I fully agree with you, it makes no sense at all at the moment to save money in my country. Just yesterday I received an email from my bank that the increased the interest rate on my savings account to 0.6%, which is insane compared to the 8-10% inflation we have now for more than a year. You are losing at least 7-8% value each year for all the money that is not invested. Even for some high risk bonds where the repayment is not guaranteed the interest rate is only around 5%. In real terms you are losing money if you don't invest in stocks or bonds. That is why I kept buying more bitcoins every month for the last 12 months with the money that I would usually put in the savings account.        

I would say that there are not many people out there who can handle big losses multiple times without hurting. Any regular gambler should keep an eye on the risks he takes and make sure that it's within his comfort level. The longer we play in a gambling session the harder it keeps to stay on top of the risks we take, that is why it's good to take breaks in between and clear our head. Also risk is not a constant in our life, it will change the older we get. When we are young we might not feel how hard it is to earn money, so we will evaluate risks much lower than later in life. In our 30-40s risk becomes the main factor to look at as we trying to build a family, buy a house, nice car and good vacations. And once we get closer to retirement we might not need all our money anymore and can handle much more risk again. I would always recommend any gambler to evaluate the risks they can take based on their current life situation.

I would say that it's very similar to why people rarely go to the doctor. If they only have a little pain they don't want to go and will wait until things get better by themselves or worse. It's hard to realise that we have a problem and need help. Also these are stories of a few unlucky gamblers, there are millions of gamblers out there who don't share their stories online. Most of the gamblers I know only play from time to time and don't spend every day at casino. It's a recreational hobby that they only spend a little money on it and would never go so far to bet all their life savings. 

It's good to be financially independent as much as possible, but there can always be hard times around the corner. What if we become sick, get fried from our job, or face a lot of maintenance repairs in our apartment? From my point of view family is there to help each other in times of need. This doesn't mean that we should always rely on our parents to provide for us, but if we really need the help they will be there. Only when I got older I realised how hard the life for my parents was and they needed a lot of help from my grand parents. Without their support we could have never went on summer vacation, or get Christmas gifts. So if things are getting bad I am glad I can get at least some help from my parents. Who else would be there for us if we really need it?

Oh I wasn't aware that there are two different versions of the same casino, one for mobile users and one for desktop users. This makes me curious now, are these two versions the same, or are there advantages for the gamblers? It would be unfair if a casino offers different winning chances for the same type of game, only depending on the system you use. The easy accessibility of casinos with our mobile phones is definitely a big advantage for all the people who enjoy gambling on the move. Just yesterday I saw my cousin gamble a lot on his cell phone and he told me he tried multiple times to stop, but keeps falling back into his old pattern to quickly. For me it's easier to control my gambling habits on my desktop PC.

That seems like a good strategy to give yourself a beak when facing losing streaks. Having a fixed gambling strategy makes a lot of sense, I am using it myself. This helps to not think about every bet we place and keep a better focus on how much money we have already spent and how many bets we need to recover our losses. The losing streak of 5-7 rounds depends a bit on the type of game we play. If we mostly bet on Red or Black in roulette then this seems like a good strategy. Only thing we need to consider that if we follow a martingale strategy is that our losses accumulated quite a lot after 7 losses and we would only need one win to recover everything.

Same for me, I never played bingo online or would download a specific app only to play bingo. If there is some charity behind it than I would maybe consider it, but only to help others and not really with the motivation to make some money. Bingo for me is always the game that is being shown in Hollywood movies that old people play in the retirement homes. Maybe that is why I am not really finding the game exciting and a bit slow. In my country it's also not very popular to play Bingo. The most times I played it was in summer vacations when we were in these big family resorts and they always had a Bingo night per week. My mother used to enjoy the game a lot and forced all of us to play it as well, but the things we won were always some useless physical prices nobody really needed. 

A better question in my opinion should be "why are you selling bitcoins?". When it comes to saving money I don't really have a goal in mind, I mostly save money for bad times like important renovations in the apartment or when the car breaks down. For me bitcoins is a means to save money each month and I prefer to do in bitcoins and not in fiat money. I already have my monthly salary coming in fiat money, the same goes for my retirement money that will be paid out eventually in fiat money. Having the chance to save money in bitcoin is a good diversification that will payoff long term. Also with inflation rates of 10% in fiat money and banks paying 1-2% interest it makes absolutely no sense to save money in a bank account. Taking profit is not really a plan for me, because that would mean to go back into fiat money - which I am trying to escape.

