A few friends of mine from Turkey who are working internationally all are getting paid in USD or Euros. None of them really want to receive TRL because of the high inflation. They all studied abroad and probably had it much easier when negotiating their salaries. For the unlucky one who are stuck with the lira it's the best they can do to switch into crypto currencies. Getting larger amounts of USD or Euros is probably harder than just to buy cryptos on your own. The intermediate economic outlook for Turkey is not that good, inflation will likely keep rising. This will likely increase the people who buy cryptos.

I also tried gambling in casinos and sports betting, both is interesting in its own way. For me personally casino games are a bit more fun and I tend to be luckier here than with betting. In really big tournaments I still like to wager a bit but with relatively small amounts. In the casino I spend much more money. Compared to you however this are just peanuts. Losing 7k USD in minutes is a lot for me. I don't really know your financial situation so maybe it's not hurting you that much. After such big swings it might be better to lower your gambling budget a bit. Casino games are still fun when gambling with less.

It's seems a bit early to declare bitcoins as the winner in the currency wars. Crypto currencies have definitely won some battles in the past, but the war is not over yet. So far there are only a few countries which accepted bitcoins as a legal tender. For me to say that bitcoins won the war would be either after being used as the world currency, so that all international trade will be settled in bitcoins. Or that one of the leading countries will accept bitcoins as a legal tender. At the moment this still seems years away. The war will continue.

While you are right that it won't be exactly 21m bitcoins that are going to be mined, this is a number that is very far an in the future. Unfortunately we all here won't be around anymore when we are getting close to the 21m barrier. What I find more interesting is to know how many bitcoins are already lost today that can't be recovered anymore because no access to the wallets. Then we could extrapolate that number to the future at find an estimate of how many bitcoins actually will be in circulation. Who knows, this number might be closer to 19 than to 21m. Nonetheless the bitcoin price has to rise in the future, the hard cap on the bitcoin supply means that the miners require higher prices to keep mining in the future. If energy costs keep rising, so must bitcoins to keep profitable for the miners.  

I do believe that trading can earn us money. First of all the trading world is a zero sum game, no money is disappearing. If you are making a loss than someone else is making money. It can't be that we all make money that the same time. When it comes to losing money in a trade we need to determine if we made an error on our research and the coin is not as good as we hoped, or if the overall market is just moving against us. A lot of price movements in the alt coin market is due to bitcoin market. If bitcoins are going down so are most other crypto coins. Like you I would rather hold a coin longer and wait for the price to rebound than to sell it too quickly in the red.

The best method to bet on football matches is to bet only the money you can afford to lose and don't bet all your money on one game. Even with the most save bet we can manage to lose money. As for betting crypto or fiat money I don't really see a difference there. Most of the big bookmakers accept fiat money and the major crypto coins. I would say it comes down to what free money you have, if you have a lot of fiat money in your savings account I would rather use that. You can always convert your winnings into cryptos later.

I fully agree with you on why we need bitcoin in today's world. Printing unlimited amounts of money is a sin by politicians. Having the opportunity to create money out of nothing removes the need for a balanced budget. Every year the government makes a plan for the upcoming year and how much they are going to spend. They are fully aware that they won't meet their own targets. Spending more money means making more voters happy. That is why we finally need a currency that is independent and can't be touched by politicians. The more we invest in crypto currencies the more we show the government that we want more control over our own money.

I don't think the rise in bad projects and bad advertising is destroying the crypto msekets. It's just a side effect due do the popularity and success of crypto currencies. As with any successful sector in the economy, people will try to profit from the success of others. While for the unlucky few who fall for the bad eggs it's devastating, all the others will not really be affected. For example, the whole scam business of fake amazon emails sending out invoices, is not really hurting the business of amazon itself. As with any area of the Internet, we need to be critical and not take everything at face value.

This is very good for you, it shows that you are not at risk to become addicted to gambling. As someone who doesn't feel that urge to keep gambling when it's better to stop, it can be hard to understand the compulsory behaviour of addicted people. We humans are not all the same, there are some of us who are more vulnerable towards addictions than others. In general I would not distinguish between gambling, drug, alcohol or even a gaming addiction. It becomes very difficult for a person to control their own action, even though they know it is wrong and will harm them. We also see that if some is struggling with addiction on one area, he is more likely to become addicted to something else. I have seen this myself with a good friend of me, we both started smoking during high-school but he was smoking much more than me. After high-school we both tried to stop but he just couldn't, it took him so many attempts but he still fell back into his old patterns. Only later when he went into gaming and started drinking he managed to stop smoking. Unfortunately he just switched his addiction for something new and was still unable to control his actions. Something we can't understand our friends why they are doing something. The only thing we can do is try to help them.

If you want an honest answer, I am afraid but this is not realistic. First of all you need to have healthy expectations when it comes to trading. If you start again with trading I would aim for returns of 30-40% per year, but not to become a millionaire overnight. The problem with focusing on a fixed number like 1 million is that it will keep you forgetting about the risks you need to take to get there. The chances for you to get so much money is very small, it's much more likely for you to lose it again. Since you lost alot of money in the past you should have some tax credits and can save on paying taxes in the future.

