This is so yesterday to think that Mbappe would underperform because he might have a pre-agreement or pre-contract signed with Real Madrid. How weird is it even to think that this could be the case?

This guy is equipped with hundreds of millions in his pocket and he is fully independent. He wouldn't give a *** if he plays against Real Madrid and destroys them. He wants to become the next best player in the world and he is tired of losing that competition and he wants that award. The only way to get there is to win the Champions League. Whether Real Madrid is his opponent or West Bromwich Albion, he doesn't care.

That would be a big jump for them and what's even better, AC Milan is playing against Atalanta, which means that Bologna will certainly be the winner of the matchday no matter how the game between Milan and Atlanta ends. Now with regards to the Champions League qualifiers I think for Bologna it would be better if AC Milan wins the game as Atalanta has two games in hand and if they win both, they could get ahead of Bologna again by quite a bit as they also have the superior goal difference. But if Milan wins, Bologna is fine as their maximum goal for this season is 4th position. But what a season played by them so far, I didn't take notice of them until I saw they are competing for the top 4.

It doesn't happen very often that I think a rumor carries a lot of value, but I think in this particular case that transfer would make a lot of sense from many perspectives. Osimhen has been playing for Napoli and I assume he got a good salary, but nothing out of the ordinary yet. He is after a lifetime contract that finally pushes him into the 9 figures. That's what he could get when he decides to go to PSG. At the same time he is a very good striker and I think a worthy replacement for Mbappe. In my opinion he is certainly not the same league as Mbappe, but he would fit into the team quite well. This could be more than a rumor.

I saw two different games in two different halftimes to be honest. In the first half there is no doubt that Barcelona should have probably taken the lead by at least two goals. But when they had this single goal, I thought all the time that this could backfire as we should keep in mind that Napoli has its own Lewandowski who can score anytime and that is what Osimhen did. And when you see how the game went after that Napoli goal, I think if they won the game eventually it wouldn't even have been undeserved. They had their fair amount of chances and offensive pressure. That's Barcelona's biggest weakness. They play well, don't score and then concede goals.

Yes this is so true and I am not sure how many people do the easy transfer of the quality of a player to then later become a coach of the same quality.

It's both ways actually. There have been awful football players that became excellent coaches and there have been excellent players that have become awful coaches. It's really two totally different jobs.

I think as a coach you are not a team player in the sense as you are as a player. You have full responsibility and of course there are skills that are similar or overlap between the two positions, but it's still a different thing to lead a whole team instead of taking care of your single position in a game.

I think he is not the classical coach, he is not the teacher with an education, but he has this character and aura that others look up to and listen to. And he is not quite like Maradonna who was a great player but not really a great coach because he had not structure in his life and was chaotic. But Zidane seems like this guy who always has control over any situation and that can help players a lot. He might not be as well versed tactically as Guardiola, but he does have something that others don't have.

But I have to contemplate his achievements and add that the winning streak in the Champions League was a mix of great play and a lot of luck as well. Some of the goals Real Madrid scored would not have been given in recent times due to VAR corrections. But it's what it is and I doubt that anyone will anytime soon break his record of three consecutive Champions League wins. He knows what he is worth.

I don't know what the private motives are that Zidane might or might not have. Whether it is the family why he declined some offers or whether the offers were just not what he was looking or waiting for, I can't tell.

But he has said a few things about his criteria upon which he bases his decision on whether the train a club or not. There is the rumor about the language barriers, but I don't know if this is true or not. I know he is a smart guy and I would be surprised that language would be a barrier if is really convinced of an offer. Zidane is speaking Spanish as if he was born there and he seems to be able to absorb new knowledge quickly. I think if a club like Manchester City would call him, language would not be a barrier. But Bayern is maybe a bit harder as English is closer to Spanish than the German language and Bayern is not like Manchester City.

I am watching the game and Barcelona is pressing quite hard, but don't forget that this game is quite taxing and they won't be able to go like that for the full distance. If they don't use their advantage and score a goal, everyone knows how that can end. And Napoli is not some mediocre club that can't score a goal out of nothing. So either Barcelona gets something out of it, or I wouldn't be surprised if Napoli gets their chance and do take the lead. This could easily be one of those games.

Please don't misquote me. I never said that the penalty was not decisive, it was! The penalty was the reason why Lazio won the game. But I countered your claim that the win was lucky. If a defender attacks an offender in the most stupid and aggressive way possible in the box, isn't it rather Bayern' stupidity instead of Lazio's luck that this game ended with a win for Lazio? That is what I said.

