That's a great success story, good job for your to amass so many bitcoin. For me such a goal is still so far away and I wonder if I can ever make it before becoming old. Having a well diversified alt coin portfolio and several bitcoin would be my dream. I think it's a good idea to not only put all our money into Bitcoin, but also to keep buying other coins. For your friend its where his success came from and I hope he is going to keep trading in the future. Having 3 bitcoin is great, but not enough to be financially independent. Another important concept of investing is to never stop, we should keep growing our portfolios and reinvest the profits. Only then we will achieve real independence and financial freedom.

I have thought about this question quite a while already, even though I am not even close to financial freedom yet. Acquiring so much wealth that I don't have to worry about money anymore is longterm goal of me that seems unrealistic at the moment. Still I like to think about what I would do in such a scenario, we never know it's only one lottery win away. Probably the first thing I would do is to quite my job and look for a more fulfilling job. Without the burden to pay bills and other expenses, I wouldn't work for my current boss. Also I wouldn't work full time anymore, only working in the mornings and having the afternoon off would be great. I need to keep working to have a fixed lifestyle, otherwise I would sleep all day and waste my time doing nothing. Teaching children would probably be the best kind of job for me. Having some classes with kids that are interested in science and doing experiments to keep the class engaging would be good and keeps me motivated.

I agree with you, someone who gambles daily doesn't need to be an addict. Same goes for someone who gambles only one time a week, he doesn't have to be an addict but can be one depending on his habits. We need to look more closely at the time spent at the casino and how much of his money he his betting. If you gamble every day for 15 minutes for 2-3 dollars, than I wouldn't call you an addict. Losing a few bucks won't change much for you and you seem to be on control over your bankroll. And someone who gambles only one time per week for several hours and loses all his monthly salary in a single day should be called an addict in my opinion. Another factor to determine if we are addicted to gambling should be if we can take a break from it without thinking about it constantly. There are more aspects to an addiction than how often we are at the casino. In sports betting it's true that we have times of big tournaments, where we have big games almost every day and then we have summer breaks where are no games for several weeks. It's more interesting how well you are doing during these break periods and if you will switch to some new sports you never followed before only to place some bets. There are detailed tests for gambling addictions and it shouldn't come down to how many times you visit a casino per week.

While it's true that the past is no guarantee for the future, I still find it the best guess we have today. When wondering what the price of a coin is going to be tomorrow, my first approach is to check the current price and the price one day ago. Observing the price at which exchanges traded a particular coin over the last several weeks is the basis for technical analysis. There are many trading indicators which rely on past data to try and identify trends that will keep running in the future. We can either believe in these trends or not, but if we don't believe it's hard to make consistent predictions of the future. For me technical analysis is a very important tool I have used many years now. I don't recommend to trust it blindly, but it can help new traders to build their own strategies. Just looking at the bitcoin price alone we can see that there are different cycles that change between bear and bull markets. Why not use indicators that help to identify these cycles.

I agree with you, if people are unwilling to save some of their winnings it's a serious problem of their mindset and might come from unhealthy expectations or being too greedy. Everybody knows the excitment of winning in gambling and the rush of positive thoughts from our brain. At least for me my brain keeps telling me that there is no chance I am going to lose now and that I should keep on gambling. Not sure if this comes from our mind looking for patterns, or it's just our faith believing in us. Nonetheless we need to keep our emotions in check and don't give into such thinking. My approach to a big win is to take some of that money out and not add to my bankroll. If I don't withdraw some of my winnings the risk is too big that I will just keep gambling with it and eventually lose it again.  I don't know if the mindset alone will be enough to transform a poor person into a rich person, but it will definitely make things better in the longrun. What I agree with is that we need a strong mindset to at least keep the money we already have. Also having strong financial and money management skills are important to control our overall finances. It's not only our gambling balance we need to control, our whole monthly budget for living expenses and paying bills should be controlled in the same way.

First of all it's important to determine what a successful gambler is. For me it's a bit hard to answer such a general question, because there are different so many different types of gamblers. Is it someone who gamblers regularly and makes money from it? Does it have to be his main source of income? Or is just someone who was lucky one time and managed to win a big jackpot? So far I haven't met anybody who uses gambling as his main source of income. If I ever meet someone who gambles 5-6 times per week and makes good money from it then I would call him successful and not an addict. But how likely is this going to be? Casino games are designs so that the player losses longterm, I don't think anybody can constantly win against the casino and make a reliable source of income from it. So if someone gambles a few nights per week and manages to get lucky from time to time winning big jackpots then I would also call him successful. As long as he is in full control of his gambling habits and making money from it, I would call him successful and not an addict. The problem of addiction come when someone can't control himself anymore and his losses are accumulating rapidly without the chance to stop and step away from the casino.