I don't feel like raising the marketcap of Bitcoins to circumvent the 21 million problem is what the crypto community really wants. We all are aware that the huge energy consumption for crypto mining is a problem. But the rest of the world is also constantly increasing its energy needs. Its just a matter of time that we become more efficient in the harvesting of energy. That's why we can't look to far into the future based on our current technology at hand. Technology advancements are going to help solve the energy problem.
The attractiveness of Bitcoins is the hard cap of 21 million, it stops inflation reducing the value of the existing coins. For me this also means the bitcoin price is going to stay on a upwards trend. While the price for 1 bitcoins keeps going up we can trade in even smaller amounts going forward.

Unfortunately bitcoins don't provide any dividends. Just holding the coins in our wallets is not going to earn us any interest. The only form form of profit comes through price appreciation and when we sell bitcoins for a higher price. There are companies that offer you returns for your bitcoins, but then they will have full ownership of our coins. The company can be legit or can be a scam. For me the risk is just too high to lose it all. Another form of making some returns would be through gambling. It's not passive income and also involves risk, atleast we can control the risk here.

Acceptance of Bitcoins World wide is a good thing. It increases the number of stores who are going to accept bitcoins as a form of payment and the number of investors. The more people know about bitcoins the more people want to own them. Which again means the more people want to be kept up to date. That's why I don't think news about crypto currencies and bitcoins is going to disappear. Newspapers and news shows on TV will have to include bitcoins going forward. The most likely is to just include it into their financial news coverage about stocks and bonds.

I don't really see how a barter system could be working in today's world. The world became so international in the last 50 years. Almost any large company produces in multiple countries and relys on transportation of goods across long distances. The barter systems humans had in the past waa very local restricted. You know the seller or buyer and exchange directly with him. But now electronics buyers from North America or Europe have no real interaction with the sellers from China. It can't really be a direct barter transaction, so we need something in between, which is money right now. There will always be the need of some kind of medium in between.

I agree with you that most of the regular gamblers are probably near the breakeven point. They didn't win much and they didn't lose much either. Many casino games are close to a 50% win chance. There will be swings in between but on average most gamblers will be in the center of the distribution. As for the tails, the number of people who got rich through gambling or lost it all is small. That's why I wouldn't count becoming rich as a big pros argument for gambling. For me the pros are having an opportunity to play games in the evening now from home. I am not so much into shooters or other traditional games anymore. Gambling provides a nice alternative.

For me timing is the hardest thing when it comes to trading. I have tried so many times to find the perfect moment to buy a new coin or old coin, just to find out that I was wrong. That's why I kind of stopped going for one purchase at the best moment and rather split out my purchases over several weeks. When going for a new project than buying directly at the launch can be a good idea. But instead of putting all my money in at once I would rather look at the charts a few weeks after the launch. The risk that a coin is being hyped massively just so the price drop in the months afterwards is real and can hurt us. So instead of doing 1 big purchase I try to make 4 purchases spread out.

That's a great idea to already have an investment plan for the whole year planned out. Like this we know exactly how much money from our salary we can set aside for saving and investing. I am doing a similar approach, where I have 2 ETF that I use as my monthly investment scheme. There is almost no fees involved and keeps me invested in global stocks. The rest of the money I put in a bank account, can't really say savings account because there is no more interest. From that I pay all unexpected things like repairs and use some money for crypto investing or gambling.

I believe that the trend towards online betting and away from local bookmakers will continue. In my country there a lot small places where you can bet on sports games. This not efficient anymore, they all have to pay rent, pay employees and other fixed costs. Online betting will always have a cost advantage. So we should see more advertising and better promotions from the online industry.
And the next big thing in my opinion will be more live betting for a large number of sports. Due to covid the stadiums are still empty, most of us can only watch their favourite sport from the couch at home. That's why live betting during matches becomes much more interesting.

For me bitcoins are a currency that is very similar to all the major currencies traded around the world like Euro, Dollar, etc. Both crypto and fiat don't pay any dividends, and both rely on investor confidence. Fiat money has a country and their economy behind it to guarantee some value, but investors look more at the future. The only difference is that there is a central bank behind fiat money that guarantee me to use that money to buy goods on my country. What they don't guarantee is a certain value for the money, since the gold standard was demolished the value fluctuates. So both cryptos and fiat money fluctuates freely. For me the guarantee that I can actually use my bitcoins comes from the large number of investors. As long as people are interest in the coin will there be value and an active market.
So I would say bitcoins are more than just a commodity market.

Money is in an important factor in our society, without it we are not able to experience nice things in life. However, having nice things doesn't mean we are happy. Owning a luxury car and wearing fancy clothes might project outwards that we seem happy, but it's no guarantee that we actually are happy inside. I would say that money provides a level of comfort that makes life easier and we enjoy important things like friends and family more. For that we don't need to wealthy or rich, just have some savings. Another thing is that focusing on money in life is not going to make us happy. Because there is never enough money we can have and all the money in the world is not going to bring us a healthy family, there things that money can't fix.