I also said that Bayern did not have a single shot on target. Now I will use your strategy and say "Now tell me that Bayern didn't win that match although they had so many huge chances". They had chances, but the entire team failed at even making the goalkeeper use his hands once! Can you believe it? It's true, check the game. Bayern did not have one shot that the goalkeeper had to defend. They were not able to hit any zone within the frame of Lazio's goal in 90 minutes. Lazio lucky? Or Bayern weak?

But I know several people who pile up cash they can withdraw immediately with no time delay just for the purpose of hunting down unexpected investment opportunities and I know it did work out for them quite frequently since they know the markets very well that they are operating in. Having cash available right now for assets of an asset class that somebody knows very well with respect to unexpected short-term opportunities can be a good strategy. Not locking up the funds for 2% interest can pay even if somebody foregoes the potential interest for quite some time if an opportunity then arises that saved the buyer 20% of the market price because of sudden fire sales from somebody who is about to go broke.

There are plenty of examples that I know about when people told me they kept plenty of cash in the bank in order to be ready once this or that opportunity pops up out of nowhere. There are certainly financial set ups that could be arranged with banks in other ways, but there are people who operate with cash in the bank they can withdraw any moment. Savings for potential investments in unpredictable opportunities so to say.

Your analysis could not be further from the truth. Lazio wasn't lucky. Bayern Munich did not have a single shot on target in 90 minutes. I am saying no shot, nada! They were passing the ball back and forth, they had good accuracy and the tried to get shots on target all the time, but they did not manage to force the Lazio goalkeeper to defend a single shot! And you call that lucky Lazio? Or is Bayern's inability to play fruitful attacks recently?

I ask you, did you see Upamecano's foul in the box and how he jumped onto the leg of Isaksen? That was insanity and he risked to break his leg... Tell me that was no penalty!

I have been thinking about this as well and I am all for never say never here. There have been examples for backdoors that went undetected for decades.

But I find one idea quite compelling to think about, do you think that publicly available artificial intelligence will come to a point where it can be asked for vulnerabilities in the most secure (or rather most pervasively used) algorithms or could it intentionally be fed an information a la garbage-in-garbage-out such that it always provides an answer pleasing the public? If AI becomes more intelligent at an exponential rate while an algorithm is a static mathematical construct, would the chance be that those developing AI would/could be the ones to know first?

What I also wonder is whether a backdoor could in any case be detected as having been introduced deliberately by someone? I am sure there are cases where it could be, but there are probably cases where someone could say it was just a mistake in the code.

This is completely the wrong approach to think about Zidane! I believe that he is making money nonstop, the cash is rolling in all the time for him. He is a very popular face for ambassador roles, he is very smart in my opinion and I can imagine he is also an entrepreneur who has made smart investments. I like his lifestyle an he looks like one of the happiest and fulfilled people I know. I sometimes watch interviews with him or wherever else he shows up and you never ever see him being stressed or pressured. And don't forget that making himself scarce is and has always been his perfect strategy to drive price up for any engagement he may enter into in the future. Every club knows by now that having Zidane sign a contract is not possible below any amount far South of 20 million a year I guess. He is doing the exact right thing.

Now it is known that Manchester United can win against Aston Villa and it is a fact that Manchester United was living up to expectations. They had a lot of chances, created a lot of attacks with a decent level of creativity and I have to say that it was one of the better games they played this season. Both teams are struggling in delivering consistent results, but this was a solid performance and although Aston Villa was pushing towards the end of the game, Manchester United had a response for them.

If your formula was correct, I would be betting on sports all day long!

But the truth is that the formula will barely hold true. How about Aston Villa > Manchester City > Manchester United ==> Aston Villa > Manchester United. Does that count as per your theory?

It really doesn't work like that as all of those teams you mentioned above are unpredictable. Chelsea is so wildly performing that you never know whether they will beat a top four team or lose against a team from the relegation zone. It's all possible. I remember before the turn of the year they were playing crab and then they beat Tottenham away from home 1-4 and then tied the game against Manchester City 4-4 only to then lose against Newcastle 4-1. I don't know what's going on there, but Aston Villa is the same now. And Manchester United is again the same.

