@philipma1957 - thanks for sharing how this is impacting you and your family. I hope everyone recovers soon.
Thanks also to @xvids for starting the thread.

I think it is important that we share these stories. There are plenty of people out there who aren't treating this thing seriously enough, who think it is some weird government conspiracy, or who think it is no big deal and no worse than regular flu. But if we all show how it is affecting us as individuals, it may help and go a little way towards making everyone understand how serious this is, and how we need to behave responsibly, and in accordance with official guidance.

I have been lucky so far. I am in the UK, which is perhaps going to be one of the worst affected countries in Europe... but so far no-one I know has caught it or is displaying any symptoms, everyone in my family has a decent amount of space in this lockdown and isn't stuck 24 hours a day in a tiny city centre flat, everyone in my family who works still has a job and is working from home, we all have access to food and supplies with minimal human contact.

But I am not taking this for granted. A lot of people out there are suffering terribly. Globally we are into millions of confirmed cases now, deaths in the hundreds of thousands. The word 'pandemic' is not used lightly.

Ethereum for me. It is so low against bitcoin at the moment, and can go so much higher. The move to 2.0 continues, and I think we will see an ETH surge at some point this year. Maybe not to the 2017 levels, but this coin has great devs, a roadmap that they are following, and one of the strongest use cases in all of crypto. Couple this with the fact that this is the top alt by cap, and that it already has a proven history... ETH looks a very good bet for the future.

I don't think that UNICEF is inherently sexist. They seem well aware of gender inequality in societies around the world, and are working to redress the imbalance. Indeed, just getting girls into schools in the first place is a huge positive step in some countries.

I don't know the detail in the case you mention, perhaps this 'boys do this, girls do that' approach is due to the specific implementation by that particular teacher or school. Perhaps a reason for the discrepancy between the treatment of STEM and of Life Skills is that education in life skills must to an extent reflect the current status of that society. If you have a society with very traditional and clearly delineated gender roles, then if you teach a girl carpentry, she will never be able to use it as a vocation because the society will not accept a female carpenter, in which case it is not a life skill. I think that the full implementation of gender equality does probably involve a step-by-step process, and can't be done all at once.

Yes, it's true that Ripple have been releasing a lot of tokens. This is a part of what has kept the price so low, and has caused consternation in the XRP community. But the maximum supply does mean that this won't continue forever. Indeed they halted their monthly dumping from escrow release, 'programmatic sales' back in January,


AFAIK the primary use case is international banking, rather than individual consumers. I do take your point, but banks have been testing the waters with XRP for years now. As for actual widespread real-world everyday use, no, we are still too early on the journey - but this is true for every coin. Even bitcoin remains niche in terms of day-to-day use by ordinary people, it is currently seen more as a high risk long-term investment.

This is certainly possible, even with the huge dip we've seen from CV-19. XRP has a history of abrupt price movements that are more often found in smaller coins. I would not be surprised to see a price jump from $0.20 to $1 happening. The question is whether that price would then be sustainable. History says no, as we saw in the aftermath of the 2017 bull run. So do we want a sudden move to $1 that is followed by a fall, or a slower, more sustainable rise? I suppose option 1 is for traders and 2 for long-term holders. What I suspect will happen is sudden rises and sudden pullbacks, but as part of that larger rising pattern. We will likely hit $1 several times in the coming months/years, but it won't be sustainable initially.

IMHO the idea of taking China to court for this is absurd.

The virus arose and spread because China is a big country that is developing rapidly and unevenly. There are many people living 'Western-style' lives with lots of money in big cities, and travelling around the world. At the same time there are poor peasant communities living almost medieval lives. This is why you have people eating infected bats (or whatever) and also why the virus can spread. You can't blame China for this.

Where China is at fault is its initial suppression of whistle-blowers and that period of inactivity that followed, which allowed the start of the spread. But after this, once they acknowledged the problem, China's response was strong, lightning-fast and I would say exemplary. This is why all (or certainly most, depending on the accuracy of official figures) of China's new cases are from people entering the country. I don't think China can be criticised too harshly for failing to anticipate how this situation would evolve globally. There is no precedent in living memory. SARS and MERS are closest, but did not spread anything like as much as CV-19.

I think a lot of other countries, particularly here in Europe, are at fault. They saw what happened in China, and decided not to implement immediate lockdowns and quarantining. They gambled not to take the short-term economic hit - they gambled with the lives of their citizens, and lost. Now it is too late, they have put the lockdowns in place, but the economic damage is huge and people are dying. I'm sure that this will be brought under control, but nothing hides the fact that the West acted too slowly. They had the example of China right there in front of them, and did nothing until much too late.

If any country tries to take China to court, then they would be doing so purely in an attempt to mask their own failings.

