Till now, only a very few countries such as Japan, Germany, Switzerland and Singapore have completely legalized Bitcoin. In the United States, the situation varies from state to state. Larger states such as Texas, New York and Florida have taken a hostile stance towards BTC, while some of the smaller states are more lenient. And the third world nations in general has adopted a hostile stance and this includes the most populous nations (India and China). Only a few of the third world nations such as the Philippines have legalized BTC.

That said, I don't think that legalization is correlated to any of the other aspects which you had listed here, such as transaction fee, stability and safety. Transaction fee depends solely on the number of transactions being made. If there are more transactions, then a higher fee may be needed for quick confirmation. And the implementation of the Lightning Network has helped to lower the fee by quite a bit. Stability depends on the developers. But no one complains that Bitcoin is unstable nowadays.

There are much better ways to deal with the bounty cheaters. For example, if an authentication post is made mandatory, then it can cut down the cheating attempts by quite a bit. Also, it should be made mandatory for users to enter their ERC-20 wallet address in the location field in the Bitcointalk profile. These are much more efficient than KYC. What is the use of KYC, when you can find scammers willing to do KYC for you in the dark market for just $5?

South Africa is still producing exceptional talent. But the problem is that they are playing for the other countries and are refusing to represent SA. One player who got much attention from the media lately is Marnus Labuschagne. A while back, almost half of the English team was made up of Kolpak players, such as Tom Curran, Matt Prior, Jason Roy, Andrew Strauss, Kevin Pietersen, Jonathan Trott.etc

The same is the case with New Zealand as well. In fact, a few years back there was even a debate whether the NZ South Africans XI will be able to defeat the rest of the New Zealand team. More than a dozen South African cricketers have shifted to NZ, including BJ Watling, Colin Munro, Glenn Phillips and Neil Wagner. And it started with Grant Elliott (now retired).

There is huge amount of interest for cricket in India and that is evident from the success of state T20 leagues. I have seen crowd numbering thousands in some of the Karnataka Premier League (KPL) and Tamil Nadu Premier League (TNPL) matches. And remember that these are not even inter-provincial matches. They are intra-provincial matches equivalent to grade cricket in Australia or club cricket in England.

The IPL blocks around one and half months (April-May) every year in the cricketing calendar. We can have a second division, which is played at some other time (February-March maybe?),  and there can be a condition that anyone who has played in more than 3 IPL matches during the previous season can't participate in the second division for that year. This will give more opportunity for the younger players.

LOL... Bitcoin gave +170% returns so far this year and you are saying that there is no hope for the future? I would like to disagree with you. The basics are still strong and sooner or later, we'll be witnessing a major spike in the cryptocurrency prices (including that of altcoins). But then, the question being asked here is a bit complex. The greed for 5x profit immediately can far outweigh the potential for far greater profit after 3-4 years. If the offer was 2x or 3x, then I would have thought twice. But to tell the truth, it is impossible to ignore when the offer is 5x. And I am sure that more than 90% of the crypto users will be choosing the same option that I am making.

As always, there are two sides to this argument.

Please don't misunderstand me. I am someone who always advice others to stay away from the ICOs. I have never ever invested in any of the ICOs and till now I haven't taken part in any of the bounty campaigns to promote them. That said, I have studied in detail about the IEO/ICO market and the bounty campaigns which are taken out to advertise them.

First let me talk about the success rate. As of now, the average success rate of an ICO is around 5%. And that is not much lower than the success rate of an average Wall Street startup. Even in my country (India) we have hundreds of startups every month, and only a few (5% to 10%) becomes successful. But people don't shy away from investing in them. Because the more the risk you take, the greater are the chances of getting good returns.

IMO, there is only one 100% safe method of growing your altcoins. That is to do mining. If you want to be completely safe, then you can go for PoS mining. You may chose coins that have PoS algorithm, such as Reddcoin, Dash, Neblio, NEO, PIVX, QTUM and NAV Coin. Now I can guarantee that the number of coins will increase. But there is no guarantee that the value of these coins will increase. For example, the price of DASH has fallen from $160 to around $70 during the past 2-3 months. So even if you got a few coins from mining, the combined value could have gone down.

