Yes definitely, having a legal framework is a good protection for any gambler. That is why I don't like outright bans from the government, it would be much better to tightly regulate the gambling industry instead of banning it. Because there will always be people who will go around the ban. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean people won't do it. I only gamble in countries where casinos are allowed and never had any contact with a gambling ring. For me personally the risk would be to big that something goes wrong. What if you win big and they refuse to pay out the winnings? There is nothing we can do, the police or courts won't help us. Legalising the gambling industry is the best way.

I don't find anything wrong with casino advertising using small banners, of course there is no space for the terms and conditions. They will be shown on the casino website itself and we should always check them before signing up at a casino. Using terms and conditions is normal for any company, even the smallest business running some advertising are going to have it. Why should a casino be different from other businesses? They are necessary to protect a company from people using promotions and advertising in exploitative ways. The main thing with casino promotions is that they don't want the gambler to instantly withdraw any free money.

I don't think this is right and your friend should challenge that decision. In my opinion a casino should only be allowed to confiscate gambling money when the account was involved in fraud and tried to take advantage of the casino. In this case I don't see any issue and it's not write to take his money away. The casino could have just banned him from their website and at least let him take his money with it. They took immediately the most drastic step without some escalation before. What if people have multiple phones? Like one for work and one private one, you could also use the phone from your wife if you have no battery.  Hopefully your friend gets legal help and can recover some of his money.

For the families directly affected by war it's terrible, but there are a lot of companies who profit directly from it. The first beneficiary that come to mind are all the arms companies that produce equipment needed in Ukraine. There is a lot of demand for ammunition, tanks, planes and missles. Then you have the indirect effect of all major countries in the world increasing their military budget and modernising their army. Any company involved in the military supply chain should be doing well. The second big sector profiting from the war is the energy market. All the major corporations increased their prices and profit from the sanctions against Russia. Last year there were large profits for the energy companies.

I don't know about the laws in your country, but in my country it's legal for children to have their own brokerage account as long as the parents agree and take the risks. When I turned 16 I got my first investment account from my grand parents. I still remember that my parents had to fill out a lot of forms before I could actually sell and buy new stocks. It was all done with a bank where also my parents accounts were, so the bank knew there was enough capital to cover any losses. This was of course the lowest level of trading, only major stocks allowed without leverage and no advanced financial products. I think it's good if our children are interested in the financial industry and we should support their curiosity. It's also important they learn about the risks involved and should start very small.

I fully agree with you, just because bitcoin was used as a form of payment doesn't mean it's a ponzi scheme. If there were no crypto currencies the scammer would have used other forms of payment and the same would have happened. We can't blame bitcoins for the lack of critical thinking. My grandmother got scammed in the past with fiat cash as form of payment, nobody would say that cash is the problem. There will always be criminals trying to take advantage of others, that is not a reason to avoid cryptos. The same could be said with gift cards, the number one asset scammer use to get money from elderly people. Getting rid of gift cards wouldn't stop the scams.

Living expenses went through the roof over the last 12 months. While energy prices stabilised again in Germany, we pay around 1.80 euro per liter, everything that is related to food is going on price every few weeks without any end in sight. The elderly people are hit hard from the crisis because their pension is not being adjusted for inflation, but families with young children are even worse off. Fresh products are especially getting more expensive, making it harder to ensure a nitrous diet for our children. Almost all my friends with children are buying lower quality products for themselves to have enough money to buy fresh fruits and vegetables for the children. Many fresh products in the supermarket jumped 50-100% up in price in less than 6 months. If this trend continues it's going to be a terrible year. The main problem is that wages are taking so get adjusted for inflation and there isn't much help from the government.

You can't say that trading bitcoins is going to be better than stocks trading or the other way round. There are thousands of different stocks out there and while some are performing good, others are going to make a big loss. Both types of trading involve different risks that we need to accept. In my opinion the best portfolio is the one that is well diversified and spreads out risk across different asset classes. Nobody knows the future and can tell is with 100% certainty which stock or cryto currency to buy. That is why we shouldn't put all our money into one basket. Owning bitcoins is a good idea and should be part of any investment portfolio, same goes for stocks. Also I wouldn't say that bitcoins are only for longterm earning, while stocks are for shortterm profits. We can make a lot profit over time from stocks, while we can also make a lot of profits in a few days with bitcoins when we buy and sell at the right time. It comes down to what is more comfortable for us, trading assets actively or investing for a longer period of time and not worrying so much about shortterm price movements.

ESL Pro League Season 17 is my main focus for the weekend and next week. There were some surprises in the last few matches, a big one was Grayhound beating NiP 2-1. I thought NiP would win that one easily, but I misjudged them. Today Grayhound is playing against paiN which is going to be interesting. Even though paiN is the clear favourite for the match I am going with Grayhound for this one. The other match today is 00Nation vs Rooster, which should the Brazilians be winning easily. Another big surprise was 00Nation losing against Grayhound and OG. Both coldzera and TACO are two great players and hopefully they will pull it around. The last match today is OG vs NiP which is probably the most interesting one, they are both good teams and it's going to be a close one. It's an all or nothing match, the losing team will be out of the Series. I will go with NiP for the match, it could go either way though.

That is cool for your dad to invest in bitcoin at an old age. My dad turned 70 this year and he isn't interested in bitcoins at all, which is fine I guess. Even though he was an engineer he is struggling with all the new technology, he doesn't do any online banking, uses his smartphone only for calling and writing messages and is not really interested in anything new. Kind of sad to see him living in the old world without much interested. With my mother it's very similar, she uses her smart phone more actively, but isn't really interested in anything related to money. That is why I can't convince them to invest in bitcoins. The only elderly person that is interested is my uncle, but he is turning 81 this year and already gave away most of his money and assets to his children, he doesn't have much money left to invest.

