FL do have a very large number of electoral votes (29), but I don't think that it is that important. The reason is that Trump can still lose the elections even if he wins in Florida. According to FiveThirtyEight, Pennsylvania is going to be the state that will decide who wins this election (you can check their forecast here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast, check the section "The winding path to victory").

I still remember one of the threads that appeared here, around the time when I first joined this forum (in 2012). The thread was posted by an user, who had converted most of his wealth to Bitcoin. He was married, and found out that his wife is having an affair with a person of another race. He silently converted his savings to BTC, and then filed for divorce. His wife got suspicious and claimed that he was not being truthful with his assets. A few of the media outlets picked up this story and published articles about it. Anyway.. I don't know what happened in the end.

Edit: I found the thread. It's here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355602.0

If someone is currently jobless, and facing difficulty in paying rent and utility bills, then I don't know what impact can motivation have on him/her. What would you do with motivation, when you are about to be evicted for the non-payment of rent? What the individual really needs is employment training, so that he can find another job to compensate his old one.

Online retailers such as Amazon and Ebay are unlikely to accept Bitcoin as a mode of payment, because they have partnerships with PayPal and Visa/Master. Also in case of Amazon, they have their own payment gateway known as Amazon Pay. Bitcoin is a competitor for Amazon Pay and this explains why Amazon is reluctant to allow it in their platform.

Australians once again showed the cricket fans how to lose a match, which they could have won easily. First of all, they had England at 149/8 and then allowed them to make a total in excess of 230. And then, after getting a good start (they were 144/2 at one point), they wasted that by losing wickets to useless shots. Feels bad for the Australian bowlers, who toiled really hard.

Still it is 50/50. Australia was cruising nicely, when Woakes trapped Marnus Labuschagne LBW. Aaron Finch is still there, but he needs some support from his team-mates. Mitchell Marsh is not looking very comfortable against Jofra Archer and Chris Woakes. The required run rate is still under 5 runs per over, and therefore they don't need to do anything foolish. But if they lose a couple of wickets now, then it will become really hard.

Edit: Mitchell Marsh castled by Jofra Archer. Advantage England now.

Rather than the interest levels, I guess the Chinese are more worried about sanctions. If the Americans can impose sanctions over Russia, then what prevents them from doing the same to China? I don't have much details about their reserves. Only recently they admitted that they are increasing their gold reserves. Officially, they are holding less than 2,000 tonnes. But I am not sure whether we can trust them on this.

You definitely have a point there. But there are practical difficulties. 6-7 years ago, purchasing a crypto debit card was relatively easy. There used to be a lot of options out there. But new regulations from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) changed everything. There are still 3-4 options available, but you need to go through all sort of KYC verifications to become eligible to purchase one. The fees has also increased by quite a bit.

I don't agree. If they break the rules, then they should be banned. Already the South African selection policy is an abomination. Nowhere else in the world, players are selected based on their skin color, rather than on merit. Because of this selection policy, more than 50 players were forced to move abroad. On top of that, there is widespread corruption within the CSA. They receive huge amounts of revenue from TV deals and from the ICC. But still the players remain underpaid.

Seriously? I was thinking the opposite. Japan is the least volatile market out there and if he is investing there, that means that he is more interested in preserving his wealth rather than increasing it. Nowadays, he is not investing in blue-chip stocks. And his move away from the American stock market hints that he doesn't think that the current valuation is fair.

I don't have the same opinion as you regarding the awareness about cryptocurrency in India. I have been to small towns and villages in India and I have met with Bitcoin investors in these unlikely places. Obviously cryptocurrency users face a lot of challenges, since trading is not fully legal in India. You never know when the authorities can cause trouble to you.

I agree. It may not matter much for the uber-rich, but imports from China helped the middle-class and poor in a big way, and in almost all the segments. I still remember paying $200 for purchasing a crappy smartphone a decade ago. Now I use a cheaper one from China, which has much better specs. The same goes for electronic appliances such as washing machine, TV, refrigerator, dishwasher.etc. Without the Chinese brands, a lot of people won't be able to afford these appliances. Obviously the competitors have seen their business dipping and want the Chinese products removed from the market.

I don't think that IPL broadcast is available in Pakistan. On top of that, the Pakistani players are not allowed in the tournament. Probably the PCB wanted to keep the players engaged with something during this period. They should not do overkill. The PSL 2020 was a grand success. Audience level and revenues were much higher than what they expected. All that said, now it will be better for them to concentrate on the next edition.

It's not going to be easy at all for the Australians. They are 44/2, and Marnus Labuschagne (playing his first international match in 6 months) is at the crease with Aaron Finch. Two of their important batsmen are gone. Both David Warner and Marcus Stoinis fell to Jofra Archer. I would say that right now it is looking like 50/50. Won't be much surprised if England wins this match.

What is wrong with the Australian pacers? Hazlewood bowled well yesterday, but today all of them failed to take crucial wickets. The 9th wicket partnership between Tom Curran and Adil Rashid was able to take England from 149/8 to 231/9. Starc, Cummins and Mitchell Marsh conceded too many runs in the final overs. Today Australia wasted a very good chance to bowl England out for less than 200.

I still remember the huge amount of dust spam that I received in my wallets in 2012 (when I first created a Bitcoin wallet and joined Bitcointalk). It was slightly different. The spammers would send BTC0.0001 or so (back then, valued at around $0.0005 or 0.05 cents each) along with a spam message with a link to some ponzi/pyramid scheme. I used to ignore all those messages. But when the Bitcoin exchange rates rose, I was able to make a profit from these spam transactions.

We had the block reward halving less than four months back, and it's impact is not yet visible at the market. From what happened after the first and second block reward halving (in 2012 and 2016 respectively), I would say that this impact will become visible in 6 to 12 months time after the halving event. So you can expect a big spike sometime in November or December this year. And this spike will not be a minor one, which takes the exchange rates from 10k to 12k. This time, we may witness a new ATH.

Yeah.. when I first joined Bitcointalk in 2012, a lot of the users were Libertarian (including me) and some of them were quite radical. But back then, most of the users were ideologically driven. Very few of us thought in 2012 that Bitcoin exchange rates would go up by 4,000x. Then we had the bull runs of 2013, and this attracted the money-minded users. A very few of the Libertarian users of 2012 are still here, but I am noticing their posts less often nowadays. Many of these accounts have gone dormant. A few might have got hacked and taken over by spammers.

I don't quite understand the point these central banks are trying to make. We already have digital versions of fiat currency, such as PayPal and Payza. What makes these payment methods any different from the proposed central bank digital currencies? Fiat currencies already exist in the digital form and we don't need additional variations from the central banks.

Bairstow is gone. He was struggling out there and Starc got him. Now Joe Root will join Jason Roy, and they will try to build a partnership against Starc/Hazlewood. England batting lineup looks quite strong, especially the lower order. Everyone up to no.9 (Tom Curran) are capable of making good scores against quality Australian bowlers. BTW, need to see how Zampa bowls today. He is taking the wickets, but at the same time he is conceding too many runs.