The other option is to go for PoW mining. Now this is not something that is recommended for small scale and solo miners. Cryptocurrencies such as BTC, BCH and ETH have become heavily biased towards the large scale miners. Only Bitcoin Gold, with its Equihash algorithm offers significant rewards for the small scale miners.

The heading is very misleading. The Americans never tried to shut down Bitcoin. On the other hand, one top ranking official was asked to study about the possible methods to destroy Bitcoin back in 2011/12, when Wikileaks started to accept donations in cryptocurrency. But as of now, there is no evidence to claim that they actually went ahead with any of the methods. And to be honest, they could have easily destroyed Bitcoin in 2012, if they wanted to do that. The hashpower was very low and it was very much possible to launch a 51% attack and destroy the reputation of the coin.

Here are the reasons why Bitcoin is not suitable as a currency:

1. It is protected against inflation and therefore the purchasing power will be intact. The users have an excuse to hoard them.
2. Long delay in getting confirmations (up to 1 hour, compared to a few seconds for PayPal, Visa, Master.etc)
3. Unclear legal status in many of the countries
4. The transaction fee can be high, especially for small sized transactions
5. Difficulty in converting crypto to fiat, and vice versa

The US government doesn't usually "purchase" anything. On the other hand, in order to finance their budget deficit, every year they "sell" their federal debt in the form of the United States Treasury Bonds. As of now, the total federal debt of the United States stand at more than $20 trillion and most of it is owned by foreign governments and foreign citizens.

The US treasury can sanction the purchase of Bitcoins. But for that they needs to get sanctions from the lawmakers. First of all, Bitcoin needs to be classified as an asset that can be included in the Forex reserves of the United States (right now more than two-thirds of their forex reserves is made of solid gold), and that is not going to be very easy.

It will be very difficult to compile such a list, because unlike the case with bank accounts and equities, a Bitcoin wallet can't be linked to a particular individual. An user may be the only one having the private keys to access a particular wallet, but the relation between him and the wallet is much weaker than... say a bank account and its holder.

A perfect example is that of Satoshi Nakamoto's coins. We can say that he is one of the top cryptocurrency holders and he holds a total of BTC980,000 in his wallets. What we don't know is whether he has the private keys to access these coins or not. In case he doesn't have them, then how can we say that these are his coins?

Well.. let me take a simple example. I got $3,000 as my salary today. I withdrew my cash from ATM and then someone stole that cash from me. Can I say that I still own $3,000? The banknotes are still there, but they are in someone else's pocket.

Well.. you definitely have a point there. But I want something in between the IPL and the numerous state-level T20 leagues (such as the Karnataka Premier League, Mumbai T20 League, Tamil Nadu Premier League, Odisha Premier League, Telangana T20 Premier League and Saurashtra Premier League). Right now there is a huge gap between the quality of these two levels of cricket.

What I am suggesting is a second division cricket league, for those cities which are not participating in the IPL. For example, we can have teams from cities such as Kochi, Ahmedabad, Pune, Kanpur, Lucknow.etc. This will increase the fan following of cricket in the second tier cities. I would like to have 10 teams in IPL and another 10 in the second division.

Well... I would agree with you there. There can always be excuses. But if there is some weakness with the Bitcoin algorithm, then it should be applicable to the hundreds of exchanges spread out across the globe. Why only some of the exchanges are hacked, and the others are safe? The answer is that in most of the cases, the hackers gained access as a result of the carelessness of the exchange owners. And in some cases, it was later proved that inside jobs were behind the robbery. To be fair, the digital nature of Bitcoin has made it easier to track the stolen coins. It would have been a different story altogether, if physical cash was stolen from a vault.

I don't know how can you compare Uber, Zoom.etc with ICOs such as HiveNet and GRAYLL. Uber, Zoom, Lyft.etc are in business for the past so many years. They have billions of USD in annual revenue (although right now many of them are in net loss). Uber itself have an user base numbering in hundreds of millions, which is increasing at a healthy pace every year.

