To me this is the most important part where I would be very careful when telling someone about gambling. In case you have struggled in the past with another addiction like alcohol or cigarettes than the chances are much higher that you become addicted to gambling as well. When I was younger I was playing video games all day long on the weekends and evenings, up until the point where my parents send me to a doctor that told me I was addicted to gaming. It took quite a long time to get back to some normal gaming activities again. Even today I need to be careful not to fall back into my old habits. That is why I keep a close eye on my gambling time each week and make sure that I have fixed limits on how much money I can use for gambling each month. Without such strict control I am afraid I could also become addicted to gambling. For example my cousin has struggled with a drug addiction in the past and even today is a heavy smoker and can't quit. I would never take him with me when I go visit a casino with friends, or show him how I play online at a casino from home. For some people the risk is too big and I don't want to feel guilty for introducing him to it.

So far I haven't come across any skill based slot machines. The only ones I heard from was some anime slot machines from Japan that want the gamblers to touch special areas on the screen to interact with them. It isn't really skilled based because it won't affect the winning chances, even though some people believed they would get good luck from it. When it comes to gambling people tend to become very superstitious and believe in connections that aren't really there. This would also be one issue I have with skill based slots, how much can we actually influence our chances through skill? Because the casino needs to make sure they make money with their slot games, so it could be that the slot machines offer skill input from the player which won't affect the winning chances at all. Or maybe it takes such a high skill cap that only a few player actually manage to be successful. I am not such a good gamer these days as I was back in highschool, but still would be nice to give the new slots a try and see how well I am doing.

I don't think this is only because of FTX, we had other big crisis before and it's definitely not going to be the last one. As soon as there is a lot of money involved it will attract shady businesses as well, that is part of the game and can't be avoided unfortunately. Just look at the stock market which has been around for such a long time and even with all the regulation today there is still bad things happening. I wouldn't worry too much about it, as long as the government is not banning crypto currencies we are fine. Pension funds are very serious business because people spend 30-40 years saving money and don't want to lose it in the end. In my country there are hard caps on how much a company can invest in stocks, the main focus is usually bonds to make sure that there is a lot of security in the funds. Also Canada and US are very similar countries as they share such a large boarder, nothing wrong with having similar laws. I think we should be happy that we can at least save some of our retirement money in crytpos. 

Trading is a zero sum game, all the money that you take out of it must have come in by someone else. All the prices at the exchange are quotes were real people offer to buy and sell their coins. So the profit we make in trading is someone else's loss, but because there are hundreds of thousands of traders in the market it's not always a direct relationship. It's good that you made the difference between selling positions at bad prices and keeping them until prices recover. All the losses are only on paper until we actually trade the coins and realise them. That's why it's important to only use money for trading that we don't need, to make sure we are not being forced into liquidating positions at a loss. The difference between making a profit or a loss can only be a few months.

Yes of course it's possible to run a decentralised gambling platform. Depending on where you are from it's true that the government wants to have some information about your business and you might also be required to obtain a gambling licence. Usually this transparency towards the government is not resulting in any operative impact for your gambling business, it's mostly in place to protect your customers from any kind of fraud and to pay taxes of course. Using digital currencies that can easily be traced is making sure that government knows about all the money that flows in and out of your business. The only real solution around it would be to base your company in a country with much less restrictive regulation of the gambling industry. Another question would be if that is really necessary as some form of regulation makes your casino seem more trustworthy.    

This might have been true in the past, at the moment real estate seems like the much riskier investment than crypto currencies. The political turmoil in my country makes every planning ahead for the next 10 to 30 years almost impossible. The government is trying to push a lot of ecological friendly reforms that could cripple any real estate owners in the long run. If you are forced by the government to modernise a house and install a new roof, new insulation and new heating that could all the savings. On top of that are still facing inflation rates of 8-10% per year which is going to make any future loans hard to pay back. The uncertainty of financing for our loans could lead to make promising real estate deals a big loss at the end. At least from my stand point crypto currencies seems like the less risky option that will also lead to bigger profits.

