Mitchell Santner has suffered a finger injury and has been ruled out for the next test match. Actually, this will be a huge relief for the New Zealand selectors, because they were facing a selection conundrum. Trent Boult has rejoined the squad and it was difficult to include him in the playing XI without dropping someone who is doing good. Now New Zealand is likely to go to the second test with an all pace attack, comprising of Boult, Wagner, Southee and Jamieson. Will be interesting to see what kind of pitch the curator will prepare.

May need to wait until the next major bull run. Crypto prices are down by at least 50% from the ATH levels. In case of Bitcoin, the exchange rates have simply collapsed to $32,000 from a high of $62,000. But the good thing for altcoins is that despite the slump, they have mostly held on to their market share. At the time of ATH, the Bitcoin dominance was 40% and right now the figure stands at 41%. So this time the altcoin market share didn't go down, despite the sharp correction in exchange rates. 

I know that some of the bounty hunters and airdrop participants from the third world nations are happy with rewards of $20 or $25 per campaign. But the transaction fee is one of the main issues here. Recently, in many cases the cost of moving the tokens from wallet to the exchange went as high as $50. That leaves the bounty hunter with no option other than to keep the tokens with him. And in the end, he suffers losses when the token price goes down. And no one likes it, when the reward can't spent after working so hard.

Since Ollie Robinson has been suspended, Dom Bess will be replacing him for the second test. I don't have a good opinion about Bess and he was horrible during the series against India. On the other hand, Trent Boult will be joining the New Zealand squad, thanks to relaxed quarantine requirements. However, the New Zealand selectors seems to be in a dilemma. I would prefer leaving out either Mitchell Santner or Colin de Grandhomme. But there are talks on resting either one of the three frontline seamers who played in the first test.

Universal minimum corporate tax was created to target multinational corporations such as Amazon and Microsoft. I don't think that it has anything to do with the cryptocurrency market. And I am quite skeptical about this initiative. The G7 has agreed to this and they will tax the corporations a minimum of 15%, in case the country where they are filing their taxes doesn't charge any corporate tax on the profits. It needs to be seen whether this measure can be defended in the court. For example, Americans are saying that they will charge 15% of the profits made by Amazon in Luxembourg, since the latter country doesn't charge any corporate tax. Now the question is how the US government can charge taxes on the sale that was done in Luxembourg. It will be very difficult to defend.

Even now the majority of the population remains unvaccinated in the EU, with only a small fraction having received both the doses. For example in Germany, 22% have been fully vaccinated and another 24% has received one dose of the vaccine. For UEFA, there is no question of affordability. They can afford to spend millions on the vaccine. But the problem is that a lot of people would oppose if the football players are included in the priority list and given a chance to get vaccinated. Because even a large proportion of those with comorbidities are yet to receive vaccine doses in the EU.

If these measures are actually implemented, then it will make El Salvador as one of the most Bitcoin friendly countries in the planet, and definitely the most pro-Bitcoin nation in the third world. But we need to be a bit cautious here. There is no guarantee that these measures will be implemented. Unless the parliament passes such measures, I am going to be skeptical. But so far, none of the parliamentarians have spoken in support of president Bukele, as far as these crypto-friendly policies are concerned.

And I will think twice before packing my bags and moving to El Salvador. Has anyone checked the crime rates there?

Well.. that is the most important question.

Why should the hackers send the coins to a wallet, that is controlled by FBI. There are all sort of possibilities in play here. My theory goes like this:

The FBI guys arrested an individual or a group of individuals, who were operating a Bitcoin mixer. The arrested individuals shared the details of all their cryptocurrency wallets with the FBI (including the private key). The hackers think that the mixer is still in operation and they send the stolen coins to the wallet, in order to wash them.

But someone in this forum claims that the wallet is linked to the Gemini exchange. In that case, I can't really explain what happened.

2.15 billion doses have been administered so far. Obviously there will be reports of adverse reactions, and especially in people aged 80 or above, in very rare instances these reactions may cause serious medical conditions. A few months back, there were reports from an old age home in Norway, where a number of senior citizens died after getting vaccinated with Pfizer dose. But such conditions are extremely rate (maybe one in 100 million or so), and you should not hesitate to get yourself vaccinated just because of this.

