put them. In our case it just didn't make sense to put down solar panels because they wouldn't profitable long term, the amount of sun we are getting is not enough and once the government substitutions run out it wouldn't make sense anymore. In wind energy it's very similar, the wind turbine need to be placed in areas with the most wind. The best place for them is actually in the ocean, as there can be much bigger turbines than on land. The problem is that most people don't live near an ocean. The best would be if we can transfer energy over large areas without any loss, unfortunately technology is not ready yet to store large quantities of electricity. 

I agree with you, a bitcoin price off 100k or 150k USD is definitely possible during the next big bull run. I am not sure about the timing though, if it's really going to take 5 years for bitcoin to reach such levels. In my opinion it could happen a lot sooner and we should be more optimistic after the halving next year. Also it's good to have a plan in place what to do with your coins once we reach certain levels. At 100k USD I am not going to sell any of my coins, at 150-200k USD I would consider taking profit in 30% of my bitcoins. The rest I am going to hold even longer. In the past I made the mistake of selling all my bitcoins at once, only to regret my decisions a few months after. After that I told myself to never sell all my coins, it's better to only sell fractions. Because nobody knows how high bitcoins are actually going to rise. 

I agree with you that crypto currency investments are more suited for young people than the older generation. With real estate it's a bit different because it requires so much capital. When looking at the time frame of real estate deals you would expect more younger people to go for it when we need 20 years to pay back the loans. The issue is that we usually need to invest 20% equity for the bank to give us a loan. Without support from the family it's nearly impossible to get a deal done. That's why it's so much easier to invest in cryptos our small amounts of money, and to accumulate more capital before buying our own apartment or house. Another issue is that investing in real estate usually means that we put most of our money on a single deal. The risk is much higher than when having a well diversified portfolio.

I don't even remember when the last time was that I visited a physical betting parlor. There are still a few in my city, but I never see people in there when I pass by. It's a surprise to me how they didn't close down yet. Online sports betting is definitely the future, it's so much more convenient to place bets from the phone or PC. Among my friends everybody is placing their bets online these days. Even though the fraction of friends who use bitcoin sportsbooks is small it's my preferred websites. For me the best way is to deposit fiat money and withdraw in crypto currencies. Like that I can grow my crypto portfolio with my winnings, and then get a nice boost on winnings when crypto prices are rising.

I don't think the problem is within the crypto community, but rather a general problem we have in society today. People are not thinking critical when it comes to money, because there is no financial education in school. We never really learn how to deal with money properly and become to easily excited about false advertising. When objectively looking at all these scams out there we should notice in 90% of the cases that it's good to be true. It's all about developing some common sense when dealing with money, that includes cryptos currencies. Another problem is that the crypto community is still new and not regulated that much. It's easier for scammers to take advantage and it's harder to trace any stolen funds. The best thing we can do is to promote all the major scams, so that nobody else falls for the same trick again. Unfortunately it's hard to avoid all the scams and it takes in some cases the pain of losing money to be more sceptical in the future.

I don't think casinos can really be decentralised, because they need one main server to run all their games. If they would not centralise their whole software it becomes very hard to ensure safety for the customer and security for the money being deposited. Since the casino is in charge and also liable for all the profits they must make sure that no unauthorised person has access to confidential data. If there was an issue with personal data being stolen I think that many gamblers would be switching casinos. As for my favourite games I like most casino games that involve cards, so my top games are Poker, Black Jack and Roulette from time to time. Gambling is mostly based on luck, not on skill. There are some strategies we can use to increase our winning chance, but there isn't one strategy that will always let us win. That is also why I would never use leverage to try and boost my gambling profits. The risk is too high that we just lose more money and then will be stuck with a bad loan we need to repay.

In CSGO the Paris Major is around the corner and we are having the first matches for the 8 spots in the Legend Stage happening on Monday. The matches are best of 1, so the teams need to give everything and can't make any major mistakes. There are still a few weaker teams in the tournament which leads to some pretty one sided matches where I hope to make some small save returns. One of the most sided match will be G2 vs TheMongolz, where G2 should be winning this match easily. And FaZe is going to play against Monte which should be a clear win for FaZe. The two closest matches on Monday will be OG vs ENCE and NiP vs MOUZ, the teams are very equal in strength and the matches could be going either way. I am going with ENCE and MOUZ for the two matches but only in a small size to not risk too much. Better to save some money for the big matches happening during the major.

It's because the whole world became so connected and most big corporations have a global supply chain. The manufacturing and production of most goods happens in different countries then where the products are being sold. And between all those countries you have a huge logistic industry that relies heavily on cheap fuel and energy. Let's say a company buys cheap material around the world that will be shipped to country A for production and then shipped to country B to be sold. If now food prices rise globally, the workers in country A will ask for a higher salary which will lead to higher cost for the product. On top of that are fuel prices rising and making the transport more expensive. This means that in country B not only fuel and food prices are rising, but also all the products produces in country A. So the salaries in countries B have to rise even higher. It's a spiral that keep spinning globally and it's hard to stop.

That's an interesting concept to focus on time management to have free time every week to focus on trading. I would expect that most people here on the forum are doing crypto trading in their spare time and have a full time job that consumes most of their time each day. That is why I mostly focus on the weekends on my investment portfolio. Depending on your family duties you might be able to spend 1-2 hours in the evening on cryptos. It makes a lot of sense to evaluate our daily tasks and categorise them into necessary, important and waste. If we can cut down on some activities that don't provide any benefits for us it's already a win.

