Any other president, yes, I think it would result in a loss of votes. With Trump though, probably not, because anyone who has stuck with him through all the craziness, appalling mismanagement and outright criminal activity so far is unlikely to be swayed by the WHO issue. In fact, this is not even the most contentious of his current activities - it's overshadowed by his attempt to subvert the democratic process in Nevada and Michigan.

It's difficult to attribute the rise to halving. COVID-19 casts a huge shadow over the markets at the moment. We had that huge initial drop, and we've been on a slow but steady recovery since that first market shock. I'm not convinced that we can argue that recent price rises are due to halving. It's not the most important price driver at the moment.

It's a nice idea, but we should restrict it to elements. BCH should not be on there as it is not an element, its a waste product.

Seriously though, I do kind of like it. It might be better to arrange by marketcap as the crypto equivalent of atomic number, and then apply the groups and periods from there. Could get messy, but would certainly be interesting.

First advice is don't dwell on the past. He could have sold during the long price drop and then bought back at a lower price - but that is all in the past now, I have made similar mistakes myself, all that we can do is learn from them.

Bitcoin remains volatile. There will be plenty of upswings and downswings in future. Your friend can still sell high and buy low, and either recoup some money or else increase his holdings. There is of course a risk attached, but the biggest mistake in trading is to end the trade too quickly. You could sell BTC now at $9.7k, then the price rises to $10k and you panic-buy back and lose some coins... or you could instead assess whether bitcoin might return to say $9.5k at some point in the future, even months or years down the line, and hold until that point and make a profit.

If he doesn't want to trade, the other option is dollar cost averaging. Buy more at a lower price to reduce your average entry price.
Say you bought 1 BTC at $20k, now buy another 1 BTC at $10k... your BTC now cost you on average $15k each. Appreciate this is an extreme example, and he may not want to throw so much more money in, but it's a valid option for someone who believes the price will increase from its current level.

I think that CV19 will provoke lasting changes in society. It is often the case that seismic events such as this acccelerate the pace of change.
As quarantines are lifted, social distancing remains in place. This means many people will continue to work from home, it means air travel is effectively dead, it means that demand for oil will remain low. This is the immediate future.

Longer term? Last time we had a huge economic crisis, the response, at least in the UK, was austerity. The large scale cutting back of services in order to save costs. This time around, there is no more fat to trim, services are as lean as they can be without removing essential provision. Our health system has been sorely tested by the pandemic, due in large part to a decade of cuts and underfunding. There is no more appetite for austerity, and little scope for it anyway.
The alternative way out of a recession, in a climate of historically low interest rates, is investment in infrastructure. Now this is a left-wing approach, but right-wing governments around the world have recently implemented incredibly left-wing policies, including effective renationalisation of entire industries (albeit temporary) and a UBI in all but name. There may be an appetite to build a green infrastructure to get ourselves out of this, particularly as evidence from the fallout of 2008 shows that investment in renewables was disproportionately profitable compared to alternatives (yes, I know, [CITATION NEEDED], I haven't got a link at the moment). And particularly as this is a pandemic that affects the lungs, and clean air is obviously a good idea to alleviate the effects of the virus.

So whilst there may be a bit of a bump in prices as economies get back into gear, I suspect demand in the near-term will remain lower than before the pandemic, and in the longer-term, we may have a shift to renewables that could sound the death knell for fossil fuels.

It is individual preference, really. Personally I have a number of different wallets, because if I had just one I wouldn't trust myself not to do something stupid to lose access. I even keep some coins on exchanges (although never a large amount on a single exchange). Do whatever you're comfortable with, just be aware of security at all times. Also don't keep passwords etc all in one place, or all on one computer.

Seems very unlikely. They'd have used a digital US dollar instead, surely? This would meet all of their nefarious requirements without surrendering centralised control.

Depends why he created it, surely? If your aim was to create a decentralised alternative to the corruptions of fiat, then you would surely choose to remain anonymous - otherwise you become an overarching authority.
Alternatively, if you want to create a new financial system mostly to receive and bask in huge personal glory, then you'd go all Craig Wright about it and never shut up - in which case you'd never have been anonymous in the first place.
Makes perfect sense to me that Satoshi is anonymous, and it fits with what bitcoin is.
^^Remember this?

Why on Earth would you want to do that? If you have it, don't share the information.

