If you want a centralized system with Bitcoin, then it is really simple. You can store your coins in an exchange wallet, or in your PayPal account. If someone hacks into these wallets and your coins are stolen, then PayPal will reimburse the amount. But the negative here is that you will not have access to the private keys. Someone else is storing the coins on your behalf, and it goes against one of the basic principles of cryptocurrency. But then, I need to admit that there is a large section of users who prefer this route. They don't want to store coins on their own (mostly the less tech savvy users).

Apart from the Russian Ruble, I don't think that any other currency would be granted the status of legal tender anytime soon. Because RUR is under heavy pressure and during the last 7 years, it has lost more than 60% of its value. If BTC is allowed for payments, then people will prefer it to RUR, and it will further weaken the national currency. But as far as I am concerned, that step is not needed for now. Russian citizens are allowed to make investments with cryptocurrency and the tax rates are extremely low. For me, that makes Russia one of the most pro-Bitcoin countries in the world.

Yes, they banned only the mining activity. But it will be too early to claim that it will not be having any impact on the market. Because Iran had a considerable share of the mining power. And I am more worried about the miners there, who made huge investments in terms of mining equipment and cooling systems. If they are forced to suspend the operations for 3 months, then they will be short of cash. These miners will be forced to sell whatever reserves they have, and it will further push down the Bitcoin prices.

Obviously no one in their right mind would think that Bitcoin will become the reserve currency of the world. But the reasons are not the ones pointed by you. Volatility is an issue with cryptocurrency, but it will reduce with expanding user base. The real reason is that Bitcoin is protected against inflation, unlike the fiat currencies. And this pose a problem for the governments, as they can't print money in unlimited quantities (and then steal most of it). And this is the reason why they removed the gold standard many years back.

I would disagree with the second part. FIFA or ITF would never agree to your statement that the primary purpose is to make money. They would claim that their primary purpose is to popularize the sport and take care of the players and fans (obviously, using the money generated from various events). In fact FIFA recently made a bold move, to increase the number of teams playing in the world cup from 32 to 48. The intention is to give more representation to Africa and Asia. Such a step would be unthinkable with cricket. Here we have reduced the number of teams in world cup, from 16 in 2007 edition to 10 in the 2019 edition.

Talking about India, the main issue is not the lack of availability of the vaccine, but the delays due to red tape and bureaucracy. There was a statement form Bharat Biotech (the manufacturers of Covaxin, the second vaccine that is used in India). They were claiming that it takes around 120 days to complete all the bureaucratic hurdles, after the vaccines are manufactured at their facility. So vaccines that are manufactured in March first week will most probably reach the population by July first week. In Western nations, this process does not take more than 1-2 weeks.

There may be a few players who have made tens of millions in profits from poker. But for every player who made millions, there may be thousands who lost their life savings. If you believe that you can make it to the top-100 or top-200 among the millions of poker players, then go for it. It is like the odds for a lottery jackpot. When someone purchases a lottery ticket, if he is in sound mental health, he will not say that "OK.. now I have taken the lottery ticket. Tomorrow I will win the jackpot. Let me sell all my assets now and waste them on partying". No issues in trying big with poker. But you should have a backup plan in case it doesn't work out.

When I was new to the cryptocurrency market (in 2017), airdrops helped me greatly to get my hands on to some valuable coins and tokens. In most cases, I exchanged the airdropped coins and tokens to BTC or ETH. But then by 2018, the picture changed completely. Very few of the airdrops were turning out to be genuine, and on top of that the free required to move these tokens to the exchanges (in order to convert them to ETH or BTC) shot up by manytimes. In the end, I gave up participating in the airdrops, because it was turning out to be complete waste of time and effort.

BNB looks quite overpriced, isn't it? Right now it is the 5th largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization, having a market cap of $51 billion. Now comparing with other exchange tokens, this value looks too high. For example, Huobi Token is having a market cap of $2.6 billion (1/20th that of BNB), and KuCoin Token is at $0.86 billion. In fact, none of the other exchange tokens have even 1/10th of the market cap of BNB. Is this difference justified? I am not forgetting the fact that the value of BSC should be added as well, but right now it doesn't have much market share.

On this I would agree with you. My primary concern related to Tesla is with their battery technology. From what I heard, the batteries need to be replaced after 8 years, or 100,000 miles. So if you are planning to keep your car for 20 years or more, then you need to dish out cash from your pocket at least two times during this period, to replace the batteries. And it costs around $15,000 to replace the battery pack, which can be quite a fortune to many people. And unfortunately, Tesla hasn't made much progress on the battery sector for the last decade or so.