It's really hard to compare the value of fiat money overtime without adjusting it for inflation. A 30 year time period is a very long time if you assume a 2% inflation per year. The problem is if you don't invest your money for such a long time and lose purchasing power every year. I still remember in the 90s where 1 million USD was a huge sum and it actually made a difference. Today a family owned apartment in a good neighbourhood can already make you a millionaire, even if you have no money at all in your bank account. It's best to get away from fixed numbers, like saying I need 100,000 USD in my bank account and I will feel rich. It's better to look at your wealth in terms of what you can buy with it. Everything is relative to the price of goods you have to pay. Another solution would be to move to cheaper locations. With 100k USD you won't get far in Singapore, but you will feel like a king in Philippines.

Danke Willi für ein weiteres Gewinnspiel.

Ich probiers diesmal mit der 13:

13 - Mauser

Schönes Wochenende und Viel Glück an Alle

To a certain extent the AI will give predictions without emotions compared to humans, but it will also be different in the weight it gives to different informations. The AI is much better at gathering a lot of information in a short period of time, the difference what we humane can offer is the importance we give to each news. When reading an article the AI will likely give the same weight to all the information in there. Whereas we humans can focus on the most important topics. I am still surprised that 1 out of 4 users here would trust the AI predictions. It might be good to use AI data as another layer of information, but I would never trust it blindly with my money. Also, wouldn't the bookmakers use AI to adjust their odds when it turns out that they predict betting outcomes with high accuracy? In the end the bookmaker would start losing money if everybody would use AI to pick the winners.

I wasn't sure if this is really the case, it definitely makes the most sense. The code behind the casino games should know instantly if we lost or won, and only takes a longer time to display the results to make it more interesting and exciting for us. Slot machines are very visual games that use different themes to attract players. Even in online roulette games I would expect it to be the same. It's only in physical casinos where we have to wait for the wheel to stop spinning before we can see who won and who lost. Like your friends I also don't like the autoplay button and always spin myself. It's more time consuming but I feel more in control and can stop when winning some money. So far I haven't noticed any patterns in slot games and aren't really looking for some. My favourite pattern in gambling is at roulette to pick the opposite color when there are 6-7 reds or blacks in a row. This is of course superstitious and no real pattern.

That's an interesting point I haven't thought about yet. I agree that ChatGPT is not there yet to take over all human decision making in gambling and online Poker. But there could be a time where AI will surpass is humans in gambling, like it happened in many other games. The real question is how will people be able you use it in poker if there are large sums of money involved. In chess for example there are computer programs that are much better than humans for years now, and still online tournaments are being played. The main issue here is that games can be analysed quickly to see if a machine or a human was playing. I would expect the same thing to happen in online poker. The use of advanced software will likely be banned and punished harshly.

Yes there are some losses that I think about from time to time, but I wouldn't say that they are haunting me. Over the years I accepted that there will be bigger losses in gambling, it's part of the game and we can't avoid it. All my losses have never been so big to a car from it which is probably why it's easier to live with them. My biggest ever gambling loss came during my first trip to Las Vegas, I managed to lose around 1200 USD in 1 or 2 hours playing roulette. That was already 5 years ago and I still think about it today. My main problem is not losing so much money, but rather how I lost it. The whole evening I had been drinking alcohol and was quite drunk when my friends decided to start gambling. After that night I said myself to never gamble when drunk again. Drinking 2-3 beers during a night is fine, just not getting wasted. If I had stayed sober that night I would have quit much earlier before my losses reached such a high level. Now I am more relaxed about it, as long as you are learning something out of your big losses it wasn't for nothing.

I know similar people like that as well, they don't have a lot of money and still they will buy the new Iphone every 2 years. Which is insane in my opinion, why would you cut back on your monthly expenses by eating crappier food, don't go out so much anymore and only buy the cheapest clothes, with the whole purpose of having the newest phone? It makes no sense to me as all the components in the older Iphone are still fine and can be used. It would be no problem to run around with a 4 year old Iphone if there wasn't the whole prestige thing with it. As for buying Apple stocks I never considered purchasing some myself. I do own some as part of the ETFs, all the stock indices from North America will include some Apple stocks. Not sure though if it's a good time to buy now. In general Apple is a well established company with stores all around the world, so it's a decent investment. It's just that the stock price is quite close to it's 52 week at the moment, maybe it would have been better to buy the stocks earlier during the crisis last year, or wait for the price to drop a bit again.

I noticed that the number of rehab facilities seem to grow over the last few tears, or at least the advertising from them. These days there seem to be special rehab programs for all types of addictions. It's a good thing as people also seem to be more willing to seek help and try to change their situation. The difference between a drug, alcohol or gambling addiction is, that in the latter case you are likely to use much more of your money. In severe cases you might even gamble away all your savings before realising that you need help. So it might be much harder for a gambling addict to afford rehab. Hopefully there is special assistance programs in place for the most serious cases. Personally I have managed to stay clear of a gambling addiction, even though I already gamble for many years. This might be due to the strict rules I put on myself, with the most important one being to have a fixed gambling budget for every week or month. Having a hard cap on my bankroll helped to not chase losses, which usually leads to even larger losses.