What kind of rewards are you talking about that are dropping in ETH mining? The returns surely seem to have increased a lot on ETH mining since the crazy fee hikes. I had a single rig running a few montbs back but it has been down for the last few lucrative weeks losing out on potential profits.

Also, the UNI token has a 4 year emission schedule and is capped at a supply of a billion tokens. Right now, only around 10% are in circulation. I think the price will keep going up for sometime but then dump hard as the biggest Liquidity providers sill constantly sell the tokens every day. Lucky for those who ever used uniswap. They all got free monies greater than the US stimulus check.

Full nodes are integral to doing business with bitcoin. We don't need to incentivise people to run full nodes making them analogous to masternodes in case of other such centralized coins. The unsaid roadmap towards incentives is greater merchant adoption and implementation of LN. The incentive will be for well-connected LN nodes in the form of routing fees.

Those growth figures are huge. Newer exchanges, particularly WazirX seem to have captured a lot of attention. Though are you sure that figure is for bitcoin trading and not for crypto trading in general. Most people in India are dabbling into Alts and there are trading competitions on WazirX almost every week.
The lockdown has given people time to wet their feet into crypto particularly after the favorable ruling by Supreme court. The biggest threat right now is the Govt. It can take its characteristic autocratic decision any day and start banning people or jmprisoning them from using cryptocurrency. There really is no space for any intellectual or nuwnced discussion in the country right now. The moment media starts painitng it as "black money", things will quickly go down.

When i first heard the name Kraken, I imagined some shady exchange with its pirate-centric name. Later i came to know that it is quite an important one for the US. And now they are possibly tbe first crypto exchange to incorporate traditional banking. With its tentacles in both crypto-economy and in traditional banking, they are in a great position to market crypto offerings to normal customers.
Being a normal bank, i suppose they can now offer some sort of crypto-fund to their customers just like the bank salesmen sell other investment options. Kudos and congratulations to the Kraken team.

The token from uniswap immedjately got listed on binance. CZ is busy playing games by lisitng all kind of shit tokens riding on the Defi wave including Sushi. He wouldn't want to lose on the trading fee. Uni has seen a low of 0.3 and a high of 15USD within hours of lisitng.

If you have a trade history on uniswap, you will have it in your account when you connect with your wallet. i've heard that claiming it needs a huge gas fees. If its less than what you will get from selling on binance then you can easioy make a profit till everyone dumps it on each other. Last i checked it was still trading at almost 3 USD.

Uniswap is basically a decentralized exchange. The innovative feature of user provided liquidity is a copy of the curve protocol. These are pretty much financial instruments that are allowing random people to raise money by just listing their token with some promise of De-Fi.
Earlier if you were a scam dev, you had to go through the pains of lisitng on an exchange so you could dump your "tokens" on clueless buyers. Now you can just list them on uniswap, make promises about "future" development and then sell as much as you can by careful trading on uniswap.

It has opened a lot of avenues but a decentralized system is only as good as those using it. Unfortunately, there is no incentive for anyone except pumping their token and then selling it to newbies. Most of the active "community" knows this too. People are more than happy to dump on each other as well as in paying insane ETH fees. The miners are having a good run for sure. Earlier we used to be concerned about investment bankers getting filthy rich at the expense of common people. Protocols like curve and uniswap have only lowered the entry barrier to being an investment banker, albeit at a lower scale.

Its raining free money. Grab it if you can.

The world economy is too big and bitcoin usage too small for it to have any meaningful impact on the global economy yet. There are too many moving parts in the economy. A lot depends on tbe political climate too. When the first views on the positive effects of bitcoin were put forward, it involved a switchover to the bitcoin standard. It also involves using something like bitcoin for transparent govt expenditure to remove obvious bottlenecks like corruption.

Such a paradigm change will take time amid opposition from banks and those on the top. The existing system is much too gratifying to them and they won't let it change. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are yet only a spark. It'll take the work and belief of millions like us in our communities and countries. We have to just keep going and keep making bitcoin a part of our individual and surrounding economies.

