This is the essence of it. The pandemic is accelerating the adoption of online commerce and remote working. It is increasing digital adoption everywhere. But at the same times, economies across the world are in real trouble. Many people have lost their jobs, many others are on reduced pay. People are not looking to invest in new projects right now, indeed they havebeen pulling money out of investments - part of the reason for the crypto price drops since this thing started.

Definitely. Money always ends up in the hands of the rich. Better to give it to the poor first and let it work its way through the economy, rather than giving it to the rich directly.

'Trickle down' is absurd and obscene. It did actually begin as a joke:

_{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics}

I think social distancing is a more accurate phrase than bodily distancing - because it only applies in a social context, i.e. with people outside your immediate 'isolation group'.
There is probably an element of manipulation in naming it this way. They want to mentally reinforce in us the idea that this is a social restriction.
I am kind of surprised actually that they haven't branded it 'patriotic distancing' or similar... that sort of naming convention usually works wonders in ensuring compliance...

It got more popular. Prices increased.

As the money in anything grows, it becomes more visible and more of a concern to governments and regulatory authorities. If a thing is small in dollar terms, then it is inconsequential to a government, and is ignored. When it gets bigger, and particularly when it impacts other people and other businesses, then the authorities step in. Crypto has a lot of rock-solid use-cases. It will continue to get bigger, continue to move towards the mainstream, and continue on the path to regulation and integration into 'normal' society.

If I have a couple of chickens in my garden and set up a stall in front of my house selling 6 eggs a week for $1, then the government couldn't care less that I'm making $1 profit and paying zero tax on it. If I scale up and have 10,000 chickens, build a shop in front of my house and start employing staff to sell the eggs, then the authorities take an interest. Same with anything.

Just have a look at the first couple of pages of Politics and Society. Plenty of examples there.

But as I (and others) said above, there is a distinction between someone who genuinely believes this stuff (which is fine) and those who are trying to cause trouble/scam (which isn't).
Most of these arguably fall into the former group. Personally I am happy to debate with people who I think have crazy views, although at times it can be frustrating - probably for them as well as for me.

The chances of ETH overtaking BTC must be so low as to effectively be zero.
I do think that all coins will recover in price as we come out of the initial shock of CV-19.  On top of this, ETH is likely to outperform most other alts (but not necessarily BTC) as it has such good development (and the move to hybrid PoS), as well as solid use case.
So at the end of 2020 I would tentatively suggest a much higher ETH price, but still well below the ATH. But BTC would remain #1 in cap by some considerable distance.

It is certainly the case that a lot of false information is spread about the virus on here. However, the question of intent is important. We need to distinguish between trolls and people who genuinely believe this stuff. For example some people do really believe that 5G masts cause (or may cause) the virus. This may be unsubstantiated, it may fly in the face of evidence and science, but still, some people believe it. Doesn't mean that we shouldn't trust them, just that we should be wary of accepting their claims. But then this is true no matter who is making a claim and on whatever subject. Truth is determined through data, evidence, and reproducible experimental results.

Blatant trolling and spreading of misinformation in order to create fear, panic etc is a different matter and these people should not be trusted. Sometimes it is easy to identify these people, sometimes not.

OP, you need some justification for those choices, really.
Bitcoin yes, it's the biggest coin and any upwards price movements normally start with BTC. As we come out of a dip, it is usually BTC leading the way, so it makes sense to buy now.
ETH too. We have 2.0 coming up, and development and use case are very strong. ETH and BTC are both well-established coins and are top in marketcap on merit.

For the others in your list though, they may be good choices, they may not, but you really need to explain why.

You do what we want. We monitor your brain or your body to confirm that you've done it. Then we pay you.

This really does sound appalling. Total surveillance, using crypto as a lure. And apparently it's 'good' because it's not as resource-intensive as PoW...

I would say that bitcoin has the potential to be a currency (and indeed a safe-haven store-of-value); this may have been the original vision but that vision is not currently realised. At the moment in its development the markets are comparatively thin and regulation is loose. This inevitably causes volatility, which leads to further speculation, and so bitcoin is treated largely as a highly speculative asset. Many people currently buy bitcoin as a high-risk high-reward gamble, they put money in when times are good and it is the first place that money is withdrawn from when a global pandemic hits. Hence the big drop because of Covid-19.

CV-19 hit the traditional markets hard, and hit crypto hard too. I think we can be confident that once we come out of this, all of crypto will bounce back. But ETH does look too low not just against fiat but against other coins as well. Percentage increases at the moment may be quite misleading as it is against such a low base... but I am very confident that ETH, particularly with the move towards 2.0, can recover very strongly. Current prices are not much more than 10% of the ATH. And whilst 2017 was a bit overheated, the fact remains that ETH has a tremendously strong use case, and has been battle-tested in a way that most other cryptos have not.

