I can only speak for myself, even though I gamble almost every week I wouldn't call myself an addict. For many years now I enjoy gambling and can still take a break without thinking about. When I go on vacation I don't gamble, or when there is an important project at work and I need to do overtime I am also not gambling. The best check for gambling addiction is to see how often during a day we think about gambling. There are different ways how a gambling addiction can show itself, there psychological and physical symptoms. Feeling bad and depressed about losing money is one thing, but having physical issues due to excessive gambling is not okay and needs to be addressed quickly, before it gets worse. It's important to control our emotions when it comes to gambling and investing, decision making based on our gut feelings is usually not a good approach. And still a big loss will always hurt our feelings. If the problem is only in our head we can think about more positive things, like how much money we won in the past already. Taking losses into consideration as part of our whole gambling career makes it seem less severe. The big problem is if the issues are not only in our head but also affect our body directly. That can be very dangerous because it can become a chronically illness that might require treatment for the rest of our lives. It's similar to little tics that humans develop under too much stress.

Happu Birthday Hhampu, enjoy your day, hope you had a great trip.

To me it seems only as matter of time for the bitcoin price to recover and reach a new ATH. With higher Bitcoin prices that could make El Salvador very rich, but it is mostly the government that holds these Bitcoins and not the citizen. I am not sure if El Salvador would transfer it new wealth to the population or just keep it for themselves. Comparing it to USA or China seems a bit off right now, because El Salvador is lagging so far behind. They need a lot of investment in their own country and while the money from Bitcoins would help them, they need to transfer that wealth into some form of production. A whole country can't only run on bitcoins. As for the monopoly I don't think it will be a big deal, as long as Bitcoins are free everybody can choose his own ledger and wallet.

I had no idea casinos would use Fengshui to help in designing the layouts. It kind of makes sense now because Fengshui is trying to achieve harmony through only using round shapes. A friend had his apartment setup with a ying and yang approach, so not using any edges or squares, everything has to be round and a fixed place to get the most positive energy out of it. I am not really believing all of this, but it makes a little sense now. I noticed myself that casinos are build up like a long maze with no real start and finish, it's like a flow of water that keeps on moving, you can spend hours and hours in a casino walking around. The design seems similar to adventure parks where you want to let the guest feel excitement all along the way and the whole design is buildup to make everything feel bigger that it is in reality.

Very good prediction last year, I hope you made a lot of money from it. It seems you have a good feeling for the crypto market, why not trust your own intuition this year again? Listening to other people can be helpful sometimes but it is still only a prediction, and if it goes wrong than we hate ourselves for listening to other people. I prefer to take other people opinion into consideration, just not to trust blindly other people. To me it seems that the bitcoin is already in a recovery state, the price recovered a lot since his lows this year. Right now BTC is up 15% within the last 4 weeks. I would still advice to hold bitcoin because the price will likely keep rising after the summer break, and it's still cheap to buy bitcoins compared to last year.

I play in casinos for entertainment, it's exciting to gamble with money and having a chance to win large jackpots. Even though the chance for winning big is small it's still fun, and if we don't play our chance of winning is 0. Going into a casino with the only motivation of winning and making money is not a good idea. We all know that the casino has a house edge, the games are designed to offer better winning chances to the house and not the player. Without it the casino would lose money and go bankrupt. I look at gambling like any other hobby I would do instead in the evening, if I go watch a movie in the cinema I have to spend money on the tickets, snacks and drinks, gas and parking. If I go out with friends to a bar I have to buy expensive drinks. So staying home in the evening and using the money instead at a casino is fun too. There I have  atleast the chance to win back some money.

Relying on money from other people is always dangerous, they will charge us fees and interest and might cut us off without a notification. I try to rely on myself as much as possible, when I was younger I only borrowed money from my family or close friends. From them I knew that they wouldn't rip me off. When I went go university it was the first time i had to borrow larger amounts of money from a bank. I made sure that that it is a longer running loan that will be fully repaid at the end. Like this there is no risk that the bank demands full repayment at one point. Loan apps now sound even less trust worthy than the big banks and even if we blame them for our misfortune, it won't change the situation. We need to be on top of our finances.

