Sorry but this concept is not going. If everybody only wants money without working for it than the economy is going to collapse. Let's say that only the people who really love their job will continue working and everybody else quits, hoping that crypto currencies and the government assistance programs will take of everything. Than we would all be in big trouble. A country can't function without money. Who would stand up in the middle to bake your bread, collect trash from the streets or cleans toilets. There are so many jobs that if we would money for free nobody would be doing it anymore. Also what me and making money for you? 5% per year? Or 100? It still comes down to how much capital you already own. Starting from 0 is very hard.

Sorry to hear that your friend lost everything, but this doesn't come as a surprise to me. Gambling is not a profession that can be used a full time job in my opinion. We all know that casino games are designed in a way to guarantee the casino is making long term. The so called house edge can be found in almost every game and means that if the number of gamblers and games played is large enough the winnings will be close to the expected values, which are positive for the casino and negative for the gamblers. The randomness aspect of gambling of course means that there can be winning and losing streaks, but this is not going to be the norm. Also there is no real winning chance for most of the casino games, so we can't rely on gambling as consistent form of income. It's good that your friend is looking for a normal job again and tries to get life in order. Hopefully he has learned his lesson and will use gambling in the future as a form of entertainment and not as form to reliable income.

You can get all the information you need to make your mind about boxing or the UFC from the internet. I wish I could name you some websites that have a lot of statistics, but I am not so much into boxing or UFC. My main sports I follow and bet on is football and some esport games. It comes natural to me to stay informed and uptodate on the sport as I have played in the past myself and I always check the news about some changes. You are right that football is completely different from boxing. There is a huge league in football with many games every week. All the teams meet multiple times during a season, so you have constantly changing odds. And also it not only depends on your own performance to become the champion during a season, but also on the performance on the other teams. In boxing it's much simpler as you have less matches in a year and the big title fights is only between two people. Which also means that it's harder to stay uptodate on the boxing news as there will be much less coverage in the time between the fights.   

Another crazy gambling related story. It always surprises me why people would bet so much money if they can't afford to lose it. By now everybody should know that there is no sure win when it comes gambling, we need to be prepared to lose our money if we gamble regularly. That is why the number one rule is to never gamble with money that we need in the near future. Trying to argue that there was a fraudulent transfer seems not very logical in today's time, we can follow any transfer and there will be records that show where the money went and for what it has been used. But still 7 years seems like a long prison sentence given that they both pleaded guilty. What I don't understand is that there is an option for a fine, does that mean they don't have to go to prison if they pay the fine?

I would say that income doesn't really factor into if you are a responsible gambler or not, because even the highest monthly income can be gambled away if we try hard enough. Let's say you only have 100 USD free monthly to spend on yourself, or even less than that, than you could still gamble with it. There is nothing wrong with only placing small bets or play games that don't require too much money. A person that plays a few rounds of slots every week, or that spend 10 USD on scratch cards and the lottery is also a gambler in my eyes. Even though he doesn't spend much money in total, compared to his overall bankroll he is spending much. And if someone doesn't spend above his means than I would consider him a responsible gambler.  On the other side, if someone has 2000 USD every month free that he can spend on himself, but he gambles so much that he loses 4,000 USD then he is not a responsible gambler. It's all about staying within our means and keep our gambling expenses relative to our total bankroll.

That is not an easy answer we can give here. In general it makes sense to spread out investments across a broader spectrum of asset classes to reduce the overall risk profile of the portfolio. Diversification is the main concept insurance companies use to try and generate a steady income over time, while protecting the asset against downward risks. That is why the investment guidelines for pension funds are quite long and restrictive. For example, there are fixed percentages on how much the fund can put into stocks or hold in cash. And then are single stock limits the don't allow the fund to put more than 2-3% into one single stock. With so many restrictions I don't think that older pension funds are allowed to invest in crypto currencies. For more newer funds that have been created in the last 3-5 years there might be a small fraction of the capital be allowed in bitcoins and other crytpos.

