In the pace department I would rate the Indian pace bowlers (especially Jasprit and Ishant) ahead of the English pacers. Also, under hot and humid conditions in India, England pace bowlers are struggling to bowl more than 12-15 overs per day. And in surfaces where there is hardly any assistance for the pacers, the only England bowler who can make a difference is James Anderson, who is able to swing the ball. Bowlers like Archer and Stone, who depends on bounce are going to struggle.

^^^ Migrating to European countries from India is not easy. It is going to be too expensive for the vast majority of the users. The best option they got right now is to travel to the GCC nations (such as UAE and Kuwait) on a temporary visa and sell their coins there (in most of the GCC nations, there are no taxes on profit from cryptocurrency). Other options include Thailand, Hong Kong and Russia.

Socialism means taking away wealth from the successful people (the so called "rich") and distributing it among the so called "poor". All the businesses will be owned by the state and the regime will decide when you should eat, when you take a dump and when and whom you should marry. Socialism can't be implemented by democratic means and that's why we have authoritarian regimes such as the ones in Cuba and North Korea. Those who support socialism are always people who have no experience of living in a socialist country. Ask someone in Cuba or North Korea their opinion about socialism and you will be much surprised.

Joe Root is more comfortable with pace bowling rather than spin, right? For the second pitch, the curators used black cotton soil in the pitch and that gave turn from first day onwards for the bowlers. I assume they will try to do the same in the third test match as well. And once again, toss is going to play a very crucial role, just like it did during the first and second test matches. Whoever wins the toss will be having advantage on his side.

You can't even compare the UAE with India. The former is one of the richest countries in the world, and the latter has the largest population of poor people anywhere in the globe. In UAE, there is no income tax and a lot of people have become permanent residents to take advantage of this. And the inflow of wealthy expatriates have benefited the country to a great deal. India on the other hand witness approx. 150,000 of their most skilled people emigrate abroad every year.

And the real reason why the Indian government is coming up with a ban on cryptocurrency is because it has run out of cash. Their supporters need a constant supply of freebies and the government is planning to seize the crypto-assets of Indian nationals and distribute as freebies to make their supporters happy.

Anyway, glad to see more and more nations welcoming cryptocurrency. It will greatly benefit their economic growth in the future. The UAE has always welcomed technological innovations and this time also they have done the right thing.

Finally we have a big score in this edition of PSL. Quetta Gladiators made a total of 178/6 batting first. The surprise package was Universe Boss Chris Gayle, who made 68 runs (5 fours, 5 sixes). He was supported by Mohammad Nawaz, who hit three sixes. Even the super-economical Rashid Khan went for 30 runs from his 4 overs (it is equivalent to any other bowler going for 60 runs from his 4 overs  ). 

Latin American countries do have an affinity towards socialism (perhaps with the exception of Brazil). There is huge wealth inequality in these nations and the Socialists came to power promising to eradicate this gap. When Hugo Chavez became president, he did a lot of good things such as providing free healthcare. But then the oil prices crashed and the regime realized that they have run out of money.

Australia is a joke nowadays. Apart from Marnus Labuschagne and Steve Smith, none of their batsmen are in form right now. And their bowling is in even worse shape with Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins performing poorly for quite some time. Anyway, all these players are not there in the T20 squad, so I don't want to talk about them. The conclusion is very clear. Australia has failed to produce young players who are capable of replacing the 35 plus members of the squad. Maxwell and Stoinis are known as some of the best in T20 format. But they never perform in the international matches.

New Zealand on the other hand, is benefitting tremendously from the influx of South African and Indian players. Their top three performers in this match (Devon Conway, Glenn Phillips and Ish Sodhi) were born outside NZ. Native talent is also booming, with bowlers such as Kyle Jamieson emerging as the world's best.

Here is what I think -

China was developing bioweapons using flu-virus at some of the military facilities near Wuhan. Unlike the Americans and the Russians, the Chinese don't have enough experience and expertise to safely handle bio-weapons. Initially there was a leak and possibly some of the people working on this project were infected. This was simply covered up (similar to the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak of 1979, which resulted in approx. 100 deaths in Russia). But the infection spread to the general population undetected and within a few weeks (incubation period), the general population in Wuhan started dying from the virus.