I saw that. It is certainly encouraging news in the progress towards a vaccine.

The issue of chemical/biotech firms profiting out of this is an interesting one. This pandemic has thrown into stark focus how different countries around the world measure value, it has set economic wellbeing against human lives. Some countries such as the UK are easing lockdown too early in an attempt to mitigate economic damage, at the expense of a rising death toll. Most countries put money before people by failing to implement initial lockdowns in time, and ended up paying a heavier economic price than would have been the case had they acted sooner.

And now we come again to money vs people, this time from a vaccines perspective. The UK and US have been arguing against patent pooling for anti-CV19 drugs and vaccines.

Is it ethical to let people die because they don't have the $$$? To treat people in rich countries instead those in poor countries? This crisis is shining a bright light on some of the questionable ethical standards that underpin the modern world.

Just have both, it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, one or the other. Sell some BTC for ETH.
I hold both. They are both great coins, and they have different use cases, so it's unlikely that one will succeed at the expense of the other. Makes sense to hold both if you think both are good.

I would imagine that by that time, we wouldn't be saying that Bitcoin is worth x Dollars, instead we'd be saying that a Dollar is worth x% of a Bitcoin. There is no way, surely, that over a hundred years from now we'll still be using fiat as the primary measurement of value. Fiat looks hopelessly antiquated now, in 2020. We are moving into an interconnected digitised world at breakneck speed. In 2140, fiat will be irrelevant, if even still exists.

Disagree. I think he's attacking China because:
1) He's trying to deflect attention away from his own mishandling of the pandemic by shifting blame onto someone else. He does have a history of this sort of behaviour.
2) This is an election year, and bellicose posturing against an external antagonist plays well with the electorate.

Trump is incompetent and divisive, and is diminishing US standing in the world. I would imagine that opponents of the US, principally China and Russia, desperately want him to win the election... so despite him attacking China, it makes perfect sense for China to want him to win again. For all his talk of economic war against China, the two countries are inextricably intertwined and their economies hugely interdependent, if one attacks the other then they damage themselves, too.

The environmental improvements are certainly considerable. Likely conditions will get considerably worse again once the pandemic ends - but will things return to how they were before? I think there are some positive signs that suggest there will be a permanent environmental improvement, even if it is only slight. We have seen how successful remote working can be, a lot of companies are now considering it as a permanent option once the pandemic ends. This should reduce vehicle traffic within and between cities, and also between countries. Companies are struggling, and those that come out of this intact will need to save costs. Removing the overheads of running large physical offices makes sense, as does stopping people say flying from London to New York for a meeting and then flying back. The cumulative savings of switching to remote meetings will be huge. So I do think that there will be some long-lasting positive environmental change. Whether that will be enough to combat climate change is a different question.

I know several people who have died from CV19, including one younger person who was in my year at school. According to a friend who works at the local pharmacy, we have had double-figure deaths just in our part of town.
I think you can count yourself fortunate if there are no cases in your area. Please don't underestimate this thing.

I'm not sure there have been any more serious viruses in recent memory, other than SARS and MERS, which the west managed to escape unscathed, due largely to a lower transmission rate. HIV/AIDS too, but again much less easily transmissible than CV19.

I don't think the overriding purpose of the forum is to achieve a high Alexa rank.

No, I'd expect the rank would not elicit any emotional response, because it is utterly irrelevant.

I'm not convinced that Bill Gates is a good representation of an average college drop-out.

They are covering themselves legally. Think about all the products that say 'may contain nuts' - even though there is effectively zero chance of them containing nuts. It costs nothing to put a line of text on some packaging, it could cost millions to defend a lawsuit from someone with a nut allergy... or who contracts CV19.

If someone with CV19 is standing facing you and coughs, would you prefer they are wearing a mask?

I'm happy with temperature checks, too. Seems sensible and prudent.

Companies are trying to keep up with government advice/orders. If they are told anything over x degrees is potential infection, then they are obligated to treat it as such. Better to have a standardised approach rather than different companies doing different things.

The difference with this is that it is a new virus, there is no pre-existing immunity. That's why it has become a pandemic, whereas seasonal flu does not.

There's a good demonstration here of how a virus can spread in a public setting. I agree with you that a video of someone sneezing in a way that doesn't represent normal behaviour may be counterproductive to the acceptance of what is a genuine problem.

