If we are talking about replacement as a store of value, then there is no reason why this can't happen. The only advantage that gold has is that it has been used in this role for millennia. The advantages of bitcoin have been discussed many many times. If this does happen, then likely it is many years away, and gold will likely always retain value too - unless perhaps commercial asteroid mining becomes viable and there are suddenly vast amounts of gold everywhere, but again, if that does happen it is many years away.

Agree that lack of liquidity is a problem, but perhaps this is a consequence rather than a cause. Can't this be solved by the team setting a hardcap to sales somewhat below the anticipated level of demand? This would create buy pressure and work to raise the token price. If a project hits hardcap, then demand exceeds supply. There will be more people buying than there are bounty hunters selling.

It depends on how the team approaches the sale, and is why the absence of a hard cap - or a hard cap set extremely high - should be considered a warning sign.

No, I'd disagree. Bounties and airdrops should be quite a small share of the overall distribution. Bounty/airdrop sellers can only crash the price if no-one else is trading, which suggests that the coin has a more fundamental problem. I think a bigger contributor is some of the big bonuses on offer to early buyers. These are essentially free coins, and can dwarf the amount paid as bounty or airdrop.

But bigger than both of these is the question of hardcap in the initial offering. If a realistic hardcap is set, this should mean that all tokens are sold... which means there are more buyers than there are coins available, which should lead to buy pressure when the coin starts trading, which should more than offset any initial sell pressure from bounty/airdrop/bonus holders.

Conversely, if no hardcap is set, or if pre-sale bonus is too high... then the opposite happens, there is a surplus of coins, there are more coins than buyers, anyone who wants the coin has it already... causing sell pressure and triggering price drops once the coin is tradable.

Watford and Villa are both on 34 points, so if Watford draw and Villa lose, the goal difference doesn't matter as Watford will be 35 pts and Villa 34 pts.
Basically Watford need to get more points than Villa, or if they get the same points then Watford have to improve their goal difference relative to Villa by +2 (so if Villa draw, Watford need a win as a Watford draw would leave goal difference unchanged for both teams).
Ignoring Bournemouth again

Yes, corruption is a fundamental problem. Systems of governance that make corruption easy are more likely to fail - this is a part of what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe. In theory, democracies are least prone to corruption... but the problem with capitalist democracies is that the term is an oxymoron. If it's capitalist, then it's plutocratic rather than democratic - whether intentionally or not, if the aim is to increase your money, then those who already have money start at an advantage, and over generations can come to control everything, not least the media, which they can then use to increase their advantage. Rising inequality is a feature of capitalist democracies, not a bug. I would argue that beyond a certain point it becomes both unsustainable and morally indefensible.

That does sound like the most likely outcome. If Chelsea lose, Leicester only need a draw... but I don't think they'll get a draw. They have Caglar Soyuncu suspended, which isn't great against an in-form United.
I think United to win, which puts Chelsea through as well irrespective of their result vs Wolves.

There's no chance of $5k anytime soon. That's x20 on current price, which is unheard of for a high cap coin.
I do think ETH is underpriced, and the move to 2.0 is a big step forward and will help to set it up for the future... but I really can't see x20, and even if it happened it's unlikely that such a huge sudden swing would be sustainable. Personally I would prefer a long steady growth in price.

Ignoring Bournemouth for a moment... in the final games, Watford need to either get more points than Villa, or else get the same result but improve their goal difference by +2 (so if Villa win by 1 goal, Watford need to win by 3 or more; if Watford lose by 1 goal, they need Villa to lose by 3 or more). If they end up on the same points and goal difference, Villa stay up because of superior goals scored... unless we have an absurd situation such as Villa win 1-0 and Watofrd win 7-5 to level out goals scored, too... in which case Watford stay up because of superior head-to-head record vs Villa.
This all ignores Bournemouth of course. For them it's simple. They need to win and have both Watford and Villa lose... then Bournemouth stay up.

So yes, Villa look to have the best chance of staying up. But bear in mind they are playing West Ham who have taken 7 points from the last 9. Watford play Arsenal who, although the more difficult proposition on paper, have only taken 3 from the last 9.

All to play for!

I'm no expert, but often there's an easy way to do things and there's the right way, which is perhaps more difficult. It's very easy to sack the man at the top and say "let's start again", doing the same wrong things in the same wrong way, just with someone else at the helm. The right way I would think is to make an honest, in-depth assessment of the current status, and how this can realistically be changed in this year and next, and whether it would be better to add some focus and expertise to a longer-term view. The fact is Ferrari have no chance in 2020, with a shortened season and from a position so far behind Mercedes - where they are actually getting lapped in a race! Equally they have little chance in 2021 with the restrictions that have been put in place for that season due to the Covid19 pandemic. Perhaps with enough little changes they could be competitive in 2021, but it's a lot of effort for a single season before everything has to start again. I think the focus on 2022 makes absolute sense.

Yes hopefully in 2022 and beyond Ferrari can win titles again. But hopefully in 2022, if the rule changes have the desired effect, a lot of teams will have a chance and racing will be much more competitive and more reliant on driver talent than on the combination of driver talent and who has the best car.

Everyone expects a big upwards price movement once 2.0 goes live, but the usual pattern in crypto is that in this situation we actually see an initial price drop. Certainly 2.0 is encouraging for long-term price movement, but  short-term movements are more driven by speculation, and it is rare to see significant upwards movement when a much-anticipated upgrade launches.
This may all be complicated by the fact that ETH is currently priced quite low against BTC in historic terms, and there is always the possibility that any change for this particular coin is swamped by overall market trends, but certainly, this 'price drop on launch' is a general trend to be aware of when considering jumping in.