That was a fasicnating read. I suspected the inability of urban agriculture to go much beyond vegetables and fruits and it did come up later in the article. If you read about the failure of such programs in USSR, it was about the farmlands being taken over by communes instead of individual farmers tilling their own land. Even in cuba's edample,the farmers have significant control over deciding how they allocate their produce.
A reason i feel that the approach of growing our own food can't work is because farming is not something that everyone can do. Its a whole sector in itself. While growing our own food might seem the best way  to ensure food quality, when it comes to feeding the masses using limited arable land and irrigation, intensive agriculture on privately or co-operatively owned and managed farms is the only method that has ever been successful.

Love your analysis connecting the basic needs. Community food programs though are something that have failed spectacularly in erstwhile USSR. A better approach towards food is to find local alternatives, innovation in farming methods towards sustainable farming. Growing enough food in terms of quantity and quality for everyone depends on better farming methods.

Apart from this, the needs hierarchy is also about intangible needs like love, loyalty and security. Those come from better access to resources like education, healthcare, infrastructure and of course, law and order. All of these have nothing to do with a universal basic income but come from professional governance.

Greed, Not money is the root of evil.

Money if anything is a godsend because of its ability to unite people in its pursuit. Money is what enabled exchange of goods and services. People everywhere may not agree on much else but they will still agree on money if you don't consider the fanatics.

Money is one of the greatest inventions of mankind and Satoshi removed all its limitations by making it decentralized when he announced bitcoin. It is upto people now to choose and do the right thing

About Diversification
You said, "People did not have enough money to invest in new projects". This gives an indication of the shit strartegy of running after the pumps and dumps and hoping to sell at ATH. In reality, what diversification means is that if you want to earn through the shit show, just keep a war-chest of moneh you can lose to put on these "projects". This should be a very small percentage of your holdings. You must always have atleast half in bitcoin if you don't want unnecessary headache.

The rest of this market is only about organised groups and whales trying to take advantage of you as a retail investor. Don't fall for that trap in the names of "projects".

IBM has been pretty aggressive about quantum computing. They have a lot of introduction about it on their website. They probably dont want to go lose the next processor battle like the transition from mainframes to PCs and are hence active in marketing quantum computing. We will have to see the exact link about what IBM said on breaking wallet in 2.5 days. They probably mean that IF theh can use QC to break SHA-256, they could break the wallet.

This bounty from IRS is interesting regarding LN. Aren't LN transactions connected to the on-chain funding/ closing transaction??  Alsk, if IRS wants to trace LN, it means they expect a lot of use in coming times which is well, good news for bitcoin and us.

Bitcoin is the first of its kind technology that has taken a middlemen out of maintaining a ledger. There is value in its network's capability to transfer wealth, not just money. It is traded like a commodity and the price remains dependent on the market buy-sell pressures.

The network effect ensures that there are multiple organisations and individuals the world over who are invested in this. What is important is to have some for of realization as to what justifies the future increase in price. This is largely dependent on navigating the pitfalls of regulation, centralization pressures, transaction throughput and the potential of significant services/ products to be built on top of the base layer.

This is the reason that imo, Lightning Network remains a very important factor. It is the only innovation which is currently focussed on removing the transaction speed bottleneck and allow building more products. Barring that, in the long term there isn't really any reason for the price to go up except institutional acceptance and interest. If institutions start building positions in Bitcoin, the retail investors like you and me will profit. That is a very socio-political decision and it can go either ways in the long run.

Did anyone see the advertisement for IPL 2021. Its a masterpiece of marketing which begins with a elderly Sardarji doctor coming out of his car after a hard days work and people dropping flower petals on him. Then they have a voiceover about how COVID-19 has changed our world. How it has increased distances but has brought us closer.
And then comes the amazing team colors and the voiceover about "Fir se aa raha hai"...Ohh, how it warms the heart after such a long winter of desperation. God, I'll miss the audience noise on the telecasts though. The ad just randomly came on my feed somewhere and i just can't find it on Google or youtube now. If anybody comes across it, do share a link

Enthusiasts say that for the case where ONE government tries to do it within its own jurisdiction. If ALL governments decide to take action against bitcoin, obviously it won't keep the price that it has now. The problem is that no government can go ahead with such a tyrannical ban and call itself democratic. Public opinion would matter in that case. The greatest hedge against government action thus, is not privacy or decentralization but public opinion. Unfortunately, Bitcoin and cryptos don't exactly cover themselves in glory with the constant scamming and hype cycles leading to uninformed newcomers losing money.