It would be awesome if the US decides to do that, but I don't think it's very realistic right now. The volatility in the bitcoin market is still too high for it to be a good store of value for everybody. Historically the Gold price has kept it's value for a long period of time, we haven't seen a price drop of 50% in a few months before with it. That is why it's so attractive for the older generation as an investment to store value. With the high volatility in bitcoins I would also not recommend my grandmother to invest in it. She is above 90 and at her age I advice against investing in stocks or cryptos, she still holds a bit of gold but the most she invest in is short term bonds. For the younger generation this completely different, the longer the investing horizon I would recommend to invest in cryptos rather than gold. The thing with gold is that it's good to store value, but you have no more upside potential. There is no chance that gold will rise 50% in the next 6 months, whereas with crypto currencies you can store your value long term as well and still have a chance to make a nice profit.

I am in favour of gambling and it should not get banned anywhere on the world. Since I am 18 I enjoy gambling regularly, there are so many different casino games out there that make me excited that I don't want the government to tell me one day you are not allowed to gamble anymore. In my eyes it's wrong for the government to constrain the way we live. During university I had a lot of time and played poker almost every single day, now with work I have less time and I play usually 1-2 days per week max. Also I play less poker now and enjoy more games BlackJack or Roulette. The thing with the con arguments against gambling, is that it's the same arguments against so many other things like alcohol, tobacco, or even unhealthy food. They are all bad for us, reduce our life expectancy and make create a lot of problems. But the government can't just ban everything bad in our life, humans need to have a choice what to do with our lives. As long as gambling is for adults I have no problem with it. I prefer to use my money in a casino instead of buying cigarettes or beers every single day.

I tried a betting bot only once and it lost for money. It might have been the case because it was a free script online. In the past I read a few success stories of people making money with betting bits, so I wanted to try it out myself. When using free betting bots you probably have to be very lucky to make money. Why would anybody give away his bot for free if it makes good money? As for subscription based models I haven't tried it, but would like to if they are legit. I am a little bit afraid now that it's a complete black box and someone takes advantage of my data. When it comes to automated betting then there could also be a bot that takes advantage of these strategies. Would be cool to see a survey to see how many people used a bot and how many made a profit of it.

It depends on how much time and money you want to invest in a big project like that. My grandparents were the first to buy a piece of land far outside of the city. We still have the aerial pictures from back then, there were no roads, no lights, no infrastructure, only our house. And now 80 years later we live inside the city. It's hard to predict how big cities can grow, but if you are willing do wait all your life then everything is possible. The problem is that my grandparents invested so much time into building up the house and garden, and they had to pay for so many things, like development of roads, canals, traffic lights and later even the Internet cable. All the people who moved later in the area didn't have to pay for all these things, they had to pay for much higher land prices.

Yeah what a final that was yesterday, really awesome CSGO matches. Best of 5 finals are always more interesting than best of 3 matches. After the first 3 maps I thought it's over for me and NaVi would win this tournament. Even though NaVi is the best team in the world I bet on FaZe for the final. Similar to the PGL Antwerp final I thought that FaZe would pull through and win. Surprisingly only one map went into overtime. Winning two maps in a row after being down 2-1 is a very strong performance. To be honest FaZe looked stronger during the tournament, they didn't lose a single map until the finals, whereas NaVi lost a map to Movistar Riders and to MOUZ. Kind of funny that the two teams always meet in the finals this year, the Major won Faze, then NaVi won the Blast Spring Series and now Faze won again. I guess next tournament NaVi will win again.

I am sorry for Steven that his life got out of control and he lost everything, but crypto currencies are not at fault here, it is his own wrong doings that let him down this road. Saying that trading is gambling is wrong obviously. Gambling are games that are being offered by casinos in which the gambler knows his odds of winning before even playing. Before ever playing any casinos game we know that our chances of losing money are larger than our chances of winning - this is how the casinos makes money. When it comes to trading the rules are different, there are no fixed odds for us to win or lose. Trading is a closed system, we trade against other humans and the only way for us to make money is if someone else loses money. Who knows what would have happened to Steven if he didn't start with crypto currencies, maybe he would have traded stocks and became addicted to stocks instead. It's good that he got help and is living now in a rehabilitation centre and can get his life back on track.