I fully understand why people dislike XRP. As a Ripple product it is indeed very different to almost everything else in crypto. But we all want crypto to be successful, which means much more widespread use, we want crypto to supplant fiat and become a part of everyday life. As a part of this process, crypto will inevitably become 'legitimised'. As the money increases and users increase, laws and regulations will appear. This is the path that crypto is on. Yes, XRP's main use case is as an international banking coin - but XRP remains arguably the best (certainly one of the best) route for crypto to achieve integration with the mainstream.

Success for XRP can also lead to success for Bitcoin, Ethereum and so on.

The first one. They are valuing economic health above physical health. Doesn't fit my definition of reasonable.

Anger in Sweden as elderly pay the price for Coronavirus strategy

The values below comparing Sweden to its Nordic neighbours are a week old, but still illustrate the point:

_{https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0414/1130498-sweden-approach-coronavirus/}

... so Swedish death rate (per head of population) is roughly 2x Denmark's, 4x Norway's and 8x Finland's.

As stated above, Ripple is the company. XRP is a token produced by Ripple the company. This is a quite important distinction, because if you read some news that 'Ripple has done x', then that may or may not have any relevance to XRP.

From their website:

There has been another recent advance in quantum computing, which may be an important step towards the development of large scale QCs.

The QCs developed thus far have to work at very low temperatures in order to keep the energy of the system low enough that the qubits remain stable. Very low temperatures, which means close to absolute zero. In practice this means below about 0.1K, or within a tenth of a degree of absolute zero.

A paper last year outlined how in theory this minimum working temperature could be raised to around 1.5 Kelvin. Still absurdly cold, but in relative terms this is a huge jump up from 0.1K. This is a quantum-dot-based system, and the mechanism by which they can work with the higher temperature is by isolating the quantum dots and then using magnetically-controlled electron quantum tunnelling to read the qubit state. (As an interesting aside, it is the phenomenon of quantum tunnelling that sets a barrier to the size reduction of traditional processors, which could end Moore's Law.)

Why does a change from 0.1k to 1.5K mean a big reduction in the difficulty of producing large scale QCs? Well, each time you make the machine bigger, and more powerful, each time you add more qubits, you are introducing extra energy, higher temperatures, which means even more cooling is required. There is a several orders-of-magnitude difference in the dollar cost between cooling to 1.5K and cooling to 0.1K. As one of the paper's authors stated: "This [1.5K] is still very cold, but is a temperature that can be achieved using just a few thousand dollars' worth of refrigeration, rather than the millions of dollars needed to cool chips to 0.1 Kelvin."

So this was the theory, an increase in workable temperature for QCs from 0.1K, up x15 to 1.5K. The big advancement is that this theory has now been experimentally verified, by the team at Delft that I've mentioned in previous posts.

It does make you wonder, doesn't it? Is Trump just Tiger Joe but with more money? If they had been swapped at birth, would TJ now be potus?

Edit: Just when you think that reality can't get any more absurd, I've just seen that none other than OJ Simpson has waded into the Tiger King debate, accusing someone of murdering their spouse. We are so far beyond satire now.

The problem with percentage increases is that they are relative. If a coin drops 50% then rises 50%, it doesn't return to its original value, it returns to 75% of that value.
Example: ETH is $100, drops 50% to $50, then increase 50% to... $75.
What I'm saying really is that 11% of current prices is nothing, it's not a big move, particularly in relation to the ATH for the coin, but it is also low in relation to the pre-Coronavirus values. We're talking about a price rise of about $10, that's all.

Exactly. I've been agreeing with you a lot recently!

Trump is pathologically unable to accept any responsibility for anything. You'd think, as president, he might feel like taking responsibility is actually a part of his job. Apparently not.
Compare and contrast with previous incumbents.

I'll concede the point, it likely is many years away. Similar to commercial fusion reactors in that sense.

But I do think we'll see it once the economics make it worthwhile. Things are moving in that direction. Easily mineable precious metals here are diminishing, and this will drive up cost of extraction. At the same time we are now seeing commercial involvement in the space industry, with some quite rapid development. The potential rewards from asteroids are - sorry - astronomical. Once the cost of getting at them and returning to Earth ceases to be prohibitive, then asteroid mining becomes inevitable. But yes, likely some way away yet.

Bob Odenkirk just retweeted the Dog Racing one, so I'm preferring Saul Goodman to you as an arbiter of quality :p
jk - everyone is entitled to their own personal taste.



even if it's wrong