Looks very cool the card, thanks for the raffle.

62 - Mauser

Good luck to all and happy holidays.

After watching all the teams play at least two games I am still confident that Brazil is going to win this year. Their team plays so well together and it feels like they are on a different level. Winning against Croatia should be no issue. In the semi finals they will probably meet Argentina which is going to be a cool match. The two countries are huge rivals all Brazil will give everything to win. So Brazil reaching the finals seems the most likely to me right now. For the other leg I also think it's going to be the winner out of the France - England match, which is likely going to be France. Both Spain and Portugal played well so far and will likely meet each other, another great rivalry which should be a nice match to watch. But both of them would likely lose against France in the semi finals. So my earlier pick for the finals is still the same: Brazil vs France, and Brazil winning the tournament.

Its been so long ago that I barely remember how I felt about Bitcoins back then and what I thought about the crypto currencies. Back in 2015/2016 I was heavily trading CSGO skins, I put some money into the game only with the goal to trade for my first knife, after that it had to be an expensive AWP skins and so on. Eventually I had too much money in the game, and once I got lucky in some case openings, I really needed to withdraw some money out of my steam account. The fastest and cheapest option on the big sites was with Bitcoins, so I made my first bitcoins transaction and owned my first crypto coins. As far as I remember it, I didn't think too much about the cryptos itself. For me it was more a tool to transfer money out of my CSGO inventory. My biggest investment mistake was to sell all my bitcoins back in the day, I wanted to have the money on my bank account and didn't save any bitcoins at all. That why I feel a bit bad about my first bitcoin transactions.

It sounds nice if a casino let's us gamble without a deposit and without creating an account first. But where is the initial balance coming from for us to gamble with? One option could be for the casino to offer playmoney for people to try out the games without actually spending money. This will not really solve the initial trust issue for the customer to know if the casino is legit or not. There will be no withdrawal process as we can't win anything with playmoney. The customer has to make the first step and deposit money if he wants to gamble for real money. I don't mind creating accounts at casinos as long as there are positive review for the casino. For example, if I read here on the forum that other users has a positive experience at a new casino, then I would also give it a try. In case someone raises red flags here on the forum than I would probably stay away from the casino. When it comes to playing at a new casino I will always first try out the services with a very small amount to see how legit the casino is and if there are any issues.

Selling investments at a loss is the worst situation we could be in and should only happen as the last solution if there are no alternatives. Before selling at a loss I would always consider holding the coin until prices recover. Only when a project turned bad and there is no chance for the price to recover we should get rid of our position. Holding is the best strategy for me, it requires almost no management and requires the least amount of time compared to other strategies. I agree with you that it can be hard in some situations to stick to holding and not follow the herd in panic sells. Checking the prices of my coins is making me too nervous and increases the pressure to trade more often. When I first started with crypto trading I was checking my portfolio 6-7 times per day,  it got really hard to not constantly check prices. Now I only check the bitcoin price once per day and my portfolio 2-3 per week. Taking a step back from the fast moving prices helped me a lot to remain more calm and not feel the pressure to trade more often.

I agree with you, if you see that your children and wife are already struggling to be financial responsible with managing their own finances, then how is it going to be when they find out about the lottery win. Having access to large sums of money without doing anything can ruin every motivation to achieve something in life. His decision might have been morally wrong, but it's hard to. Judge without knowing his whole family situation. Winning big in a lottery only happens to very few lucky people, and the people who are doing well with their winnings we will probably never hear about it. What we hear about is the stories of lottery winners who manage to spend all their millions in a few years and are broke again. There are so many articles online about people who lived above their means and are poor now. In my opinion secrecy is everything when it comes to dealing with a big lottery win. Once the word gets out who won the millions, then all the people who you have known in life will come back. It becomes difficult to distinguish between real and fake friends. Can't blame someone to try and stay anonymous, even from our own family.

I am not rich and no expert in money management, but I made some good investments over the years that have helped me a lot to finance some of my dreams. The best advice I can give up anybody who is trying to build a portfolio is Diversification. Don't place a your eggs in one basket is the best phrase that I kept in my mind over all these years. Investing and trading always a form of randomness that can't be controlled. Even the best investor is not going to be right 100% with his trades. With that in mind it's best to split our money into multiple investments. Like that we increase our chances to pick good investments while decreasing our overall volatility. Lower volatility means lower risk to lose large sums of money. The more different investments we have the higher the chance that some will perform well when there is a general market downturn.