In my opinion bitcoins will always be recoverable, there is no price that is too low from which bitcoins couldn't come back. Let's say bitcoins drops down to $1 which is already very unrealistic, then the market would be flooded with buyers. Who wouldn't buy 1,000 BTC for 1,000 USD? At such a level I would even take out a loan just to buy more coins. It's seems so unrealistic because who would sell his coins for $1? At such a low level it looks like a bad idea to sell. If you bought your coins at 10,000 USD you would never sell them so cheaply, rather hold them until prices recover. Same goes for the buyers, would you really wait until such low prices before buying? I think if the bitcoin price drops close to 1,000 USD there would already be a lot of new buyers pushing the price back up.

That's an interesting strategy you are running here. With 1 million bets you should be able to hit the jackpot. To hit it with less than 100k bets you should need to be lucky. Based on your past strategy to reach the 10,000x multiplier, it would take you 693,000 bets to reach the 330,000 multipler. But with so many bets it's hard to say, you might be lucky before. I am wondering now how high the jackpot is and if it's going to be profitable for you. There is probably a fixed number of bets you can make before you lose money, even after getting the jackpot. Or is the jackpot increasing every day? Than it could be profitable to keep playing. Hitting a jackpot must be an awesome feeling, I tried so myself for years in slots to one time hit a jackpot, so far I have been unlucky. It probably happens when you completely forgot about it and don't expect it anymore.

Pretty cool idea to interact with aliens. Bitcoins offer a lot of new possibilities to interact across different planets, and it could also be a tool to show other life forms that we are friendly and no threat to them. I am thinking about that message that is being broadcasted into the universe to try and contact different species. How about we add some free bitcoins to that message. So whenever it reaches aliens they directly have a wallet and currency to buy something on earth. This would make the first contact much more fun and less stressful for us. The message for the aliens could be something like, we humans invite you to a free beer on earth.

This is what you call market risk in the crypto market and it determines most of the prices changes. It doesn't really matter which exchange you look at because they are all connected, there can't be two different prices for one crypto coin on different exchanges. If that was the case traders could just buy the coin on one exchange and sell it on other to make a free profit. The market risk is also what makes most stock prices move. Stocks are highly correlated to each other, like crypto currencies. If blue chip stocks drop, so will also the small cap companies. In the crypto world we can see that when the bitcoin is falling then all the alt coins are also falling.

So far I have never met anybody who can work for a living as gambler. I know some guys who are successful in gambling and made some money, but never enough to cover all their living expenses from it. In my eyes they are still recreational gamblers. From the Internet I know that there are people who managed to become millionaires through gambling, that is such a small percentage compared to the total number of gamblers.
I wouldn't say that anybody who loses in gambling is not interested in winning. Ask any gambler to choose between winning and losing and everybody will pick winning. You can have fun in gambling when winning and losing, it shouldn't be only about money. Because there will always be a time when we lose, even if we spend all our time forecasting games we can be wrong from time to time. Winning consistently is one the hardest thing in gambling.

Yes I think the US Dollar will be more valuable than the Euro in near future. Europe is screwed and I don't see our politicians reacting fast enough to offset all the negative shocks. The Russia Ukraine war is having negative consequences on the whole world economy, but Europe is hit the hardest. USA is pressuring European countries to buy energy outside of Europe, preferably from North America. Cheap Russian gas is what made European countries so competitive, now we have to buy gas for almost 3 times the usual price. On top of that is inflation still rising and the European central Bank is much slower to react than the FED. It might take years for Europe to recover from this.

I am pretty impressed by the performance of Movistar Riders this tournament, reaching semi finals is a great achievement and a big boost for the spanish CSGO scene. The game vs Liquid was very close, luckily I didn't bet on it because I would have picked Liquid to win. Both of semi final games today look very one sided to me. NaVi should win easily against Astralis to reach the finals tomorrow, they won all their matches so far and are ranked #1 team in the world. Same goes for FaZe, I don't think there is any way for Movistar Riders to win in a best of 3 match. FaZe won all their games so far without even losing 1 single map, the are ranked #2 in the world and even won against NaVi in BLAST Premier Spring Final last month. In my opinion the final will be NaVi vs FaZe, with FaZe likely to win again.