I think that as crypto develops and expands into the mainstream, it is inevitable that it will encounter government response in the form of legislation. Crypto has to either fit into an existing legal framework, or else have one devised for it. It is not possible for something that contains so much money to remain unregulated and be acceptable to governments.

Ripple with XRP obviously has that degree of mainstream integration already, and in an important sense is ahead of most (all?) other coins. This is one reason that the price is struggling - the court cases are taking a toll and dampening expectations. I do think Ripple and XRP will come out of the controversy - after all, some of the most egregious charges have already been thrown all, and Ripple have been working with officials for a long time, it's not like this is some new upstart company bursting up from nowhere.

As for $5, yes, I do think XRP will hit that price. May take a while, but it should get there. There is after all a guaranteed maximum supply, and XRP gets burned all the time. And this is coupled with an ultra-strong use-case.

The problems here are a) achieving sufficient consensus on a QC-proof update to avoid a damaging chain-split and, more importantly b) deciding what to do with any coins that remain vulnerable to QCs after the upgrade.
If a QC-proof upgrade of bitcoin is implemented, the coins are not safe until they are moved to QC-proof addresses. Some coins have not been moved in years, and early coins are particularly vulnerable. There is the highly contentious issue of how to resolve this impasse for coins that are not moved in time, or that can no longer be accessed classically. Should they be burned to prevent theft by a QC? Or should they be left alone to be stolen? What constitutes theft anyway? It's been discussed at length and quite some time ago.


There's a later discussion here:

OP, you should probably lock this thread if the answers above are sufficient. There is a 'lock topic' button in the bottom left.

Thank you, I hadn't seen that it was an old image, and so potentially misleading.

I think the point is still valid though - even at 6%, CV-19 would have much lower mortality than something like MERS, and we are lucky in the sense that this current pandemic doesn't have that sort of mortality rate per infection.
But whilst I wouldn't be surprised to see China faking its figures, I do think it's true that probably many cases with low-level symptoms and most asymptomatic cases aren't tested, and so skew the reported mortality rate. A good health service alone is unlikely to account for Germany's orders-of-magnitude lower mortality than Italy, whereas their huge testing programme might explain it.

Either way, this CV-19 pandemic is serious and must not be underestimated. Governments have been lucky in that they have a chance to learn a valuable lesson here, and so be prepared for the emergence of anything as bad or worse in future.

This is very true. Look at the MERS outbreak a few years back, mortality rate reported at around 34%. Fortunately MERS does not transmit anywhere near as easily as COVID-19.
MERS had a very high mortality rate, but low transmissibility.
CV-19 has a low mortality rate but high transmissibility.

The current situation with CV-19 is terrible, and many people are dying. But it could have been a lot lot worse. We are lucky that this thing has a low mortality rate. It could quite easily have had both high mortality and easy transmission, in which case we could conceivably be facing the end of civilisation at the moment.
This is why it is vitally important that lessons are learned here. This poor response from governments cannot happen again. The next time we have a global pandemic, governments must be much more willing to suffer economic damage in order to protect their populations, they must act more quickly and more decisively to contain the spread.




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This can be difficult. But if a coin's price is moving differently to the rest of the crypto market, and the movement is very sudden, and there is no clear reason why it should be moving, then that means you might need to investigate further. Also if the price fluctuation is limited to a single exchange, that can be another clue.

This is quite true. Statistics show general patterns but mask the individual detail. Certainly it seems, as we'd expect, that people with a pre-existing condition are more at risk than people without. Similarly old people are more at risk than the young. On average.

However there are always other factors to consider. Johnson is a public figure and has perhaps been exposed to larger quantities of the virus, which can be a factor in severity of symptoms. Also he may (or may not) be physically healthy, but being in charge of a country at the present time is no doubt hugely stressful, and stress has a huge effect on the body.

I dislike him and his politics, but I hope he pulls through and is okay.

'Whales' can of course do the reverse, and sell huge amounts of a coin to reduce the price, and then buy up more at a big discount. They can manipulate the price up or down to make money.

The only ways a whale can lose really are a) another whale manipulates the market in the opposite direction at the same time, or b) there is a genuine price movement in the opposite direction at the same time, say from breaking news (good or bad).

We do need to be careful about ascribing all sudden price movements to whales, when we don't know how often it is genuine whale activity, and how often normal market movement. Also a 'whale' is not necessarily an individual - there are pump-and-dump groups set up for the purpose of market manipulation. Remember also that big coins such as bitcoin are much harder to manipulate as they have much bigger order books.