Inflation is part of the fiat system that is not going to disappear, people are losing money or money is getting destroyed by accident. That's why there is a natural form inflation that is always going to occur. Also most savers only set money aside because they are getting interest and hope they get more for their money in the future. Without any inflation the interest rates would be much lower and there would be less incentive to save money. I don't think a country could survive if all people would switch to crypto currencies at the same time. The government would like intervene and stop the capital outflow.

Unfortunately it's really hard to control advertising when we are online. The online marketing market is huge and many companies pay a lot of money to get access to our phones and PCs. There is no button that we can press to avoid advertising in the future. For gambling and other addicts it must be especially hard because they see the same ads everybody sees. And in the online world everything works with algorithms, once you get categorises in the gambling section its really hard to get out from it. My advise would be to get a new phone and new phone number. Only when we start completely fresh we can try to avoid gambling advertising. Otherwise it's going to take a long time for the algorithms to move us into different categories. There also some ad blockers, but I don't think they work 100% and ads will eventually find a way around it.

Yeah that is true, having a lot of money is no guarantee to make a business successful, it only ensures that we can keep running a not profitable business for a long time. You definitely need some money to open up a casino, but not billions. And it's true that we need some experts who help us running the casino. One way would be to higher the experts and let them run the casino and we only have the management position on top without too much work. In case we already are a billionaire are we still motivated enough to run a profitable business? In my opinion it would make more sense to enjoy our money and not work too much. Wouldn't it be better to only be an investor in a casino? We could try and buy out some shareholders in an already established and successful casino. As a silent investor we would participate on all the profits of the casino and don't need to worry about the day to day business.

20k views in only 2 days, these kind of videos seem to be quite popular. I like how he switches from Slots to Black Jack all the time, seems like a funny guy. If his friends are also streamers then there is nothing wrong with using their money. In the end it's all for content and trying to make them more popular, that is why they are also trying to get the highest possible returns. Nobody wants to see someone only makes very small bets and goes home with a 10% profit. The big flashy bets are what attracts the viewers. If this was just some friends playing together without an audience then the behaviour wouldn't be cool at all. Going from 1k USD to 2k USD is already a huge profit with slots and they should have cashed out at least partially their winnings already. Then going up to 7k USD was very lucky is not going to happen in most cases. If he had lost all the money of his friends they would be pretty mad.

Honestly I would be fine to accept payment in all the major crypto currencies, as long as there is an active market we can always convert the coins to our favourite coin. For simplicity I would probably choose bitcoin as its also the coin I want to hold long term. Assuming that I don't need the money any time soon I would put it in my hodl wallet and just forget about. The thing about accepting payments online is that you want to reach the largest number of consumers, that why I would try to accept as many different coins as possible. And if you don't want to hold a particular coin just make sure to convert it immediately.

That's a nice idea and could create some new traffic for the forum here. The gambling section is quite big with a lot of casinos advertising here and many gamblers exchanging their ideas and strategies. Especially the sport betting section is very active with betting tips almost every single day. Having a more centralised form for casino reviews could be nice for new people looking for a new casino. But many members here on the forum have been around for years and already know most of the casinos. I would definitely give more weight to reviews written by forum members than by any other people online, as long as they are not getting paid for it. We wouldn't need some kind of supervision though that makes sure the claims in the reviews are true. Otherwise it could be easy for the competition to make some fake claims.

Yes anybody can be profitable in trading, even someone who has no clue about trading can be lucky and invest in the right project. The question is how likely is it for the luck to stick around or is he going to lose his money eventually. I would recommend anybody that is interested in trading to first read about it and study to get some basic knowledge. This doesn't mean we need to spend years to learn everything, a few days and some good articles can teach the basics. After that I would recommend to start trading very small. Theory is one thing, even better is to already apply theory in practice and see how we are doing. As long our positions are small we don't face the risk of losing a lot of money.

Not everybody in gambling is losing, there are also gamblers who make decent profit. And the profit they receive is the money someone else loses. Sure the casino is earning their share, but they are also the one that have to pay taxes, keep the site running and hire support staff. If the casino would give back all the profits to the customer than they would go bankrupt. It takes people to lose money for winners to pay out their winnings. Lottery is the best example, 99% of the people are losing so that a lucky few get rich.

Yes of course, we can achieve financial freedom with almost any asset, as long as we buy at the right time and buy enough of it. The real question is how likely is it going to be that we reach our goal. Crypto currencies made huge profits in the past and are well established now. It's a bit unrealistic to expect to make huge gains by only holding bitcoins these days. If you are looking for life changing returns you would need to go into the alt coin market. But the higher our potential returns the higher is also  our risk of losing money. The best would be to spread our money out across multiple projects and hope for the best. To achieve financial freedom we would also need to keep buying more coins with our savings. Financial independence is not something we will reach overnight, it's a long way and we need to work hard for it.

No I don't think that the average gambler can use the money he makes from gambling to earn a living. The major problem in my opinion is that gambling income is not reliable. All the casino games we play have a house edge that prevents us from finding a profitable strategy long term. To make money consistently in gambling we would need to be lucky consistently, which is not going to happen. Every gambler is going to have a losing streak eventually, and if we depend on the money from gambling we are in big trouble. That is why I wouldn't recommend anybody to use gambling as their major form of earning money. Gambling should be looked at as a potential bonus we can make at the side, in case we get lucky and hit the jackpot.