As long as these two remain in Russia, they are going to be safe. A part of the funds has been seized by the US authorities. But at this point I don't think that they can do much more than this. Especially after the controversy surrounding the arrest of Alexander Vinnik, I don't think that the Russians will cooperate with the American authorities (and deportation is a strict no-no).

One of the accused is an ethnic Greek and I assume him to have dual Russian-Greek nationality. At the most, the Americans can force the government of Greece to cancel his Greek passport.

Can't put it any better than this. The Libracoin is completely opposite of everything Bitcoin stands for and it is more similar to a central-bank issued fiat currency rather than a decentralized cryptocurrency. In the end, there is going to be hardly any difference between the digital versions of fiat currency (such as PayPal/Visa), stablecoins such as USDT/USDC and Libracoin.

I don't remember exactly, but I believe that my longest wait lasted a week or so. This happened sometime in 2017, when I was moving coins from one of my wallets to another. Since I control both the wallets, I put a very low transaction fee (around 2 Sat/Byte). But the transaction took a long time to get confirmed and eventually I had to wait for around 6-7 days.

If you have the patience and the ability to wait for 4-5 years, then there is no harm in investing at current levels. Those who invested in December 2013 had to wait almost 4 years to see their investment in green. The same happened to those who invested four years later, in December 2017. They are still in loss, but we can expect them to be in profit by next year. So if you can wait for that long, there is nothing wrong in investing in Bitcoin.

Today there was an important milestone in the history of West Indian cricket. Joshua Da Silva became the first native-born white to play test cricket for West Indies, ever since Geoff Greenidge in 1973 (Brendan Nash played test cricket for West Indies from 2008-11, but he was born in Australia). Da Silva is of Portuguese origin, and his forefathers migrated from the island of Madeira (birthplace of Moises Henriques).


https://www.cricket.com.au/news/joshua-da-silva-west-indies-test-debut-new-zealand-wellington-dowrich/2020-12-11

The lady claims that Babar had physical relations with her, and then broke off the relationship when he achieved success in cricket. In South Asia, this would be regarded as sexual assault, but in most of the other countries it would not be treated so. The two were not married, either formally or informally, and now the intention seems to be purely money-related.

USDT is very useful for trading, especially while dealing with highly volatile altcoins. But that said, I would never recommend keeping a lot of your funds in the form of Tether. USDT is a token issued by the Bitfinex exchange and a few years back they were accused of not fully backing up USDT with US Dollar. So there is always a small chance that the USDT=USD parity may be tested in the future.

Some of the projects may have real use cases. But how much acceptability they are able to gain is very important. Also, we need to check the ability of the developers, to resolve security issues and bugs. Having a real use alone won't make the project a successful one. Another important aspect is the availability on major exchanges such as Binance and Huobi, which can result in an increase in daily trade volumes.

Most of the cryptocurrency users haven't even heard about Polkadot. And the OP is claiming that it is going to kill Ethereum. The biggest strength for Ethereum is not its technology. On the other hand, its biggest plus point is its acceptability. Even now, more than 90% of the new tokens are being created in the ERC-20 platform. None of the other platforms can even come close.

As expected, New Zealand is off to a good start against West Indies, in the second test. Henry Nicholls managed to score a century, and he is out there with Daryl Mitchell, with New Zealand looking pretty comfortable at 285/5. Remember that New Zealand has rested Kane Williamson, who is expecting the birth of his first child. Apart from Shannon Gabriel, the other West Indian bowlers looked out of form.

Matches between the Pig 3 are always competitive, and highly revenue generating. So they need to play as many matches as possible. So I too would have preferred 5 test matches instead of 4. IMO, the Pig 3 (India, England and Australia) needs to make sure that at least 50% of the matches they play are between themselves. This will reduce the incidence of one-sided matches and will make sure that the three cricket boards are able to generate good revenue.

Fiat currencies won't last forever. But that is applicable for cryptocurrencies as well. The US Dollar has survived for more than two centuries, ever since it's introduction in 1792. Do you really think that any of the cryptocurrencies may last that long? Advancement in quantum computing will make the current technology for cryptocurrencies obsolete within the next few decades.

Investing directly in Bitcoin is one thing, and investing in some of the shady cryptocurrency projects is another. In 90% of the cases, the scam project has hardly anything to do with Bitcoin (examples are OneCoin and PlusToken), but the payments are being received mostly in BTC and ETH. The victims pay these scammers with their BTC/ETH, and when the promoters vanish with these funds the media is quick to highlight the Bitcoin link.

Financially, the T20 format may be important for the cricketers. But if they are more concerned about the fame, then they should not overlook the longer format. When someone talks about the stats (highest number of runs, top wicket takers), they always mention about these stats from the test cricket. I have almost never heard about anyone talking about the T20I stats.

Will Pucovski is a promising young player for Australia and I expect him to be a regular member of the squad within the next few years. He may be temporarily out of form, but that should not be held against him. Even star Australian batsmen such as David Warner had rough patches during their career (for example his bad form during the last Ashes series).

I also believe that Rohit Sharma can be a good replacement. But then, Virat has captained the Indian team for such a long time. Critics may argue that it can have a negative impact on team bonding and morale (although Rohit has been a regular member of the squad for many years). And then there is always the concern that Rohit and Virat may form their own closed groups, just like the case we had when Dhoni was playing for India.

ROFL. If they are waiting for Trump to concede, then I am afraid that it is not going to happen anytime soon. The POTUS results came out more than a month ago. Those who won the bets deserve their winnings by now. I believe that none of the gambling sites have any solid reason to delay the payment, after December 14. That is when the electoral college will vote for the new president. The outcome of the voting from December 14 should be considered as final.

Once the excess supply is created, there is no way to take it back. In the long-term, it will result in a massive hyperinflation. The governments have used the COVID 19 pandemic excuse to print banknotes like crazy. Even in the United States, trillions of USD worth of banknotes were printed during the pandemic period. The real impact from these measures will be visible in the next few years.

First of all you can't generalize all the 10,000 or so altcoins. Investing in a top-10 altcoin such as LTC or ETH is different from investing in little known shitcoins such as Davinci Coin or Quantstamp. While it is safe to keep invested in the top-10 altcoins for the medium to long term, the same can't be said about the smaller shitcoins. A lot of research needs to be undertaken first, if you want to invest in the smaller coins. 

Agreed. Being emotional results in users holding shitcoins for the long-term, despite knowing that they have very little future potential. It takes a lot of courage to book losses, as the users don't want to admit that they made the wrong investment. But sometimes that is the only option available to save yourselves from complete forfeiture of your capital.