At the current stage we are on AI still needs human oversight and can't be trusted blindly. In gambling I have no experience with AI, but in investing I have seen selflearning AIs build quite complex trading strategies. The problem is that the AI sometimes identifies anomalies in the market and builds a whole strategy around, and the occurrence of the anomaly is so low that is not going to make a profit for a long time. In gambling these anomalies don't really exist, all the odds and profits are known before and analysing a lot of past games won't give an edge. Handling large sums of data is a key advantage of AI, but in gambling this won't influence future winning chances. All rounds are a new game and are not connected to each other.

That's a good summary of why people are selling their coins and I agree with point to sell our coins if we need the money for something important. For me health is also the number one thing to focus one. Hopefully you are okay and not selling your coins because of it. What kind of other opportunities are you going for, will you come back to bitcoins? In my opinion financial opportunities change quickly and I would only sell my coins for emergencies. If there is a short term opportunity to invest in I would rather try and raise additional funds than sell my bitcoins. When it comes to investing I strongly believe that we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket, diversification is important. That's why I will try to always keep some bitcoins and sell rather other assets first.

That's a very good point for anybody that tries to create a new casino with unique features. Before bringing something new to the gambling community it's important to meet the industry standards. Even the newest and coolest game won't bring success if the casino Website is not competitive compared to other big casinos. There are some basics like having an experienced customer support team, processing payments quickly and accepting a variety of crypto currencies, that without them it will be hard for any new casino to survive. The online casino boom in 2021 lead to a lot of competition which forced casinos to be more User friendly. In my opinion it's great to try something new and shake up the community, just the casino owners should focus first to make a good platform.

It's true that being new is already enough for most customers to buy the product. We can see this with so many things, slightly different color makes shoes completely new and people will buy them instantly, or putting a slightly better camera in a mobile phone will make people go crazy over it. In gambling a new Casino might attract gamblers only by offering new promotions. At least for me a new 200% first time deposit bonus is much more interesting than a new casino game. It's still great to offer new types of games, but if want to attract a large number of customers there should be a financial incentive for them to switch casinos. Another problem with new games is that it takes some time for gamblers to learn them if they are too complicated.

There is the famous saying that prostitution is the oldest profession in human history, so in our past people must have tried to regulate it for a long time already. In my country it's legal too and is nothing evil, because it gives better protection for the workers. If something is illegal it doesn't mean people won't do it, it's just that it will be hidden from the law. Capitalism isn't really at fault here because it has been around much longer than we have capitalism. Same goes for banking, the concept of borrowing and lending money has been around for hundreds of years. It's much older than capitalism and we can't blame it for all the evil. How are we being killed by capitalism? I think that in a military dictatorship many more people are getting killed by the regime.

I think this is the best thing that is coming out of the move of Macau to accept CBDCs. Macau must have realised that the online crypto casino boom is becoming a real threat for their local gambling industry. Due to the covid lockdowns many regular casino customers switched to the virtual world and might be reluctant to go back visiting physical casinos. This move by Macau seems to try and get move competitive with the online casinos. For me Macau is too far away to be a real gambling destination, sitting for 12 hours in a plane only to visit a casino is too much. Unfortunately Las Vegas is a similar distance away and I am stuck with my local unspectacular casinos. Any casino that starts accepting digital currency should be rewarded with more customers in my opinion.

Good for the pastor, no need to judge him for quitting his job. He is a normal person like all of us and should be able to choose freely what to do with his time. I am not really a religious person, so I am too familiar with how the church stands towards gambling. What I do know is that the Christian Community has different branches and some are more strict than others. Maybe there are some priests who are more open towards gambling. My grand parents were very religious people, going to church every Sunday morning and still used my grand father to play the lottery for more than 30 years. To me it seems that the church is fine with us gambling, as long as it's in a responsible way and doesn't bring us on a bad way in life.

No you are not paranoid, when it comes to the security of our money we should invest more time and money to avoid losing coins long term. Over the years I had many different wallets, right now I probably still have 10 active wallets out of which I am using 4. For me the best approach is do have seperate wallets for each purpose. My smallest wallet is a mobile wallet where I keep only a balance below 100 USD. This is the lowest form of security and I only have it for quick purchases. The second wallet is an online wallet where I usually keep less than 1,000 USD. This my wallet where I deposit and withdraw my gambling money. Once the balance becomes to big I send the coins to my third wallet, a paper wallet which I use for medium term storage and to buy any bigger items from. My last wallet is my hodl wallet where I only deposit money and never want to withdraw coins from. Only in emergencies I would consider taking money. Maybe I am also paranoid, but it doesn't cost much time or money to run multiple wallets.

