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Crypto original use case
Not much crypto news this week probably because the Ukraine story sucked up all the oxygen in the room. Or maybe I missed something.
I won't comment on Ukraine, but I will use the opportunity to highlight the primary crypto use-case: direct funding. A lot of people where woken up when they found that they couldn't donate money to Canadian truckers. Then they found out that because of their legitimate donation through legitimate channel, they were now essentially put on a list. This list leaked of course and pretty soon national newspapers were doxxing small store owners for donating $200 for the wrong cause.
It got worse when some people that donated got their bank accounts frozen. It sent a chilling effect to anyone that even considered supporting a protest not endorsed by every branch of the government and all major corporations.
Crypto un-ironically solves this. It gives people the full autonomy of their money. They can fund any group they want. It's true that they'll be going on the ultimate "list", an immutable blockchain, but pseudonymous accounts help here. Setting up a direct line to people is incredibly powerful. Can you really say you own your money if you can't choose to transfer it to someone? Or some name-less face-less unelected bureaucrat from some department you've never heard of can pick up the phone and get the bank to freeze your assets, preventing you from paying rent, buying food or providing for your family.
Whenever there is a noble cause that attracts a lot of attention, you'll find gatekeepers. Sketchy NGOs that want to be the intermediary because you're too dumb to figure out how to help. Consider the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. There was a huge outpouring of support and over $13 billion was raised. To put that in perspective, Haiti has about 11 million people, and 3/4 of the population lives on less than $2 a day.
Where did the money go? I don't know. Maybe it went to a great cause and really helped a lot of people. I'm sure some of it did. But I personally would like to have a direct line to those in Haiti without any restrictions. Many Haitians may not have bank accounts, but I bet a lot more of them have cell phones. Crypto helps side step gatekeepers and fund causes directly.
Similarly in Ukraine, I hope options exist to fund groups on the ground directly without going through organizations whose sole purpose seems to be virtue signaling and using money to raise more money.
Few things get me bullish on crypto. I won't pretend like the FUD doesn't have an effect. I like the technology and gambling is fun. But beyond that, I'm less optimistic. But the events that occurred around the debacle with the Canadian truckers really opened up my eyes and brought back my original optimism.
Anyway, that's my rant on what's going on this week, now lets get to the games.
Action
We had a sell-off in crypto mid week. BNB briefly dropped below $330, a terrifying level. Taking a step back, the price shows a pretty steady decline since November 2021.
I can't say what I think is going to happen. In general I don't see exactly where BNB fits in with the crypto market. Now I use it as a cheaper Ethereum and I love that. But supposedly Ethereum should sort out their issues and hopefully get to parity with BSC in terms of costs. And I'm not even too optimistic about defi either. It's too easy to get your shit stolen with alt-coins. Stable coins still require a lot of centralization and trust or algorithmic wizardry that I don't think anyone has solved. And Bitcoin serves the original purpose of digital gold better, so I'm not sure how BSC and BNB token fit in. That's all to say take profits regularly!
Prediction volume was a bit choppy, dropping early in the week with a big spike in action on Thursday / Friday, only to drop off again and climb back up.
We didn't have any crazy 100+ BNB rounds and no crazy winner payoffs. The highest successful payoff was 5.23 and some 4+ payoffs.
Winners and Losers
| Place | account | games played | won | won USD | Winnings Even Money | Average bet size |
| 1 | 0xf3448525c89bc37bb66c7d596dcfdefec891c935 | 204 | 66.44 | 37,620.0 | 23.26 | 1.89 |
| 2 | 0x688312b0421ccc5db6007b5764ab4cfd1003a8d1 | 1080 | 35.15 | 19,950.0 | 100.48 | 0.28 |
| 3 | 0x36b0b3d25cc1b0314b5f55262b9ca646ad0abd9b | 376 | 32.02 | 18,240.0 | 33.06 | 0.36 |
| 4 | 0x9860b9293bf9beb08004d41becf6fdc948a0ffe8 | 93 | 30.78 | 17,670.0 | 18.07 | 1.47 |
| 5 | 0x39b35d67dceb86ee4fe22f465993c9e4e121c48b | 84 | 27.51 | 15,960.0 | 2.71 | 2.68 |
| 6 | 0x4fd29ca0222fa8fa08d2e00aa6411b4e3bfdfeba | 52 | 26.98 | 15,390.0 | 7.95 | 1.43 |
| 7 | 0x65e83f2e32e4f9a04abdaa900ae824be49154dd6 | 558 | 23.42 | 13,110.0 | 76.57 | 0.37 |
| 8 | 0x2d8de7773a917249d4f45e490f9d6688e6afcee4 | 38 | 22.93 | 13,110.0 | 18.1 | 1.04 |
| 9 | 0x5eed9a2f413369e82b4f901cbbb585ed3766713f | 2 | 22.53 | 13,110.0 | 2.34 | 9.64 |
| 10 | 0xa508654ea91a30a68274387376804ddf33ba8fae | 227 | 22.34 | 12,540.0 | 7.46 | 2.05 |
Another modest week in the games. Not too long ago we've seen our top player pulling in 100 BNB in a week. And that was with BNB a lot more expensive than it is now.