Good luck with creating a new casino, the market is very competitive and you should not expect to make high returns very quickly. Any new casino has to overcome a lot of problems to compete with the older, well established casinos. Running only one game on a casino seems like a bit limitation to me and I am not sure if you are going to attract a lot of customers with it. First of all the question should be if you will bring anything new to the crypto gambling community. Like new games, better promotions or a higher payout ratio for the gamblers. It seems that you will buy all the scripts, so you will just copy the existing games that we already have at another casino. Maybe you have some good plans for a marketing campaign that is going to attract new gamblers. Also you need a decent bankroll to start your project, because in the first few month you will likely lose some money.

After G2 winning the IEM Katowice 2023 tournament I am really hyped for them to perform well this year. Next week the ESL Pro League Season 17 games are up again in Group A with G2 playing against Eternal Fire, unfortunately the odds are really bad with 1.02-1.05 for G2 to win, still worth it to make a small profit. Fnatic is going to face MIBR which is going to be a nice match and should be won by fnatic without much hassle. Also Cloud9 is playing against Evil Geniuses which is going to be a sure win for Cloud9. And the last match will be Outsiders vs IHC which is going to be won by Outsiders hopefully. G2 is clearly the strongest team this series and should win it, the second team to reach the upper bracket finals for Group A is likely Outsiders. Let's see if Heroic can get easily through group B and if there will be a final of G2 vs Heroic again.

Buying crypto currencies and stocks to HODL is a good investment strategy, but it is really a form of passive investing? It's true that we don't need to invest much time into our trading activities and can just forget about our holdings, but these investments won't create much passive income for us. When it comes to passive investing I always thought it's about finding assets that create us a steady passive income, instead of making money on the rise in price. That is why crypto currencies are not a good tool to make a passive income portfolio. Same goes for stocks, the majority of stocks don't have a lot of dividends they are paying out. We would need to focus on the stocks with a high regular cash flow and strong business model so that they keep paying out dividends each year. For me the best form of passive investing would be to buy an apartment and rent it out, receiving monthly rent payments would be very steady monthly income for which we can plan ahead many years. 

These were two young girls, of course they are going to take the cash. Such kind of videos on youtube always involve some kind of money the person gets to be in the videos. It's all about getting cute woman in your video and make a nice thumbnail as click bait. Even if this is fully legit, I would expect that any young girls in this case would always take the cash. The hundred dollar bill they see in front of their face and can touch it, bitcoin is something not physical to them and they might not trust that they actually get it. This video seems to be shot in the city center and the girls could use the money to go shopping straightaway, or buy some drinks with. Would be nice to see the same kind of video, but asking a wider range of people. If they would ask some older man I think the answers would be much different.

There isn't much information here and I would expect that most news about this are in Portuguese for the smaller Brazilian leagues. But since this scam must involve a lot of players who tried to get penalties, I wonder now how long this scam actually worked before it was found out. 150,000 Reais is a lot of money in the poorer regions of Brazil, in the big cities like Rio and Sao Paulo this is not that much again. Once this scam is being discovered the career is over and you will likely have to repay all your illegitimate gains. Maybe all the players involved managed to bet on the games themselves and increased their payouts like that. Otherwise this seems like too risky compared to the payoff. What I find most surprising is that betting fraud in football lately involves mostly players and not the referees. Isn't the risk too high to involve a large number of players in the fraud? The more people involved the higher the chance that someone will tell friends about it and the whole scam will be uncovered. Having a rigged match in sports betting is like winning the lottery, we can bet all our money on the most risky outcome and make a huge profit. The problem is only if we can trust the match is fixed or not.

The bitcoin price looks already pretty strong compared to the levels at the start of the year around 16-17,000 USD. In terms of inflation not much changed over the last 6 months, the central banks kept increasing the interest rates but prices are keep rising. Overall I think that a higher inflation is also going to lead to a higher bitcoin price. In the short term however investors are spooked and will be selling all types of risky assets including crypto currencies. Higher interest rates by the central banks will make all fixed income products more attractive, so that is what most investors are going to switch into. The problem is that even the high yield bonds are not going to yield returns as high as the inflation rate. So for investors to not lose value long term they have to come back to the crypto market.

