I will give you a few examples. Waqar Younis was actually spotted by Imran Khan during the late 1980s during a club competition. Imran groomed him and made sure that he gets quality training. Similarly, it was Majid Khan who spotted Shoaib Akhar during a similar club competition. Those days are long gone. The senior players are no longer handpicking any of the promising players from the domestic scene.

When I first joined this forum, there were a few airdrops which were reserved for Bitcoin holders. I am taking about airdrops such as XLM, GBYTE and BTX. These were very easy to apply, and at the same time they were very rewarding. Such airdrops are no longer occurring now, because rather than distributing the pre-mine amount among the users, the promoters want all of it for themselves.

Those who are interested in the future of Sri Lankan cricket, please answer my questions:

1. Why the SLCB is never staging any international matches outside the Colombo-Galle area. Why no matches in the Tamil dominated Eastern and Northern province?

2. Why there are zero Sri Lankan Tamils in the domestic competition? (Muttiah Muralitharan was not a SL Tamil, he was an Estate Tamil).

3. Why there is so much resistance in spreading cricket to cities other than Colombo and Galle?

4. Why cricketers from rural districts need to come to Colombo to pursue their career? Why no facility is available for them in the tier-2 cities?

5. Why the SLCB continues to be controlled by the Sri Lankan government?

It is not practical to list all the bounty projects that got labelled as scam. Because only a minority of those campaigns posted in the Bounties sub-forum made payments to the participants. So rather than making a list of bounties that ended up as a scam, it will be easier to make a list of the bounties that actually paid the bounty hunters. But IMO, it is all a waste of time. Who is going to gain from doing this?

Oh.. so after Imran Khan, now Shahid Afridi is trying his luck in politics? I am not too excited with this news. As far as I know, Imran Khan isn't doing that good. Pakistani economy is not performing that well. What is the need for cricketers to exploit their celebrity status to enter the field of politics? Personally I believe that there should be a hard boundary between politics and spots.

Yes.. players such as Waqar Younis, Shoaib Akhtar and Shahid Afridi were hand picked by senior members of the Pakistani team during the 90s. But it is not happening now. Either the senior players are not helping the selectors to find new talent, or there is a shortage of talent in Pakistan right now. The latter scenario is very unlikely, as Pakistan is having such a large player pool.

I have been around for 3.5 years. And I have seen how the bounties and the signature campaigns work. Back in 2017, the rewards were much better. But even then the payouts were not enough to make a living out of it. You needed a full-time job and the rewards from bounties could act as supplementary income. And now the situation has become much worse.

I am not sure whether this is the right strategy. If this repeats, then Trump may increase the ticket price, and the liberals may end up sponsoring his presidential election campaign. What they did in Tulsa is OK, and it will act for shock value. But I would not recommend repeating this, especially when Trump is unlikely to mobilize his support base, due to the pandemic and party as a result of his low approval ratings.

If the team is dumping the tokens at the first opportunity, then it can mean only one thing. The project is a scam and the promoters are trying to accumulate as much money as they can before vanishing. So we need to take our attention to this. If the dumping is being done by the promoters, then that project should be declared as a scam and should be delisted from the exchanges.

There is something called FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). It happens in a lot of different domains, and not just in the world of cryptocurrency. When an altcoin or a token suddenly goes up in value, the investors flock around to purchase it. And this is a bad strategy in cryptocurrency domain, because many of the coins and tokens undergo pump-and-dump cycle. You will be trapped, if you make your investment during the pump.

While I agree with your findings, have you ever thought about the reasons behind this exploitative practice? IMO, there are too many bounty hunters around and many of them are willing to work under slave-like conditions. This actually encourages the promoters and the bounty campaign managers to put even more restrictive and exploitative terms in the T&C. Unless we take a stand against these exploitative practices and stand united, this practice will continue.

Domestic cricket in Pakistan is in very bad shape, and in the recent years the quality has actually gone down. Domestic competitions are no longer producing quality players, who can be drafted to the national team. That is one of the reasons why the average age of the players in the national teams remains one of the highest in the world. Unless the quality improves, I don't think that it will be right to ask the players to take part in the domestic matches.

Having a diversified economy helps a lot, but it is not the perfect solution. There are countries such as India which have diversified economy. But the GDP per capita is much lower when compared to countries such as Maldives and Gabon, where the economy is overdependent on a single sector. Effective management of the economy, eradication of corruption and a low population growth may do the trick.

My advice is not to go for the social media bounty. I was doing social media bounty for more than 1.5 years and the rewards are not that good. Right now many of these bounties doesn't have a mechanism to differentiate between real followers and fake followers in social media and that negatively impacts users like us who participate in these bounties honestly. Go for the signature bounty, as it is more rewarding. But the issue is that you can participate only in one campaign at a time.

Sri Lanka is a cricket crazy nation, but the problem is that they have a smaller population when compared to India or Pakistan. However, the biggest issue in my opinion is the lack of a proper domestic set up. Domestic cricket in Sri Lanka consists of a few cricket clubs playing against each other. There is no State/Province based teams. And this means that outside Colombo, and to a limited extent some of the other cities, there is no proper domestic setup.

I have been saying this for quite sometime now. There are too many altcoins in existence now. Out of the 10,000 or so altcoins created to date, the majority are now dead or dormant. But still, a few thousand of them claim to be active and even this number is huge. There is a saying - too many cooks spoil the broth. The condition of the altcoin market is like this. There are too many of them around, and this means that none of the coins are able to become 100% satisfactory to the users.

This is really ridiculous. If you take in to account the military capability, then the United States is miles ahead of China. China won't even last one month, if it enters in to a war with the USA. Having a population of 1.4 billion doesn't guarantee anything. Nowadays, it is the technology that matters. And as of now, the Chinese military technology is in dire straits. Also, when you speak about the United States, you need to talk about the NATO as well. A war against the United States is a war against the NATO.

There was a time when I had accounts in more than a dozen cryptocurrency exchanges. It was necessitated because I used to take part in the bounty campaigns, and I had to register with different exchanges to barter my tokens for ETH or BTC. It was tedious as well as dangerous to go through the KYC process for all these platforms. But now I no longer take part in the bounties and I am active only in two exchanges - Binance and Huobi.

There is some truth in what deisik posted. It is not that easy to create vaccines against viruses, because they mutate very often. As a result of this, you may not get a vaccine that is 100% effective. And it needs to be remembered that the COVID 19 virus is having different strains. A particular vaccine, which works against one strain, may not be useful against another virus strain. That means that you need to go for multiple vaccinations if you want protection and even then it may not be 100% effective.

Unfortunately, this is the truth. The way ICO works mean that if some project is outed as a scam, there is hardly anything the investors can do to get their hard earned money back. Theoretically, you can pursue them using legal means. But in today's world, it is very common for these scammers to move from one country to other, to escape from law. On top of that, most of the victims may not have the financial means to pursue the legal option.