This is all caused by low trading volumes and thin order books. The smaller the amount of coins in existing buy and sell orders, the easier it is for someone with a lot of coins to manipulate the price.
Say a coin has the following sell orders: 10 coins at $2, 50 coins at $3, 40 coins at $4, 800 coins at $5.
This means that with $20 you can buy all of the '$2' coins, with another $150 you can buy all of the '$3' coins, with another $160 you can buy all of the '$4' coins. So if you spend 20+150+160=$330, then you can single-handedly pump the 'price' of the coin from $2 to $5.
There's then a good chance that people will see the price rising, and decide this is a good coin to buy, and so everyone will start buying, increasing the price further. But only you, the 'whale' know the real reason the price increased. So now coins are trading for maybe $7, you can sell all or some of your coins for say a 'bargain' price of $5, and make a huge profit.

That's it in essence. If there is not much volume, it is easy for someone rich to manipulate the market. In practice this means that low cap alts are prone to pump-and-dump schemes such as the above, whereas something like bitcoin that has higher volumes is more difficult to manipulate - because it costs more to do so.

Exactly. And if it doesn't work against CV-19, it is still a proven anti-malaria treatment.



I'm not sure about this, there are deeper moral implications. It's an anti-malaria drug, and if the Indian export ban was indeed an attempt to preserve domestic supplies, then the lifting of the ban raises profound concerns. Malaria is endemic in India.


India has also been quite successful in fighting the disease:




Trump has forced Modi to hand over medicine which may help fight CV-19, and which is proven to help fight malaria. Further, we all know (from being in crypto at least) that when there is high demand for something, and demand outstrips supply, then the price rises and whomever is willing to pay the most gets the product. The US has the most money. Trump's actions are taking proven life-saving medicine from poor Indians and giving it to rich Americans, whom it may or may not benefit.

This isn't black and white of course, Trump is acting to protect his citizens, which is his job, and he would be remiss in his duty not to do this. Also we don't know if India genuinely needs all of this medicine or whether they have a huge surplus. It would be unusual (unprecedented?) for Modi to actually have the moral high ground in any interaction. I'm not saying Trump is wrong, I'm just trying to highlight the complexity of the situation.

It's not up to the crypto community to make a decision. This isn't a closed system, anyone can 'join', be it individuals, companies or governments. And anyone can develop a coin. Also as stated in the above post by Ucy, blockchain is transparent. As soon as there is a way to connect a 'real' person to a crypto address (excepting privacy coins, mixers etc) then all of their transactions over all time can be traced. The immutability and transparency is a fundamental strength.

The reason that crypto continues to exist is that it is simply better in many ways than existing financial systems. This will lead to it becoming more widespread, and more mainstream, where it will encounter new regulations and legislation, including KYC and AML, and full legalisation will ensue. I think this is inevitable, and there is no choice here really, it will happen.

All of crypto dropped substantially. The most relevant thing here for me is that ETH is outperforming BTC at the moment. A sign of things to come with alts leading the recovery? Perhaps.

+11% a day isn't sustainable. 11% in one day then plateauing is sustainable.
I don't think it's a trap, ETH has been under-priced for a long time. The markets dropped too far I think in the CV-19 panic, it's natural that we have sudden mini-recoveries like this. It's welcome, but I don't think hugely important given the context of those recent big drops.

This has been the case forever. There is and always has been controversy over Tether and whether it is actually properly backed, amongst other things. I don't think it will suddenly vanish or deviate substantially from the peg.

Other stablecoins are probably just as good as USDT, or maybe better. But if you are using it for trading, you want a high volume market where there is not a huge gulf between sell and buy orders. The gap is a built-in loss that you have to beat in order to profit from a trade. The smaller the gap, the less you have to overcome. USDT markets are often high volume. Choice of exchange is also important here, obviously.

I would say USDT is fine to use short term, but as others have said, don't keep money in it (or on exchanges) long-term.

I think that's correct, yes. Not the media though, the government have been suppressing it in a bid to hide it from the media.

The government have for some time been intentionally underplaying the severity of his condition. The reason I would imagine is partly PR - they want to project an image of a capable administration who is in control of this thing, and partly managing the behaviour of the populace - the lockdown here in the UK has been in place for a while now, and there are concerns about how people are coping, both with the physical aspects such as securing food supplies amidst panic-buying, and the mental side of isolation, frustration, and fear. What the government want is to keep people calm in very difficult conditions. I'm no fan of the Conservative party, but they are in a tough situation here. They are also fighting the sensationalist news culture. I imagine a big part of why they wanted to keep quiet about Johnson's true condition was in order to avoid the newspaper headlines we are seeing this morning. Now apparently Johnson has been given 4 litres of oxygen, against the normal 15 - which suggests that whilst his situation is indeed serious, the oxygen and the ICU move are at least partly precautionary, not that this is apparent from the 'sick Boris faces fight for life' headline.

I don't like him, but I hope he recovers. I don't like the government, but I can see why and sympathise with why they are trying to manage the news in this way at this time.


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