As a CFO your job is not really to invest the money of the company in stocks and cryptos. For that there is usually a chief investment officer (CIO) that has to trade within fixed guidelines with some form of oversight in place. The job of the CFO is rather that the company meets it's financial liabilities and following the regulatory requirements. The CFO clearly overstepped his boundaries and got punished for it. It doesn't matter that he wanted to repay the losses with future winnings, it's not how it works. Using the money that we can afford to lose is fine for a private person using his own money. But when you are using company money make sure that someone gave the okay for the trades. The CEO should have been involved in the decision making process to avoid any jail time.

Bitcoins became quite popular in the last few years and attracted a lot of new investors. Especially institutional investors were looking at ways to quickly buy large quantities of crypto coins. Moving large sums of money peer to peer is much harder and requires a lot of work compared to a centralised exchanges. I think that for the average investor who is looking to buy a few hundred USD worth of Bitcoin it's fine to engage in decentralised transactions. But for any larger corporation the advantages are with a big exchange than can quickly process their trades. Even with the scandals we had in the past where an exchange got hacked, or scammed the user out of their money, it's still attractive for many investors. Personally I have uses centralised exchanges regularly in the past and think that security risk is not that big if we regularly withdraw our coins. It makes no sense to leave our funds at the exchange for a long period of time.

Obviously food is more important than investing. What good does a big portfolio if we don't have enough money to buy food? Over the last 2 years food prices have risen a lot, we still face inflation rates of 8-10% today. That makes life very difficult for some families and I agree to focus on the essential things in life before investing. But once we have some spare money left at the end of the months we should definitely invest it. The high inflation makes sure that our cash and savings become worthless over time. The only way out of the inflation trap is to invest. Why not consider combining our need for food and investing. We could look for companies that produce and distribute food and would directly profit from the rising food prices. Or if we have some more money at hand we could look for buying some cheap farm land and rent it out to the local farmers. And instead of asking for monetary payments we could ask to get paid in produce. Getting access to healthy and fresh food became harder during the covid pandemic and will likely get even more expensive in the future.

First of all welcome to the forum and good luck to your crypto endeavours. This is quite a small sample sizes and you still have more people voting to buy rather than to sell, that is why I would recommend you to buy at least small part of bitcoins already with your salary this year. There is no strong conviction for any action at the moment, all we see from your picture is that people are unsure what the future is going to bring. And the best case in such a scenario is in my opinion to buy at least some coins. Let's say prices will rally in the near future (scenario 1) and you missed your window to buy, then you will feel terrible for not buying earlier. The second scenario would be that the prices are not changing any time soon, then it doesn't really matter if you are invested or not. And the third scenario would be that prices are falling, which is not such a bad situation either. Because as long as you are not selling your coins you are not losing any money and eventually the prices are going to rebound. It's hard to go for the perfect time to buy and sell our coins.

This weekend is a CSGO online tournament - Brazy Party 2023 - is happening with some nice matches. It's a good opportunity to bet on some one sided matches. Unfortunately BIG my favourite German team is already out in the last place. The first match today is going to be GamerLegion vs ENCE, where ENCE is a much stronger team and should take that game easily. Then there will also be Astralis playing against SAW today which is going to be a good win for Astralis. The match Sprout vs Imperial is going to be much closer and I will probably not bet on it as it could go either way. With FalleN in the team I try not to bet against him, he has so much experience that he could turn around a game on a good day. And the last match of the day will be Cloud9 vs 9INE, which should be won by Cloud9, they played really well during the Rio IEM and are a stronger team if they don't choke again.

What a crazy story, really sad that somebody would do such a thing to his own family. Even in the worst situation I would never consider hurting my family deliberately. I know that addictions are a terrible thing, but so far I haven't met anybody who was severely affected by a gambling addiction. Over the years I met quite a few people who are struggling with alcohol, drugs or tobacco addictions. But when it comes to gambling I know people who play every second day and might categorise as addicts, even though they would never use any money that they can't afford to lose. It's really hard to try and understand such a behaviour if haven't experienced addictions in such a form. Hopefully this doesn't lead to other people trying to copy it.

When I was still in university this sounds like a normal evening, even though it was mostly fast food and cheap alcohol that I was focusing on with my mates. In my opinion it all depends on your situation in life. If you are single, have a decent job and make a lot of money, or if you are still young and want to enjoy life, then it's fine to go out often and spend a lot of money. But if you are married and have a family then it's not fine anymore to spend so much time and money for your own pleasure. Priorities change over time and we need put our family first. It's still fine to go out with friends from time to time, but this shouldn't be a regular occasion. It would also make more sense to meet at someones home instead of going out to save on the money. Even if we have the best paying job in the city we still shouldn't be spending so much going out.      

