The previous few days have been incredibly exciting whether you are a crypto sports betting – or simply a crypto bettor.

The market had its ups and downs, as it usually does, but the last 96 hours or so have witnessed some of the most spectacular increases in recent memory.

This is especially true if you are a Cardano fan (ADA).

While the best-rated online sports betting companies do not now support ADA as a crypto bet funding option, it is only a matter of time until they do.

And the more Cardano rises, the sooner our favourite bookmakers will include ADA in their banking options.

Of course, cryptocurrency may be a fickle mistress.

But it's critical that you embrace her in this way. She'll be a severe mistress if you don't.

Take a look at the current ADA pricing.

After trading considerably below $2.00 for the majority of the year, ADA reached an all-time high of $2.58 on Friday. It spent the majority of the weekend in that range before soaring to its current ATH of $2.98. That top occurred just yesterday, owing mostly to optimism about the September 12 smart contract implementation. Cardano will eventually give Ethereum a run for its money in the NFT area and the overall DeFi market in a matter of weeks.

But, as we've seen today, ATHs are always – and we mean always – followed by modest but major crashes or "corrections."

The ADA price has decreased to $2.64 after peaking at about $3.00.

We've heard friends and coworkers completely freak out.

Of course, when ADA hit $2.58 on Friday, there was ecstasy all around. It's now worth considerably more, and panic appears to have set in for people who should know better.

Of course, this is human nature. It's the only way to play the game.

However, if you want to win, you must resist the temptation to abandon your wager.

This is all too frequent among sports bettors. Every day, thousands of gamblers put money on a sure thing, observe an early inning slip or first-quarter collapse, and promptly hedge their bets by betting the opposite way on various live odds. More often than not, this is a loss-mitigation strategy rather than a win-guarantee one. Of course, bettors frequently count on foregone conclusions before they are foregone conclusions.

When that happens – when their initial bet wins despite the terrifying glitches – they make money, but considerably less than if they had simply sat it out. And they make a lot less money than if they had doubled down at the bottom. It's a good thing if it works out. But when it doesn't, it's difficult to remember.

The same is true with cryptocurrency, albeit with far higher stakes.

Because we're bullish on ADA and have been involved in the crypto platform since its inception in September 2017, we've seen this type of scenario play out in a plethora of tragic ways. Investors buy in, experience some gains, and then panic sell and lose every time the inevitable crash occurs.

Consider this true story, as told by a trustworthy friend and hodler.

This buddy of ours had a colleague who dabbled in cryptocurrency, which was just entering the mainstream at the time. He'd heard wonderful things about ADA, which was trading at 12 cents per coin. Staking prizes, smart contracts, and so on. All of these features had been planned for years, but they have represented the basic concept of the Cardano platform since its inception.

He invested $100,000 in Cardano at the $0.12 valuation and received 833,000 ADA in return.

But then the (completely predictable and everyday) inconceivable occurred.

ADA prices have reduced to six cents per unit. He went into a frenzy and sold.

In other words, this poor man transformed $100,000 into $50,000 in a couple of days. He decided to cut his losses.

To be clear, nobody spends $100 Large on a crypto stack if they can't afford to lose it. Sure, some people may overextend themselves, but that is always a bad option, regardless of the earning possibilities. You should never gamble more than you can afford to lose.

This guy, on the other hand, did not. He was able to afford it. But he panicked and now regrets it.

Had he simply hung onto his stack and ridden the ebb, he'd be sitting on $2.48 million at yesterday's ADA ATH of $2.98.

That's enough to make an adult cry.

The real tragedy though is not that someone made a terrible wager and decided to stop the bleeding by leaving early. In most cases, this is perfectly reasonable. We were, of course, in the same boat, and we muscled our way through. “Hodl the line,” was our catchphrase. “Maintain the faith.”

This is why:

ADA is more than just asset appreciation. It is intended to perform actual work, meet the technological needs of entire nations, and serve as the foundation for a new, efficient, and omnipresent kind of informational riches. It is intended to foster unprecedented upward mobility not only for investors and traders, but also for established and emerging markets around the world.

It's also intended to decentralise the blockchain verification process so that it isn't reliant on expensive data centres, inaccessible mining hardware, and so on. Stake pools crunch the figures with ADA delegation, and their rewards are distributed to pool members. Remember, none of this was in place when our sad hero abandoned his haul. But he was aware of the possibility.

So, while it's unfortunate that this man turned $100,000 into $50,000 instead of the $2.48 million he'd have today if he'd done nothing, that's hardly the worst of it.

Consider the following: Currently, a relatively well-performing ADA stake pool pays out 4-8 percent in payouts per Cardano "epoch" (five days). Of course, the percentage is not the return on stake (ROS) for individual delegators. It is the number of ADA earned by a stake pool depending on its total delegated ADA. Those awards are subsequently distributed to all delegators based on the ratio of their delegated ADA to all others in the pool.

This man would clear roughly 573 ADA each epoch with 833,000 ADA and an average ADA pool return. This equates to 3,436 ADA each month.

He would have made $10,240 per month at the current Cardano all-time high.

A whole month!

In terms of incentives alone, he'd be able to recoup his whole primary investment in less than a year.

This, of course, does not account for the fact that free ADA acquired from staking is added to your stake, so that with each new epoch, you are taking a larger portion of your pool's benefits.

We're not celebrating this poor man's stupid decision or his huge squandered opportunity right now. We're simply using it to encourage bettors of all stripes – sports, crypto, stocks, etc. – to do their homework, understand what they're betting on and the key factors influencing that bet, and make certain that your mitigation strategy aligns with the future potential that piqued your interest in the first place.

Make a bodl and a hodl!

And, of course, when your betting site eventually accepts ADA, make sure you claim all of your payments in the same currency and delegate them as soon as possible.

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