That sounds pretty harsh and I wonder if this could be accepted in a fully democratic country. In western nations cannabis is getting legalised, so people getting caught with larger amounts are not facing any prison time anymore. Which would be crazy if then people who own BTC are getting arrested instead. Owning BTC alone should not be a punishable offence, only if the BTC are being used for illegal activities. In my opinion banning crypto currencies outright is never a good solution and will only move BTC transaction out of the government reach. A ban one something never works 100%, there will be loopholes. If I were in charge than I would use taxation as my main tool to control the use of crypto currencies in my country. If the government really wants to reduce the use of cryptos, than increasing taxation would be one option. Like this the government will actually profit of the use of cryptos and still gives it's citizens the option to choose which type of currency they want to use. 

Oh maybe I have a better chance in the English forum

6 - Mauser

Thanks for the raffle @cygan

Good luck to all

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Congrats salad daging, that is a nice raffle to win.

That sounds really unlucky, I know the feeling well not so much from sports betting but rather from my casino experiences. When it comes to gambling from me I tend to set a fixed amount of time for me to gamble, so that I don't end up gambling all evening without stopping. The most common scenario is that I have decent evening where I am winning more than I am losing and then I tell myself 3-4 more rounds before I stop for the day. And then my last 3 rounds end up being completely terrible and I lose a lot of my winnings again. It feels a bit like the casino knows I want to stop and gives me only bad hands, which is of course crazy. For you it seems that you really like to place long combi bets, which is very risky of course. For myself combi bets were not a good betting strategy, I ended up always being unlucky with them and never make a good profit. That was with 3-5 combi bets, if you are running 8-15 combi bets the risk of one bet ruining everything is considerably higher. But if you are running good in your first 10 bets, you should really think about cashing out early. If it doesn't work on the last bet anymore, how about you cash out on the 9th or 10th bet? The profit should already be really high with so many wins and you could try to build your bankroll up more before going to the really long combi bets again.   

From my country I know that currency redesigns are done within 10 year time spans  to increase security of the bank notes. A new design also means the chance to include more anti counterfeiting measures. This doesn't mean that the old currency design are not being accepted anymore. Even today I see a lot of old bills that people had at home and didn't use in a long time. Only when the notes are being deposited at a bank they will be taken out of circulation. I am not really sure if the price of creating new designs and printing new notes is smaller than the economical damage of counterfeiting old notes. A new design also means to make someone else happy as  there can be new pictures on the notes. The main issue I have with new currency is that it seems to reduce the value of the old currency. When cleaning out the basement of my grandparents 2 years ago we found some old British Pounds and some Swiss Francs. The notes were probably 15-20 years old and I went to the bank to get them exchanged. They told me because these notes are old and not in circulation anymore she can't give me the full price anymore. We lost like 25% of the value only because the notes were old.

Wow round 5 started really quickly, thanks for another free raffle Betnomi. The wallet looks really cool, maybe I have more luck this round with new numbers:

45 - Mauser
75 - Mauser

Good Luck to all and a happy Sunday.

Good luck with your black jack career, hopefully you are going to make some money with it. Black Jack is together with roulette the oldest gambling games I know and I still love the game today after playing it for so long. After poker is black jack my second favourite card game. The rules are very easy so that you can learn it quickly and make your own strategies with it. There are also quite a few casino movies around the topic of card counting in black jack. Which is the only proven strategy that shifts the winning chances in the favor of the gamblers. That's why most casinos ban gamblers who are being caught counting cards. In high school we calculated probabilities of a few different strategies to find out the house edge. For me it's difficult to stay profitable over a longer period of time, but I still enjoy playing black jack regularly.