I don't think this is why Bitcoin is going to reach 100k USD soon, because all the countries that invested so much time and effort to ban crypto currencies are not going to change their mind so suddenly. First of all most countries still allow their citizens to invest in Bitcoins, there some crypto regulations but no outright bans. Which means that even all the world would allow free crypto investing, there wouldn't be a lot of new investors all of sudden. And secondly, I am sure that Bitcoin will manage to reach 100k USD in it's current form without many new investors, probably next year after the halving or in 2025 latest. Bitcoin can already be used in many cases and it's up to all off us to increase the use of cryptos in our daily life.   

I read an article on the weekend that analysed the last few earning calls of the biggest corporations and how often they would mention AI in it. They found that since 2021 there was a huge increase in focus on AI from all types of sectors like Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, Tech Giants, etc. So we can already see today that most companies identified the great potential of AI and the need to be part of the change. What many companies are doing now is trying to setup teams to develop their own AIs and not take the AI from other companies. Which would make future acquisitions not so important if the knowledge of AI is already inhouse. It's interesting to see a lot of new companies focusing on AI, but I am not so sure in how much value they are going to bring to the table. When all the big companies develop their own AIs then the profit potential for these startups will be very limited and it could be very likely that we are seeing a big rise in bankruptcies over the next few years.

It's a long time ago when I first started gambling. Already as a young kid I have been interested in gambling due to two factors. The first one was my grandfather who played lottery and scratch cards all his life. He would take me with him to collect his winnings and place the new bets every Saturday. To keep me entertained he would always buy me 2 scratch cards. And the other factor was watching casino movies. When watching movies like oceans eleven or rounders I knew that when I will be 18 that I am going to visit casinos myself. Most of my friends back in the day felt the same and we would regular visit our home town casino. And then there was the poker boom in 2010/11 where a lot of small poker tournaments where being organized locally. In my country it's not allowed to gamble for money outside of casinos, so all the Poker tournaments where offering physical prices. It was a good way to win a new graphic card or monitor with limited downside.

In case you are one of the persons that store all their money at home in a big vault, you might be reluctant to transfer all your money into bitcoin. The upside of having fiat money at home is that you can see it, touch it and even when the whole world breaks down you will probably find other people that are willing to trade with you for that money. Making now the switch to a fully crypto wallet can be a hard step for people that are so used to using cash in their daily lives. I would recommend to not move too fast and rather slowly ease into the crypto community. Why not start with building a crypto portfolio with 10-15% of your wealth and slowly build it up over time. Bitcoins are a good currency to store value online, and its also a great opportunity to make some money longterm. But I wouldn't recommend to put all our money into one single asset class, better to spread it out and diversify in multiple different assets.

That is a very good strategy and if you don't have so much free time to trade actively it's the best approach for you. The so called HODL strategy has been one of the most profitable strategies since the launch of Bitcoin. The long term trend of Bitcoins is still upwards and any holder is going to profit from it. Without the need to constantly buy and sell our positions we also save on transaction fees. If you don't hold any Bitcoin yet I would definitely recommend you buy some coins today and just leave them for now. In case you are looking for more active trading opportunities I would recommend you look at the alt coin market and pick a few less popular coins to trade on the side. Then you can use any future profits to buy more bitcoins and grow you crypto portfolio. Or if you only want to focus on Bitcoins, then split your coins into two wallets. Make one longterm storage wallet where you keep 80% of your coins, and use another wallet for active trading with the remaining 20%. Here again you can active trades depending on the time you have and any profits you should keep adding to your HODL wallet.

These are interesting questions and it sheds a new light on the benefits of the forum here. First of all, I have never been addicted to gambling and I think the forum helped me a lot to keep my gambling habits in check. The many posts here on the forum about the topic of gambling addictions made me focus more on the issue and evaluate my own time and money spend at casinos and bookmakers. Without the forum I think that I would have been at risk to become addicted to gambling over the years. Thanks to the many advise here I am using fixed limits on my gambling budget to avoid the big risk of not stopping and chasing loses. For casino games the forum didn't change much of my experiences, because I am using the same strategies for a long period of time now. Also the games I enjoy the most are usually the same. I played Roulette, BlackJack and Poker ever since I started gambling at the age of 18. However, when it comes to sports betting the forum helped me a lot to make better strategies and focus more on a particular sport where I think that I have an edge. Another great advantage of the forum is that it brought me in the crypto casino community, where I found a lot of new casinos that offer good bonuses and easy ways to deposit and withdraw money. Without the forum here I would have not enjoyed online gambling the way I do now, as I would have probably stuck to only visiting physical casinos with my buddies.

Today are some showmatches between top CSGO clans and some old school Legends. Faze is going to play a team of Legends in the SteelSeries CS2 matches. These games are mainly for entertainment as there special bounties for the players if they get a knife kill and only the Desert Eagle as weapon is allowed, but we can still bet on them. When it comes to showmatches I am always a bit afraid as the top team will likely not give 100% performance to make it seem more interesting. That is why I am only going to make a small bet on the Legends team. And then there is are two matches between NaVi and Vitality, where the two best players are going to switch teams. ZywOo  will play for NaVi and s1mple is going to play with Vitality which is going to make things more interesting. Again I am a bit afraid to bet any larger sums on these showmatches and will only make a small bet on Vitality, I think they have they have the better strategies at the moment. It's always only best of 1 games which makes it harder to predict a winner.