 
7 years is already a long time to be involved with crypto currencies, I haven't been around much longer than you. By now all my friends and family know about cryptos as I have told them countless times about the opportunities, but there quite a few people that are still reluctant to accept the positive aspects of cryptos. I can understand my parents and great parents that are already old and don't want to buy anything risky anymore. But some of my younger friends who are looking for ways to invest their money are still afraid of bitcoins. Which is a bit weird because they are looking for high returns to beat inflation, and still are afraid to accept some risks. What I learned over the years is that you can't convince everybody about the positive aspects of crypto currencies. Everybody has his own ideas and thoughts, and some people have made up their mind about cryptos that is not really rational and can't be changed by arguments. The best thing for me is to avoid the topic all together and talk about things we have in common.

I think this part is the most important when it comes to trying and save more of our monthly income. There are two ways to increase our net worth, cut our monthly expenses or increase our income. When living in a rather poor area of the country with low wages and not a lot of opportunities, then we might not have the option to increase our income. Moving to a better area might also not be an possibility due to external factors. That's why in many cases the only real chance we have is to cut down our living expenses. Especially in the last 12 months with rising food prices I tried to save money wherever possible. Using vouchers and buying in larger quantities helped me to offset some of the price increases. I noticed that some fresh products like vegetables increased 50-100% in price over 6 months in my country, that's insane and won't be able to be paid by the average family for a long period of time. Switching to canned vegetables is not so healthy, but the only chance to save some money. Best would be to start planting my own vegetables, if I had the garden for it.

I am a big fan of martingale strategies, that's why I usually double after a loss. When running a martingale strategy all we need is one win to recover all the previous losses. It's a pretty easy strategy that saved me a lot of times in the past. The big problem with this kind of strategy is when we started our initial bets too big and are not able to keep doubling down. If our bankroll is too small to withstand a loss streak we can face a loss of all our money. In such a case where we don't have enough capital it might be better to consider betting twice instead of doubling down.

I don't think that beginners luck is a real thing. At least in my personal experience I didn't really notice it. Over the years I tried out many new casinos and had good and bad starts. Same goes for my friends, so far I haven't heard a story of someone winning big the first time he played at a casino. Wouldn't it be bad for the casino to have beginners luck, because then all the gamblers would disappear again after playing a few times and move to the next casino. It's probably true that beginners have more problems to try and control themselves after a win and face a bigger risk to lose it all again. Or maybe the didn't pay attention to the first deposit bonus and think the 100 or 200% they get from the casino is their profit.

That's a terrible story and I really hope you manage to find help. In my family we have no one who is addicted to gambling, so I can give you specific advice for that kind of addiction. But I can give you some insights into addictions in general. My uncle was addicted to alcohol for a long time. It took quite a while for us to even find out of his illness (his wife was drinking a lot too and they didn't tell it to anybody and did a good job of hiding it). Only after my grand mother found large sums of alcohol in their house we tried to help them. We did everything from interventions to hiding all alcohol, but nothing helped. Eventually he died of liver failure before even becoming 60 years old. You can't control the life of someone else, there will always be loopholes for them to fall back into their addiction if they don't want to change. My advice would be to try and make them understand that they need to change to get their life in order. It's not possible for us to change it for them. And if they really want to get better they should seek professional help. It's going to be a long way and he needs all the help he can get. Good luck.

I don't think that any large scale conflict like a China-US war over Taiwan is going to have any positive economic impacts. The world economy is in a fragile state after the covid lockdowns and the sanctions on Russia of the Ukraine war. In my opinion, any additional negative shocks is going to send us into recession. But even the worst economic crisis is not going to be the end of the world. What we have learned from all the major economic crisis in the past there will come a recovery, the economy moves in cycles and will rebound eventually. Which doesn't mean that it's going to painful and a lot of hardship. I think that all the other big countries will be heavily affected by the China-US war and also suffering. The effects in the long run could be positive for the US if they make the right decisions. Bring back home more production facilities could be one way to be less dependent on China in the future.