All these mistakes are not limited to bear markets in my opinion, they are also problems in bull or sideways markets. Panics and following your emotions is never a good idea in trading, no matter the market condition. Investing short term only works when you know what you are doing. Day trading is a very risky business and you can lose money quickly, during bear markets there is a lot of volatility in the markets and price tend to fluctuate more quickly. For me the best trading approach became to stay long term invested during bear markets. Don't give into the all the selling pressure and wait for prices to recover before consider selling any investment. Overtrading I see more as a big mistakes during bull than bear markets. If you sell all your positions in a bear market there isn't much overtrading you can do. But during bull markets where you see alt coins rising a few hundred % the pressure is much higher to trade more often. And finally mental health, this is probably the most important factor when it comes to trading and investing. We need to make sure that our mind is in a good spot, otherwise we will be burned out after a few weeks of trading.

That is really bad, I am sorry to heart that. Can't you do anything against it? If you know the children you should talk to their parents and inform them about the bad habits of their children. Gambling for minors is a very difficult situation than should not be allowed by the law. The government and police should avoid it as much as possible. So maybe you could talk to your local police officer about it? When adults are already struggling with gambling addictions than it's much worse for children. As a minor you don't fully understand the consequences of your actions yet. There is a reason why children don't decide for themselves, like for example what they want to eat every day. If children were in full control at a young age they would only eat Pizza and chocolate every day. The parents have a duty to protect their children from such harm. Once they are 18 they can decide for themselves if they want to gamble or not.

What a week of football this was, especially the group E had me struggling. I had a small bet on Spain in their match against Japan only to see them lose the match 2-1 with a 83% ball possession. How is that even possible to lose a match like that. Now with hindsight it seems that Spain wanted to get rid of Germany and make sure Japan can get to the next stage. But why didn't Germany just play for a draw before winning to get pressure on Spain to win the match. If Germany had lost than both Japan and Costa Rica would have advanced. With group E I only lost money so far. At least Portugal and Switzerland both advanced to the next match so I could recover my losses. As for today Argentina vs Australia should be a very one sided match. Argentina should take the win home in 90 minutes without problems. As for the Netherlands vs USA match, I do think Netherlands is going to win but I am not sure if there will be overtime or not. And tomorrow France should easily win against Poland. Good way to make some small wins before the quarter finals.

The two main factors that determine the price of a house is location and it's condition. In the past location was the main driver for house, you could see two very similar houses in different cities having a 30+% price difference only because the living quality of the second city is so much better. Over the last few years I noticed that the trend stopped a bit and the condition of the house became more important. Due to the covid pandemic many people are working from home now and only need to commute to the office once per week. With that it becomes much more important to have a nice and good quality home even if you are a little bit more outside of the city. In my country we also have another issue with government regulation on insulation. Every new renovated house or apartments need to meet certain conditions on thermal insulation. This drove prices for renovations up sharply and can be a real burden now. On top of that the high inflation rates make building material very expensive.  So having a house in good condition becomes the main factor these days to determine price.

Ganz schön was los im Collecibtles in den letzten paar Wochen. Hier noch ein weiteres Raffle:

[FREE RAFFLE] 496th- ฿ECAUSE I AM STILL IN A GOOD MOOD-CYPHER HODL PRINTED COIN

Ist keine Münze direkt sondern nur ein Prototype und ein benutzer Holo Sticker und vielleicht nicht ganz so interessant wie die anderen Raffles. Auch das Verschicken nach Deutschland muß selbst bezahlt werden über minerjones. Trotzdem eine Möglichkeit um mal wieder sein Glück zu testen.

Thank you seek3r for another great raffle here on the forum. It really must be christmas around the corner with the all the raffles lately. Going to try it with 91 this time.

91 - Mauser

Good Luck to all and happy holidays.

Accepting Bitcoin as a legal tender in a country is one, relying on it as your main currency to function your economy is something completely different. At the moment Bitcoin is not ready to function as the world reserve currency where everybody could trade with each other without many limitations. On paper it would be a big step forward to make international money transfers more efficient, but the Bitcoin price is too volatile at the moment. I can also understand why governments are so reluctant to adopt Bitcoins as their new legal tender. Having Bitcoin as the new currency in a country means to give up a lot of freedom for it's financial and monetary policies. Politicians all live in the moment and only worry about the next election. For them it is important to have full control over the money supply. Whenever politicians need money they can print more of it and increase the debt of the country. With bitcoins this is not going to be as easy, politicians will have to be more responsible with their budget and can't spend as much as they like. It doesn't seem realistic that politicians would vote to change the system in such a way.