In my opinion it comes down to what you want to achieve with your bitcoins. Let's say you heard about bitcoin's a lot and only want to understand what everybody talks about then knowledge is the thing you are after. Buying a book about bitcoin's or reading several articles online will likely do the trick. The same goes for someone who is looking at bitcoins for long term investing. As a HODL investor it's more about the knowledge than experience as you are not going to sell your coins. Only if you are looking at actively trading bitcoins you really need the experience. As a short term trader it's all about the experience and not so much about knowledge anymore. Having some basic knowledge is sufficient if you already have trading experience. It's more important to handle stress well, not react to your emotions and keep making rational decisions. So any new beginner should learn towards his goal.

I don't think many people are using the 1 Minute time period when looking at prices. Maybe there are some very skilled intraday traders that can make it work, but for me this period is way too short. I am not a short term trader anymore and only look at daily prices these days. Anything shorter contains too much noice in my opinion and is not going to lead to clear trading signals. For my technical analysis I like to look at indicators based on 30, 60 and 90 days. It takes a longer period of prices to find trends that I want to trade on. Looking at 1 or 5 Minute data I would expect to find a new trend every hour. Now I am wondering how many trades someone would do every day following 1 minute charts.

When I first started out with investing a long time ago I was checking the prices constantly and always felt really bad when I saw red numbers. It took me several years to accept the fact that there will be bad weeks where our portfolio will drop in value, there is nothing we can do about it. It's part of the game, even the best traders have bad trades. That's why it's important to learn how to deal with losses. So far I only used money that I can afford to lose, which is probably why I never lost sleep over it. But if you experience physical pain over your trading positions than something is wrong and you need to change. My advice to you is don't put all your money into one asset. Better to spread it out over several different assets, than the chances are much higher not all investments will be in the red at the same time.

Personally I don't see a issue here as long as gambling is fully legalised and there are no advantages for politicians. As long as any person can open a casino and the gambling industry is regulated so that there are no scams it should be fine. A casino as a company as any other and shouldn't be penalised. It's like not allowing politicians to own a company that sells alcohol, tobacco or firearms. In case the politician uses his power to promote his business and limit the competition than of course it's wrong. I don't have anything against politicians owning companies, but there should be higher regulatory standards than for the average business owner. Maybe a special department that looks more closely on taxes, regulations and corporate governance for people in power could help to make people feel better about it.

I can open the website, but I am only on my work cell phone today and don't really want to do any gambling related things from it. Tomorrow evening from home I can take a closer look. What I saw was that they offer some kind of N Dollars, no idea what that is. Are you only waging with playmoney here or can you make real profits? It doest matter if real money is involved or not, it's still gambling in my opinion. Same goes for playing poker with playmoney, or joining a lottery without paying for the ticket.

Obviously the two are not same and we can't compare profits from investing in bitcoins with profits from gambling at a casino. First of all casinos are private companies that offer games where we can make a profit if we are lucky. All the risk and rewards are known before and there is controlled environment where the games are being played. Everybody who is 18 can sign up at the casino and start gambling, but once we lost our money it's gone. There is no chance to recover our initial money, except if we deposit more money. Bitcoins are completely different, they are not being owned by one private company that sets an artifical price for it. Bitcoins are traded every day and the price moves and as long as we don't sell our coins we are not realising out losses. We can just hold our bitcoins and wait for the price to recover.

Interesting question, not that I have ever been in such a situation or will likely get into one. We can still dream can't we. If had two choose between the two I would probably prefer to pick fiat rich instead of crypto rich. Families who are rich with fiat money usually own a company or are majority shareholders in multiple companies. Marrying into such a family gives a lot of opportunities to make a career in their own company. The flexibilities with fiat money are much higher than with cryptos. We could easily sell a small part of the company and use the money to invest in cryptos. Vice versa it's much harder to sell your crypto portfolio and buy a successful business. Most profitable family businesses will never be sold publicly.