Now let's take a look at the ongoing ICOs. There are a few good projects such as HiveNet (distributed cloud computing network) and FRED Energy (alternative energy promotion). There are some very good ideas out there. But the problem is that they don't have a final product yet. The development has just started. And they don't come cheap either. The hardcap for HiveNet is placed at $19 million. Do you really think that this is justified?

Cricket South Africa (CSA) is solely responsible for the death of cricket in that country. Their stupid quota system has destroyed the quality of their national team, as well as the domestic cricket in that country. I can understand quota system in education and employment, as I come from India where up to 70% of the seats are reserved based on the caste. But implementing quota system in sports is just ridiculous.

And take a look at those who have benefited from this quota system. Kagiso Rabada got his selection for the first time to the national team in 2015, thanks to this quota system. Ironically, Rabada hails from a very influential family and studied at one of the premier educational institutions in South Africa. Now how can someone justify the selectors giving priority to this guy over some white guy just because of his race?

The opinion here is decisively in favor of long term investing. But in my opinion, only a few of the cryptocurrencies are suitable for long-term holding, and these include coins such as Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin. The other coins and tokens are highly volatile and therefore more suitable for medium term or short-term investment. And I am saying this out of my own experience. I used to hold some of the promising tokens, which I purchased in 2017. Many of them have gone down in value by up to 99%. I should have sold them in 2018, when the exchange rate was higher than the purchase price.

Actually the number of projects have gone down significantly. During 2017 and first half of 2018, on average we were having 10 new projects every day (i.e around 300 new projects per month). But the situation has changed very drastically now. On average, the number of projects have dropped below one per day and we are having around 20-30 new projects every month (including the IEOs). And the irony is that the success rate has also declined, despite the low number of projects.

This is the excuse I have heard most often. During the past 2-3 years, we had at least 5,000 ICOs listed in the cryptocurrency market (a conservative estimate). And I would say that more than 95% of them are currently trading below their ICO prices. A majority of these projects are no longer listed in any of the exchanges, as they got delisted due to low trade volume. Those who invested their hard earned money in these projects lost all of their capital. Only a few dozen, or a few hundred at the most are trading at a premium.

Now here comes the question. Had the development goals been completed on time, their exchange rates would have been the same? In every single project where the price went down drastically, you can see that the development has been either completely stopped or slowed down to unfeasible levels. If the investors feel that a project may not get completed in time, then they don't have any persuasion to invest in it. And that is what causes the steep crash in the prices.

You can't blame everything on the market. If a particular project is good, then it will give you good returns irrespective of the market sentiment. I checked the charts for Ferrum Network. It has lost more than 50% of its value in just around one and half months. Actually this is very discouraging. When a project suffers such a heavy fall in such a short duration, you know that there is something wrong with that. On top of that, the trade volumes are also declining and this token is listed in only one exchange (BitMax).

There are multiple red flags with the Ferrum Network project. Why the team is refraining from listing this token in multiple exchanges? Right now it is being listed in only one exchange, and from the order books it looks like someone is dumping the tokens there. This follows a very similar pattern. Once the ICO is over, the team members dump their allocation and exit the project. The development becomes stagnant and gradually the token loses its value and gets delisted from the exchanges.

What is wrong with hoarding? There is not enough liquidity in the market for Bitcoin to maintain a healthy exchange rate without hoarding. May be that will happen sometime in the future, but under current circumstances hoarding is actually helping those who invest in Bitcoin. And since Bitcoin is not being used as a currency nowadays, I don't think that we can claim that hoarding is something that is weakening the Bitcoin ecosystem. It happens with each and every investment asset.

However one of the disadvantages with hoarding is that if the bearish phase continues for too long, then there is a good chance that at least some of the investors may lose their patience. And once that happens they will be ready to dump their coins at whatever price they could manage. This is what happened in 2015, when Bitcoin touched $200 per coin level. If we want good returns from Bitcoin, then we should be ready to hold on for at least 3-4 years. If the same can be done with gold, then why not try the same strategy with BTC?