Then we went through an algo-pocolypse phase where algo bots started losing heavily. You see this in other financial markets as well since algo bots are all trained on similar signals. And this isn't science where the rules of gravity can't change. You can have a signal completely reverse in a very short period of time. This is actually what you'd expect as more players are bidding up the winning signal and odds change against them.
I follow the markets pretty closely and I could tell you that there were days where every serious algo-bot was losing money.
But algo bots made a bit of a comeback although volume is still light so they don't show up heavily on the weekly top 10. So we mostly have whales with big bet sizes.
An impressive showing for the bots! Nearly all the top 10 players this week were bots! And bet sizes were reasonable. Obviously the total amount won is pretty low historically, but in the long run this is the way to go. just consistent performance with bets that don't skew the odds too much.
I will tell you it was a lot easier to make money on the games even just a few months ago.
Let's look at the losers
| Place | from | games played | won | won USD | Winnings Even Money | Average bet size |
| 1 | 0x22625fc8c83541204f7de13ad131d23ff1f11672 | 42 | -100.73 | -57,570.0 | -4.23 | 3.25 |
| 2 | 0x541447f1b6e2599b86de681fda1a1e86c158e64e | 117 | -73.42 | -41,610.0 | -13.22 | 3.28 |
| 3 | 0x697d6962b11f792fa90d29bf8bd2cfb52a31d2cc | 152 | -57.12 | -32,490.0 | -20.21 | 1.69 |
| 4 | 0x49a715172767818b639ea4df3f6dd352340be4bd | 253 | -55.15 | -31,350.0 | -38.51 | 1.56 |
| 5 | 0x39d5a272faef220ab778edf718fd00a732ac8246 | 82 | -50.59 | -29,070.0 | -0.31 | 2.34 |
| 6 | 0x670410893e82f42b752cbc8cfd765306fe27284b | 153 | -41.11 | -23,370.0 | -14.75 | 1.94 |
| 7 | 0x7155c73bc99878050c9ccf89be4f3aa87442bab1 | 84 | -39.66 | -22,800.0 | -9.37 | 2.32 |
| 8 | 0xeed8c31e7f91766e3afe9083d6ae5852bc5d44cd | 9 | -39.53 | -22,800.0 | -0.56 | 10.03 |
| 9 | 0x0ff6701480b43d3fdd1846078a7dcfa38dc9fa00 | 118 | -32.79 | -18810.0 | -16.34 | 1.57 |
| 10 | 0x50ea356a75c9c5dede91e6decfc302931b506387 | 27 | -32.6 | -18810.0 | -2.15 | 6.78 |
I looked through a few of the losers. They aren't so much the regulars but some players that won a bit in the past but gave it all back and then some this week. For instance, our #2 lost 73 BNB this week but his total loss was 54, meaning he was up 20 BNB at some point. So he bet way too aggressively and was overconfident.
It's always important to remember this isn't science, this market is a living thing. You can somewhat reasonably say that your car worked fine last week, it should work fine this week. But it's entirely different to say this stray dog didn't bite me yesterday so he won't bite me today.
The markets change. New players come in, move the odds around. World events affect the price of crypto. People play games with the Oracle. A million things can happen. You can have a 100% successful strategy one day, and lose all your money the next day.
The most important thing in investing is risk management. It starts with basic measures: how much am I willing to lose. Never bet more than you're willing to lose. And not just one round, I mean total bankroll.
Next, quantify your edge and backtest. Backtesting is the hardest thing to do as it requires a lot of discipline and honesty. You have to make sure you're 100% mimicking just the information you'll have at the time. You also have to make sure you don't build a model that over fits the data. And finally you'll want to test it live with very small amounts to work out the bugs.
Finally, you have to understand the market changes. You can't be tied to your historical performance and have to be able to walk away if it becomes obvious its not working. Try to create signals to look out for in the future and stick to them. For instance, I could say "I'll stop my strategy if I lose more than X in 6 hours". That helps you make a call objectively rather than relying on yourself to make the call at the time. Maybe you were only down a little bit on hour 5 and you think its coming back around. No, you should stick to what you said.
I do want to talk more about backtesting, but its very specific to your signal. But backtesting is no substitute from testing in a live environment with a small balance.
As always, sending love to our losers. That's all I got for this week. Stay safe out there, and bet responsibly.
As always, feel free to reach out with questions or comments or want my to highlight anything different on my weekly market recaps. If you like what you read and want to subscribe to receive an email when a new post is published, click here.
Good luck and bet responsibly!