Sensible restrictions are an important part of keeping the R value below 1. Now there may be reasonable personal liberty concerns over things such as abuse of track-and-trace technology to monitor citizens after the pandemic is over, but temperature checks and masks seem perfectly acceptable. However, sending people out into society with no clear guidance, or with guidance that can't reasonably be implemented is not.

I think it's extremely unlikely that he holds 0.25 BTC. For a person with a normal amount of wealth, 0.25 BTC is a reasonable amount to hold. However for a billionaire it makes no sense whatsoever. You would hold either zero, or else an amount that is at least a reasonable proportion of your wealth.

If someone has $10 billion (Musk reportedly has $35b), then 0.25 BTC is roughly 0.000025% of your total wealth. Which means it is absolutely irrelevant to you whether or not it increases by an improbable x1000 to give you 0.025% of your total wealth. In which case there is no point in holding it.

Even 10 BTC would only be 0.001% of your total wealth. So a x100 increase would make it 0.1% of your total wealth. Even with 10 BTC there would be little point in having such a comparatively small amount.
Maybe 100 BTC, which would be 0.01% of your wealth, and x100 would make it 1% ... but that's still a tiny amount.

_source

It is no secret that the Conservative government in the UK values money more than people. They are re-opening sections of the economy, they are re-opening schools without employing any track-and-trace policies, without any PPE equipment, without any real guidance on how to implement and enforce the necessary social distancing - the guidance isn't there because it is clearly an impossible task to social distance on the London underground, on buses, in primary schools. The rich and the middle-classes get to continue to work at home, whilst the expendable poor are sent out as the vanguard. Those who have to travel into a city centre and don't have private transport will be at hugely increased risk of catching and spreading the virus - but it's okay, don't worry - they will spread it amongst themselves whilst everyone who can afford to continues to safely self-isolate, away from the unfolding chaos. Only the common people will be sent out to die, only the expendable poor. Fee-paying schools will remain closed. Schools for everyone else will re-open.

Schools are being re-opened because the government sees people as valuable only in terms of their economic contribution. The government wants to free up parents to go back to work, despite the dangers, despite the fact that R is very close to 1 and we are teetering on the edge of a return to exponential growth in new cases. Teachers don't want to return. Teachers' unions don't want them to return. Parents don't want their kids to return. Certain local authorities are refusing to re-open their schools. It is clearly nonsensical to reopen now, clearly unsafe, the R value is too close to the threshold.

Meanwhile the right-wing press continue to act as the government's mouthpiece, casting teachers as valiant heroes who are desperate to serve their country, battling the evil unions who are getting in their way...

... this is the same paper that has a somewhat questionable record when it comes to picking the right side


This post is aimed more at people who vote for right-wing parties than at anyone else. Presumably most Conservative voters would not kill their own family in exchange for money, but they are happy to support a party that wants to increase the national death toll in exchange for a small economic lift. Is this an astonishing level of cognitive dissonance, or simply the utter absence of empathy?

Think about it though. If it was a guaranteed price rise, then everyone would start buying because it means guaranteed profit. If everyone starts buying, then that means more people buying than selling, which is what pushes up the price... so if everyone thinks that halving leads to a price increase, then that is guaranteed to be the case, and equally is guaranteed to be priced in before the event actually takes place.

If we all knew that halving would increase the price from $10k to $20k, then people would have started buying months ago, which would have pushed the price up to $20k in anticipation of the halving... and when it actually occurred it would mean no further rises.

Price is determined as much by expectation of future price as it is by actual changes such as halving.

Halving will certainly be good for bitcoin price in the longer-term. However I for one was quite surprised that we didn't see a sell-off immediately after the halving occurred - normally that is the case with this sort of thing.
I think this lack of a drop-off suggests a lot of strength in bitcoin right now, a lot of bullish sentiment. Part of this may of course be due to gradual re-opening of markets following the initial CV19 shutdowns - but whatever the reason, the absence of a sell-off is promising.

Thanks for making it clear from your profile name that you are connected with this coin - that is important for transparency, and it does help to build confidence in your project.
But you do need to explain a bit more about what the coin is, what problem it is uniquely positioned to solve, and the process for how the team will achieve their aims.

Thanks for the transparency, though, that's an important first step that others would do well to emulate.