Be careful when you talk about the fatality rate. It varies with different strains. For example, the original strain had a mortality rate of only around 0.1%-0.3% among the younger people. However, with the double mutant strain (B.1.617.2), the mortality rate seems to be 10 or even 20 times higher when compared to the original strain. A lot of young people have died as a result of this strain in India. Thankfully the strain has remained limited to India (with the exception of a few cases).

You didn't understood what I posted. The nominal price of real estate and bullion may go up as a result of inflation (in terms of fiat currency). But overall, the purchasing power of fiat goes down due to inflation, and it will make sure that the real value of these assets are lower than the pre-inflation level. Let me give you an example:

A country is having 20% annual inflation for 5 years. Nominal value of fiat currency remains same, but the purchasing power goes down by 60%. That means that purchasing power of 100 units of fiat currency during pre-inflation level is now equal to 250 units post-inflation. So in order for real estate and bullion to maintain their purchasing power, their nominal price needs to go up by 150%. But in real life cases, it never goes up by that much. At may be 50% or 60% at the most.

Inflation is actually good for the cryptocurrency market. Since most of the cryptocurrencies (except a few shitcoins such as Doge) has controlled supply mechanism, inflation would only mean a higher exchange rates for them. The net value of the other assets such as equities, real estate and bullion will go down as a result of inflation, while that of cryptocurrency will remain the same. And this will attract more investors, which in turn will result in another pump for the cryptocurrencies.

The damage is already done and the exchange rates are down by 50%. Now what difference is it going to make, if the people doesn't believe in his tweets. As a lot of posters have already claimed, his real intention may be to come up with his own coin. It is something that Mark Zuckerberg tried, and failed to implement. Now Elon has come up with an idea similar to the Libracoin, with careful planning and deception. Now let's see how he will proceed with his plans and how much success will be there.

All it takes is one or two corrupt prison wardens out of hundreds in any state or federal prison. And McAfee has a lot of cash in hand to bribe them. Estimates are that he swindled hundreds of millions of USD worth of funds during 2016-18, by promoting various scam projects. And most of that money is parked in various offshore tax havens and the authorities don't have much success in recovering them so far. Unless he is moved to some ADX prison, he will continue to have access to various contraband.

My understanding is that they need to do a lot of paperwork and formalities if they want to make cryptocurrency available for the other countries. Still, looking at the pace at which they are adding new features to their cryptocurrency services, I won't be surprised if they make their service available to users in cryptocurrency friendly jurisdictions such as Japan, Canada and European Union within the next few months. For users in more restrictive countries (such as Indonesia and Philippines), it may take some more time.

Unless the OP gives a link from a reliable mainstream media article, I am going to treat this as fake news. Iran needs Bitcoin much more than the other way around. Recently, the regime even encouraged Bitcoin mining inside its jurisdiction, in order to earn valuable Forex and circumvent the sanctions. For the last few weeks, cryptocurrency sector has been flooded with FUD, and this rumor is the latest one being used for that purpose. Iran contributes to around 5% of the hash power and any ban could potentially bankrupt the miners there.

The government is partly to blame here. The vaccine rollout was delayed by several months, because of bureaucracy and red tape. Even the Sputnik vaccine, with an efficacy of 92% as certified by reputed researchers got the approval only after 3 months of negotiations. And even now, the government has refused to negotiate with the western pharmaceutical manufacturers, such as Pfizer and Moderna. People like me, who are in the 18-44 age group has near zero chance of getting vaccinated in the next 2-3 months.

Even if it is 14 or 16 years instead of 12 years, what Bitcoin has achieved is impressive. Google was the fastest to achieve a market cap of $1 trillion. And in case of Google, the company was founded in 1998 and within two and half decades the one trillion USD market cap was achieved. And Bitcoin was able to achieve it in almost half of that duration. And this is also one of the reasons why we should hold the coins for the long term. Look at the other companies in that list - GOOGL, MSFT, AAPL and AMZN. All of these stocks have retuned excellent returns to those who are still holding these stocks.

For the economy to recover properly, first the pandemic needs to be contained. And with just 6% of the world population fully vaccinated against COVID (around 400 million till now), that target is at least one year away. And even those who are fully vaccinated needs booster shots after a duration of 12 months. And from what we have seen, the vaccine manufacturers are unable to meet the global demand. On top of that, at least some of the vaccine manufacturers are facing tough questions related to efficacy.