That depends a lot on what CHINA decides to do. It has a lot of infrastructure and a population deeply involved in crypto. I am pretty sure if US Fed decides to unilaterally de-link USD from bitcoin, China will be very eager to support it with RMB. They couldn't have a better chance to increase usage of their own currency in all the developing countries. Bitcoin survives because its everyone's friend and everyone's enemy, depending on how you treat it.

The prices depend on exchanges and the demand for BTC against altcoins for trading at any given day. The price fluctuations are mainly driven by bot traders looking to get the most out of arbitrage trading as well as by swapping Alts to gain more BTC during their upward moves. BTC moves also depend on market sentiments of adoption, regulation or hacks.

There is a huge category of low liquidity cryptocurrencies which are listed on almost no exchanges and as soon as people FOMO, the prices tend to pump up as bag-holders will continue to raise prices depending on incoming volume. Lots of bot trading and whale manipulation goes on in pumping the prices of alts. The only prices that you can safely assume to be linked with demand and market sentiment is for BTC. Rest of them all is either whale manipulation or rumors about "Projects".

You are screwing up your proportions here. More like if 10 projects appear, 1 will be successful. There is already the rampant copying, scamming and pump and dump that this space has always been famous for. It is impossible to separate the good ones from the bad ones as most of them seem to have learnt from their mistakes and are adapting very encouraging tones as far as devs and "community" is concerned.

How exactly do you find the "profitability" of a DeFi project before listing and being available on exchange??  It is always like they pump the prices on Uniswap with some low-liquidity pool. People FOMO and buy worthless tokens by paying very high transaction fees. Finally when and if they find an exchange, the price goes into high volatility benefiting the traders and whales like it is meant to.

Skills and good work ethics are as useful as they ever were. Though if its school education you are talking about, then one has to be very careful about what "skill" they choose. The only thing to keep in mind is that it matches your ambition and aptitude. A lot of fear has been raised about AI eating up jobs. Yet, to think of it, robots aren't really going to replace human riggers, welders working on skyscrapers anytime soon. Infrastructure doesn't employ as many people as it used to but it'll survive. Engineers, particularly Mechanical, Civil, Electrical will continue to be in demand.

The most that automation and AI will effect is the jobs on lower end of the spectrum. Support services, call centers are going to get very light in terms of human intervention. Apart from that, we are always going to need good code and new product implementations. It isn't going away anytime soon.

So yeah, Money is king only because skills and work ethics will continue to be used to earn more of it. Nothing is changing in those terms except that we may just self-destruct ourselves with climate change and novel diseases as we continue to disturb earth's balance.

The way De-Fi is working on all of these platforms is that you stake or lock your tokens in their contracts on the ethereum blockchain. The contract then allows borrowers to take loans and pay interest on it. The value of the liquidity that lenders provide to contract is balanced automatically based on data obtained from exchanges. Traders who will jump at any arbitrage opportunities ensure that the "pegs" are maintained.

In a way, this does provide a kind of bank on the blockchain into which you can deposit money and from which you can borrow money. It is decentralized so you aren't actually trusting anybody except the robustness of the code itself. The problem is that even for a simple implementation, the transaction costs and time becomes too steep for any PoW chain (Like ETH in this case). If instead PoS is used, it becomes a whole new question of whether it is decentralized anymore. What really happens in practice is that any small player is driven out simply on the basis of transaction fees. It ends up as nothing but a place for price manipulation and arbitrage milking for whales and traders who are expert at this sort of thing.

To answer your question, yes, there is a need to decentralize. But, there isn't yet any way to do it without these other pitfalls which make the whole system pointless.

Indians lapped up even the 90s Ramayana and Mahabharat that was telecast during the lockdowns. At the core, we are all pretty religious people..LOL..And everybody knows that cricket is a religion in India. So yeah, viewership will definitely be there.

The umpires maybe pulling out due to age factor in certain cases but hey, who watches it for the umpires. Those familiar faces are long gone I think.