How many rounds did you play with your 1k USD? If it was your first time betting large amounts and you lost it, then it's not really a big sample size to make your claim we are getting cheated. In my opinion it makes no sense for casinos to adjust their winning chance based on the bet size. If gamblers find it out then the casino is ruined, nobody is going to come back after such news. Why should a casino risk their whole company on a few bets? Both blackjack and dice are already winning games for the casino, no need to adjust the percentages even further.

Oh now it makes sense why Australians enjoy gambling so much, I wish I also had to pay no taxes on my gambling winnings. In Germany we have to pay taxes on all type of winnings, that is why the government are pushing lotteries so much. Around 20% of all the money being put into the lottery is being transferred to the government. That's a very profitable business model for the state and I would never expect the government to ban gambling. Paying taxes on gambling winnings is kind of sad if pay attention to it, most of the winning payouts are already quoted after taxes. When it comes to casino winnings we need to declare them ourselves and if we try to hide them it could be a problem during a special audit.

That's a lot of questions and they are quite hard to answer, at least for me. Maybe for someone with a mathematics degree it's trivial. There are a few general issues however, bitcoin hasn't been around for 20 years and it's going to take more than 100 years for all the coins to get mined, so all the people investing now won't be around anymore. It's hard to make long term predictions based on the time line. It depends on if we assume a linear trend to happen from today onwards, or if an exponential trend continues. Let's say bitcoin started at 1 USD, then it made 28,000x return for all the early investors. If the price would rise the same again than, 1 BTC would be worth 784m USD in less than 20 years. This is not really likely, I would rather expect bitcoin to reach 500,000 USD for the next 10-20 years. DCA is the best purchasing method, as long as their is a positive trend in the bitcoin market we are going to make a profit. How high that profit is going to be I can't calculate.

I think he means that the people who are doing the actual money laundering are usually employed by the rich criminals who made the money in the first place. The rich bosses are not spending hours every day on online casino to launder their money. This is nothing new, before the online gambling boom the money was laundered at the local casinos and the authorities knew about. I still remember when I was younger we had slot machines in most bars and it was always the same people sitting there all evening. Only later I found out that they were from organised criminal organisations and would launder money. It's pretty clever of them, when you play slots you know you get on average 95% of your money back. When playing roulette and play only black/red you win 48.5% of the time. So your losses are quite small if you okay long enough. It's nothing new of the online gambling industry, this has been done for a long period of time and should not be used as argument to ban online casinos.

Unfortunately I don't think there is an easy way to end the volatility of bitcoin anytime soon. The ETF industry is one way to reduce the demand on owning bitcoins yourself, you can participate on the increase in bitcoins price without directly owning coins yourself. The problem is of course is going to trust the financial industry to buy synthetic bitcoins instead of real ones. For the average investor the motivation to invest in bitcoin comes at the distrust of the financial industry. When buying ETFs now we put our trust in a company and not in bitcoins itself. That is why I would expect many smaller investors to buy the coins themselves rather than any financial product on it.  Also there are quite a few ETFs that need to buy the underlying bitcoins for storage, so it makes no difference for the investors to buy the coins directly or buy the ETF. To a certrain extent the volatility is part of the game as it is in the stock market.

Sounds like a good plan to me. I haven't really thought about using crypto currencies alone as my retirement money, but looking at the current values the money should be more than sufficient. Right now 10 BTC are worth around 280,000 USD, and 100 ETH are around 175,000 USD. That is more than enough for one person to live off in retirement. I read from some insurance sales person that you should try to accumulate around 300-400,000 USD for retirement. It of course depends a bit on if you own your own house or apartment where you can life rent free. Also with so much money in crypto currencies you will profit of any further increase in price, the long term trend for both BTC and ETH is positive and the prices should keep rising over the years. Once you turn 60 or 65 you wouldn't sell all your cryptos at once, you only sell a little bit every time you need money. So it could easily happen that the price is going to rise a lot in 10-20 years and will leave a lot of the coins behind for your children and grand children.