I think for large companies with tons of liquidity there is more flexibility in adjusting their purchasing strategy. When you look at Micro Strategy's purchases, I don't know if the goal was to accumulate and increase their portfolio through DCA, or whether DCA just was the required means for a higher purpose. In my opinion their main objective was to build a powerful position in the market. They have added BTC all the time, no matter what the price was, whether the sentiment was negative or positive. It's quite impressive and by now they do have a position that is really powerful. They now own close to 200,000 BTC and there's definitely some game theory kicking in here among the biggest players in the industry. If there is a player like Micro Strategy and that player is increasing their portfolio more and more, on the one hand it creates positive momentum and sentiment and also some pressure on other big players to not fall too far behind, and on the other hand it gives Micro Strategy a massive leverage option against players trying to short the market and put downwards pressure on the BTC price. Since BTC is deflationary, Micro Strategy is also soaking up more and more of the circulating supply, making it more scarce at the same time.

i am curious how they will execute their strategy one day, whether they already have an end game in mind or whether they keep buying and observing market developments. It's an exciting but also somewhat crazy strategy because they gain additional leverage when BTC's price increases due to their existing portfolio that is going deeper and deeper into profit, allowing them to leverage existing BTC positions to add new BTC.

So I am not really sure whether Micro Strategy is primarily following a DCA strategy in order to better control for volatility exposure or whether their strategy simply is to keep buying no matter what in order to increase their market power.

The biggest problem about these kinds of topics is that they confuse security of the BTC network with security measures taken by the users of the BTC network.

Some people save their private keys on their computers without encrypting them. Some people save their private keys in the cloud. Some people have their wallets open without a set password and visit all kinds of malicious websites.

It's all up to the user and how technically literate and considerate they are when it comes to securing any of their assets. Hardly anyone would leave their car open while it is parked in front of their home. But lots of people use easy to crack passwords or no passwords at all because it feels comfortable.

There are so many easy mistakes that could be avoided to effectively protect your BTC against theft that it is careless to not address these issues. Often times they barely take any time either. A typical example is leaving BTC on an exchange, which then gets hacked and the media says it is a BTC problem instead of an exchange problem and their security standards.

Anything that is not secured against theft can obviously be stolen...

The probability for Bitcoin going extinct = 1 - p(BTC not going extinct).

Without going through this thread I expect that most of the answers will be something like "it is impossible to predict that" or "nobody knows". I think the truest of the answers would be to say that it is not zero and this has many reasons.


This is one aspect that is indeed true because when we think about events that could make BTC become extinct, there is a good chance that many other important things become extinct or are at threat. As soon as we have a technology that can derive private keys from public keys, the set of problems humanity would then be facing is much bigger than BTC going to zero.

The total market capitalization is a good indicator of the trust that people and institutions around the world put into BTC. The whole infrastructure that has been built and the investments that went into that infrastructure, the political endeavors in regards to ETFs and other investment products and many other things that are related to BTC are all positive signs that BTC won't suddenly disappear anytime soon.

But nobody knows whether the wheel will be around forever if there soon might be some other tool to move stuff from A to B, like vehicles based on magnetism and what not.

Since BTC is deflationary, there is a strong incentive for BTC network stakeholders to not jump ship. That's fundamentally different from FIAT currencies like the USD. BTC won't become inflationary where the USD already is. For the time being I think it is quite safe to assume that BTC will be around for quite a while

It would never be a bad job if a coach decides to manage Barcelona, but if Xabi Alonso has the choice between several clubs and there would be Liverpool or at some point in the future Real Madrid, I think Barcelona would be less attractive. The biggest problem I see is that a lot of people are still remembering the Pep Guardiola times, but they forget that Guardiola was extremely privileged as he had the young Messi and all the other superstars in his team. Yes he had to do his job well and Barcelona became such an amazing team, but still Messi contributed a lot and there aren't a lot of Messis.

Barcelona isn't the same anymore, they have so many more problems to solve and they don't have a strong era of young high potential players. There are a few, but it can't be compared to what Guardiola had available back at the time. I doubt that Barcelona will be able to sign players like Haaland as they would decide to go to a different club.

Yes I think this was far superior and now Real Madrid won both games against Girona in La Liga and there is no doubt as to who the boss in the league is for now.

But I am negatively surprised because I thought that Girona would show a brave performance and that they would at least go all out and try to score a goal themselves. But this nothing of anything that they are known for. Girona had zero shots on target and two corners, which is quite disappointing for a team that is the strongest in the league offensively.

Since Real Madrid barely shows weaknesses this season, I think that this was an early decision in the race for the La Liga title. Girona did not win three out of their last five games whereas Real Madrid is consistently winning their games and only dropping last minute points against a top team like Atletico Madrid.