That seems like the best approach I would try to do the same. If I had enough money to buy an apartment or house I would do it and rent it out or live in it myself. The rent income we can use for our crypto portfolio or use the money we save in not paying rent anymore. But we need to be careful to not invest too risky our money, because if we lose our coins then we could get in trouble later. There is a big difference between crypto investing and owning real estate, real estate needs maintenance to not break down. A tenant is not going to pay rent if there is a problem with heating, a hole in the roof or other issues. Our crypto portfolio is fine without any maintenance and we just hold it long term. Renovating a house can be very expensive and if we don't have any savings for it we could be forced to sell it. For me it would be best to have a mix of all assets so that we always something to fall back on and be secure against bigger issues like a damaged roof or broken heating.

I agree with you, it's hard to imagine working in the same job for 40 years without any end insight. On top of that having to work overtime and weekends for a boss that doesn't appreciate my sacrifice is horrible. At least among my friends we all dream of becoming financially independent one day. Running a business and being our own boss is one way to achieve that freedom, but it can't be everybody self employed and not working in big companies. The majority of us is stuck as employees and in such a case investing is the only solution to make enough money to be independent one day. It's true that investing is no guarantee to become rich one, but not investing is a guarantee that we won't become rich either. Better to at least try and have the chance to make it, than never to try it and being stuck in the rat race.

Since the start of the covid pandemic I visited my home casino only three times, first it was closed during the lockdowns and then I mostly stuck to playing online which is more comfortable for me now. When visiting a physical casino I always go with friends and it's a evening event, we are having good dinner and also stay for drinks, so we are spending all night in the casino. Gambling is part of that evening, but not our main focus, we also enjoy watching others gamble and don't want to spend all our money in the first 30 minutes in the casino. Usually it's only one of us gambling and the others watching and our big winnings of the night we share at the end. As for online gambling I have some rules that I follow to keep my gambling habits in check. First of all I only gamble in the evening after work, after doing all the important things of the day first. Gambling is a form of entertainment for me and comes after taking care of the household and looking after my family. I usually try to take a break after 45-60 minutes gambling to clear my head a little. The most important part is that I have a fixed budget for every week to not fall in the trap to keep chasing my losses after a bad streak.

That sounds a bit superstitious that there are hard caps at which you lose more. It's not like the casino knows your goals and wants to trick you in to spending more money to reach that goal. Like you analyzed yourself it's probably coming from your own mind that becomes more reckless in trying to achieve your goals. I had similar experiences in the past where I tried to reach certain profit goals, only to end up losing more money than I hoped for. My mistake was to set unrealistic goals for myself that took too much risk to achieve. In the end I changed my approach to gambling, instead of having fixed profit goals I now have fixed weekly budgets to gamble with. This makes it easier for me to control my maximum losses and whenever I make a big profit I take it out to stick to my fixed budget. Focusing on the risk instead of the profits is the exact opposite from your approach and helped me a lot to control my bankroll.

When it comes to sports betting we usually don't play against the bookmaker, but rather against other gambler. That's the main difference to casinos, in a casino well play against the house and when we lose the casino wins. That is why the casino adds a house edge to all it's games to make sure they win in the long run. A bookmakers offers all type of bets, we can bet on a win, lose or draw of our team and the bookie has no preference what we pick. The bookmaker adds a spread to all his bets, that's why we can't just bet on every outcome and make a profit. He is not in the business of making good bets himself on which team is winning and losing, rather the bookie is trying to match all type of bettors against each other. That's why our goal shouldn't be to beat the bookmaker.

Kids are the new seniors of tomorrow and will eventually become interested in Bitcoin and other crypto currencies. As a teenager we don't worry about money, we never really worked and don't give any serious value to money as we rely on our parents to give us the things we want. It's just part of life and we shouldn't worry too much that our kids don't share the same enthusiasm that we have for Bitcoins. Teaching our kids about money is one thing, nevertheless they need to learn eventually to take care of themselves. That is why I think it's the seniors that will keep growing Bitcoins and eventually pass them on to their kids, which then will be seniors themselves and keep on growing Bitcoins.    

I am the exact opposite to you, if someone I don't really know calls me a gambling addict I wouldn't care about it. Why should I care what a stranger thinks of me? If I would be concerned what other people that I have no connection with think of me, than I would be worrying about it all day. But if my family or my close friends would call me a gambling addict it would make me think. First of all it would irritate me and I would need to find out if he only said it as a joke, in anger or if he really means that. The thing with family and friends is that they know us pretty well and have a good view on our life. So in case a good friend is concerned that I gamble too much and has the believe that I am an addict that I would talk with him as open as possible and try to convince him otherwise or hear what else he has to say.