Experienced gamblers know how to take care of this issue, so I am not going to mention them. For the noobs and gambling addicts, the most dangerous situation is when they win two or three games at the start. Then they start to believe that it is their lucky day. Then they will lose 2-3 games and all the gains made in the previous games will be gone. At this point, anyone with some sort of experience would quit. But the addicts would refuse to admit their losses and they will gamble until every single penny is lost. 

Vietnam is a very strong team. In terms of FIFA ranking, they are 61 ranks ahead of Indonesia. And let's not forget the fact that Vietnam is now on the top of Group G, with 4 wins and 2 draws from 6 matches. It is too early to say whether they will qualify or not. But for Indonesia, there is zero chance of qualification. After 7 matches, they have just one point (from the draw versus Thailand). Teams such a Indonesia stands a better chance of qualifying for the 2027 World Cup, as the number of teams have been increased to 48 (from 32).

Carbon tax is one of the biggest scams in recorded history. If implemented, only the western corporations such as Exxon and Shell would end up paying it, as the largest petroleum producers (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Qatar.etc) would just ignore it. In the end, it will overburden the already heavily taxed western corporations and ordinary consumers. If we want to reduce global emission levels, then it has to be a combined effort. It is not the sole responsibility of the developed nations to keep the emission levels under control.

Just wait until the details are known. We still don't know how the FBI managed to retrieve these coins. In case the hackers sent the coins to an exchange wallet and the exchange handed them over to the FBI, then I would say that the hackers have acted in an idiotic manner. On the other hand, if the FBI had tracked down the hackers somehow and forced them to forfeit the stolen coins, then I would appreciate the FBI. In this case, it would act as a serious deterrent to any such criminal activity in the future.

We all need to remember one thing. This is not the first time that El Salvador has made a foreign currency as the legal tender. Back in 2001, as a part of dollarization, they gave that status to the United States Dollar. And ever since then, the national currency (Salvadoran Colon) has become more or less obsolete. So in case they make Bitcoin as the legal tender (which they haven't done yet), then there will be three currencies with the status of legal tender in El Salvador - Salvadoran Colon, US Dollar and Bitcoin.

There is a lot of propaganda being spread through social media channels airmed to discourage people from taking vaccines. More than 2 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered till now, and only a handful of people have died from adverse reactions. On the other hand, as per the official numbers more than 3.5 million people have succumbed to CoVID 19 till now. And these are just official numbers and in many of the countries the number of deaths have been heavily undercounted (especially in India and Brazil).

I don't think that the proposed rate of 10% is too low. Gambling industry doesn't have very big profit margins, so it is not viable to tax them at the default corporate tax rates. And also remember that the tax is applicable on gross revenues, and not on the profit. So ideally I would argue for a rate even lower than 10%. But I like the attitude from the Ukrainian government. At least they are not prohibiting the gambling industry and pushing it to underground like many of the other countries are doing.

According to the IRS, every cryptocurrency transaction that you make needs to be reported in the income tax return. It doesn't matter whether you are transmitting $0.10 or $1,000 worth of coins. You need to enter the details everytime you purchase something with crypto. So at least within the US, you can't escape the tax liability when you purchase anything with BTC. Now the catch here is that if you do such purchases hundreds of times in a year, it gets quite tedious to enter the details. So a better option would be to use a platform such as PayPal, which will convert your coins to USD, before you make the purchase.

The price didn't move much. That is not because El Salvador is a small country, but because it is just an informal statement. We don't know whether the president (Nayib Bukele) is serious about it. I hope that he is serious and will introduce the bill in the parliament, but from what I heard he has a history of flip-flops. And getting the bill passed in the parliament is not going to be easy. As we all know, the politicians form one of the most Bitcoin-skeptic group of people in the world.

Twitter got what they deserved. On one hand they tolerate genocidal tweets from various Jihadist and leftist elements, and on the other hand they block genuine tweets from the center and center-right. Let's not forget the role they played during the POTUS election of 2020, by banning any news related to the laptop of Hunter Biden. I am glad that Nigeria didn't fell into this trap and stopped Twitter trying to implement the regime change. Next will be India. There they have been trying to implement regime change for so long.

There are still a lot of people out there who don't trust Binance. And they believe that BSC is a centralized Blockchain which is controlled by Binance (which is not true actually, although many of the nodes seems to be operated by Binance). The fee with BSC is in the $0.10-$0.20 range, which is almost 100 times lower when compared to Ethereum. Also, BSC is compatible with the Ethereum chain and many users believe that this creates some kind of interdependency between the two chains.