Yes, exactly.
Scenario#1: Public figure spontaneously becomes interested in bitcoin, purchases some, and tweets about it.
Scenario#2: Binance approaches public figure and manages to secure an interview. Binance walks public figure through how to purchase bitcoin on their platform.

This is definitely #2: https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2020/05/this-2x-fifa-womens-world-cup-champ-is-now-a-bitcoiner-thanks-to-binance/


The quotes don't suggest the in-depth understanding of someone who has researched crypto. I am ambivalent really about this sort of thing. Regardless of whether it's just an advertisement for a platform, it does help to spread awareness of crypto, and it is probably an inevitable part of the move towards mainstream adoption.

There's no evidence to suggest that bitcoin will cease to be the dominant cryptocurrency. Nothing else comes close. Generally when dominance is mentioned, it refers to market cap... which is only ever a rough guide at best, as already stated in this thread:


I suppose, looking into the future, if bitcoin's eventual role is as a store-of-value, then perhaps a smart-contract crypto such as Ethereum can become more dominant through becoming embedded into the functioning of society via the automation of what are currently manual tasks and job roles... or a crypto used as a fast, secure day-to-day currency might become dominant... but if any of that were to happen, then it's years away at best. There's no chance of anything supplanting bitcoin in the near future.

I don't think this is really a valid point. A situation where bread can only be bought using crypto would be very different to the situation we are in today. For a start it would mean that crypto had become fully integrated with  mainstream society, and was used by everybody, all the time. Crypto would be vastly - multiple orders of magnitude - bigger than it is today. Look at how the price of small cap alts can be manipulated very easily, and at how much more difficult it is to manipulate the price of bitcoin, with its much higher market cap. In general the bigger a thing is, the more difficult it is to manipulate the price. As an example, if 1 bitcoin was worth $1 million, then $1 billion would only buy 1000 bitcoins, perhaps enough to move the price a bit, but no more than a $1 billion purchase in traditional markets would do.

Just in the last 24 hours, bitcoin has increased by 1.88% and ETH has increased by over 8%.
I don't think we can say that the altcoin rally is over right now. There's just no evidence to suggest that. If anything, it looks like it is just getting started.

I think we'd need bitcoin to break $10k and go soaring off well above that point for interest in alts to diminish. At the moment the bitcoin gains have been too modest, and alts are still dominating the upwards price movement.

Ferrari have, predictably, announced a management restructure: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/53503786

It sounds like they are going about it the right way. Instead of sacking everyone and starting again, they are switching away from a flat management structure and more towards the system used by Red Bull and Mercedes, where there are clear areas of accountability. The biggest decision could be bringing Rory Byrne back to a prominent position and putting him to work on the 2022 car. This makes a lot of sense. Byrne is undoubtedly talented, and it would be a waste to have him making minor tweaks to this year's car and the 2021 car when he could instead play an important role in the massive changes coming in 2022.

I think it's a good decision for the long-term success of the team, but does it suggest that Ferrari have already started to give up on being a title challenger this year and next?

I'd agree that this is China flexing its muscles. It has risen to superpower status on the world stage, and like any superpower is using its might to get what it wants. Global politics is often far more about who is most powerful than it is about who is morally right. Probably the only way to remedy this is to have a supreme global legal body that has actual and practically enforceable powers - which of course will not happen, as it would be advantageous to weak nations but disadvantageous to the powerful.

The chart undermines your argument, surely?

African-Americans make up 13% of the population.
African-Americans make up 23% of fatal police shootings.
Therefore African-Americans are disproportionately likely to get fatally shot.

It was a weird situation for Liverpool. Most teams went into lockdown knowing that they still had something to fight for when the season resumed, be it a relegation battle or a European place. For Liverpool probably a lot of the pressure was off, they only needed a couple of wins from the remaining fixtures to be mathematically certain of winning the league.
It does make you wonder if they suffered a bit from lack of motivation during lockdown, which might go some way to explaining why their post-lockdown results are worse than pre-lockdown. Or it could just be that the break meant they lost that winning momentum they had.
Either way, they don't look quite the same proposition now. Normally you would expect them to beat Chelsea. At the moment though, I don't know. It might not be enough to simply be motivated for this match, they could well have lost fitness and sharpness due to a lack of motivation during the months of lockdown.

I think Watford did influence the Villa win. Watford played earlier, and if they had kept the score close then Villa would have had less hope. That 4-0 now means Villa have a superior goal difference. Bear in mind also that Villa have superior total goals scored, which takes effect if points and goal difference are equal... which all means that whatever happens in the final round of matches, Watford need to match the Villa result AND increase the relative goal difference by +2 to finish above them. If Villa win by 1 goal, Watford need to win by 3. If Villa lose by 1 goal or even 2 goals, then Watford need at least a draw.

I can't believe Watford sacked their manager when they did. That seems a really poor decision, and has given Villa a lifeline when it had seemed they were all but definitely relegated.

The economic impact of a pandemic will always be a lagging indicator. Obviously the US is still in the stage where infections are increasing... but even once the rate slows down, and all states are 100% re-opened, that doesn't mean that everything is suddenly back to normal from an economic perspective. The bailouts and the loss of business need to be paid for. Unemployment is likely to increase significantly. People are likely to have less money to spend, exacerbating the problem.

I think even once the pandemic is under control, it is far too early to be talking about the start of an economic recovery.