Bitcoin may be regarded as a speculative asset at this point, but I disagree when you claim that it is not suitable for long-term investment. With institutions pouring more and more of their funds in to Bitcoin, in the long term the potential for returns are much higher. Many of these institutions are claiming that they have 10-year or even 15-year targets. So unlike the individual investors, they are not going to dump their coins at the first opportunity. This definitely means that the corporations are expecting good returns in the long-term.

If he refuses to transfer back the coins, what are the options they (the exchange) have? From what I can see, the user has done nothing illegal. I am not sure whether the exchange would even consider going to the courts against the user. What they are going to tell the court regarding this? And if they get involved in court case and all, their reputation is going to take a hammering. My advice to the user is to ignore the demand letter and keep the holdings with himself.

Wow!!! What a recovery from New Zealand. After the powerplay, they were at 28/3. After that Devon Conway and Glenn Phillips made such a remarkable recovery. Both these players are being regarded as future stars for New Zealand, and they performed exceptionally well today. New Zealand finished at 184/5 after their 20 overs. I feel bad for Conway, as he missed century by one run (he made 99 not out).

I am liquidating part of my holdings on a gradual basis ever since 2015. The total volume of coins I have sold since 2015 is almost 3 times higher than my current holdings. And I regret about it, because most of those coins were sold for three digit prices. But if you are making an investment, you need to sell your assets at some point of time. My mistake was that I sold them too early.

Now profit booking, "exiting crypto" and "significantly reducing your stake" are three different things. What I am doing right now is profit booking. I have no plans to completely exit from the cryptocurrency sector. Because I have been here for the last 9 years, and I know about the future potential of cryptocurrency more than any of the other users.

There are two ways to look in to this. For instant payments, Bitcoin is not preferred right now as a result of high transaction fee and delays in getting confirmation. But rather than direct payments with Bitcoin, on such occasions, you can go for third party payments (i.e using Bitpay or Coinbase). And the second thing is that for paying bills and all, the delay in confirmation doesn't matter much. So you can set the transaction fee to a very low level (10 Sat or 20 Sat per Byte) and make the payment.

Teams are struggling to score big totals so far in the PSL. Peshawar Zalmi could only make 140 earlier today, and now the Sultans ended up at 150/8 (despite 71 from Mohammad Rizwan). And in reply, Islamabad seems to be in some sort of trouble. They have lost two important wickets before the first power play ends (Phil Salt and Shadab Khan). Right now it is like 50/50.

Ultra-slow motion video footage is available now and the coaches and the batsmen can study his technique in detail and make their plans against him. If they are still ineffective against his spin, then the reason may be because he is changing his techniques very frequently. When Sunil Narine first played in the IPL, he was also having a similar reputation. But he lost his venom now.

Gold is the no.1 target, and not silver. The case with silver is a bit complicated, because silver is widely used for various purposes in industry, and not just for investment. Silver is used in solar panels, conductors, water filtering.etc. So it is quite difficult to get the amount of silver, that is being held as bullion. Gold also has industrial usage, but that represents less than 0.1% of its annual mine production.

It is true that gold is going down right now. But I don't agree when you say that gold is going down because people are increasingly flocking to Bitcoin. What happening with gold right now is a temporary slump. In the long-term I expect gold to trade at around $5,000 per oz. Gold remains the most trusted and accepted store of value. Bitcoin will take a long time to overtake gold in this regard.

Here are the latest stats from 21st February 2021.

Total market cap: $1,738,938,140,650 (+16.61%)

Bitcoin: $1,066,214,278,455 (61.314%)
Bitcoin forks: $17,911,815,041 (1.030%)
Stablecoins: $48,019,574,267 (2.761%)
Altcoins: $599,729,803,325 (34.488%)
WBTC: $7,062,669,562 (0.406%)

This is the change compared to my last post:

Bitcoin: +0.282%
Bitcoin forks: -0.212%
Stablecoins: -0.249%
Altcoins: +0.190%
WBTC: -0.011%

The no.2 position of Ethereum is not guaranteed. Bitcoin is more or less guaranteed of the no.1 position, because it is the original cryptocurrency that was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Ethereum came much later, although we can say that it was the first among the second-generation cryptocurrencies. A lot of the Ethereum users are facing difficulty due to sky high transaction fee. The developers have responded to this, saying that once the ETH 2.0 implementation is complete (by 2023), the fee will get back to normal. What sort of response is this? What are the users supposed to do until 2023? If they want to move or cash out their tokens, what are they supposed to do?