Adoption of Bitcoin by Starbucks (if the news is true), will definitely have a big impact on the exchange rates of Bitcoin. But still I believe that the block reward halving will be having an even bigger impact on the rates. If the Starbucks rumor had a big impact, then we should be seeing Bitcoin rallying in the exchanges now, but that was not the case when the last time I checked the charts. To clarify a bit, nothing is confirmed about Starbucks. Bakkt has made an announcement that they intend to integrate Bitcoin payments in Starbucks, which may or may not be realized in the near future.

Before the series started, I expected the Pakistani batsmen to struggle under AUstralian conditions and their bowlers to perform well. But exactly the opposite is happening now. It is true that some of their star batsmen such as Fakhar Zaman have failed. But Babar Azam played exceptionally well during both the T20 matches (which means that the additional work load of captaincy is not affecting his batting form).

However, the Pakistani bowlers have been a disappointment so far. Their fast bowlers, especially Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Irfan have performed well on pitches abroad. But they have been unable to take the wickets of top order Australian batsmen. The used two spinners for the second mach, which sounds like a good strategy for me (given the lack of form from the fast bowlers).

It is funny that you expect the market to stabilize in a week or two, when the ongoing correction phase started many months back. By the last week of June, Ethereum was trading at around $340 per coin. Currently it is trading at $187, which represents a 45% reduction in the exchange rate in a matter of just four months. After a brief phase of stabilization that occurred during the second half of September, the prices have once again started moving downward. And for Ethereum, a lot will depend on whether it can hold on to the 0.02 BTC support level or not.

I was holding some Stellar Lumens, and I was glad that the price went up. I was unaware that the Stellar Foundation was behind the price rise, and came to know about it only after reading this thread. But still I don't think that this can have a long-lasting effect. The coins being held by Stellar Foundation was outside free-float. These coins were never traded, and therefore the impact should be minimal. On the other hand, had the Stellar Foundation decided to dump all these coins in to the market in a short duration, then the prices would have surely crashed.

It is not surprising because these nations have their own fiat currency (Euro). Libra is a digital version of the United States Dollar and if people start using that currency then the national currency will lose its value. Why should the other countries allow the US Dollar to be used in their territory (in the form of Libra), when the US does not allow the usage of any other fiat currency within the American borders?

If Libra wants to operate in these nations, then it should come up with the versions that are denominated in the respective national currencies. For example, within the European Union, the Libra should be backed up with assets denominated in the Euro. In short, rather than a digital version of USD everywhere, in each country, it should be the digital version of the respective national currency.

Well.. Chainlink is almost 40% down from the ATH. But one positive thing that I noticed about this coin is its high trade volume. Chainlink is being traded in all the major exchanges including Bithumb, LATOKEN, Binance and Huobi Global. Despite the prices going down, this coin has managed to hold on to the trade volumes. Apart from Chainlink, a lot of new coins are getting listed everyday. But searching for a good asset to invest among these coins is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

What you get from bounty campaigns are not "free". You need to work for these bounties and what you get as reward is the salary for that effort. On the other hand, you can classify the proceedings from airdrops as "free money". There is certain amount of effort involved (such as verifying your email ID and entering your ERC-20 wallet address), but still I would consider it as free money. But users need to be careful before enrolling in to these campaigns, as the scammers are active here as well.

A few days back, I saw a thread in which an user was mentioning about the presence of a phishing link in the airdrop sign-up spreadsheet. Airdrop participants needs to sign a message in order to qualify and the website was providing a link to Myetherwallet for the participants to sign their messages. But the link provided was not a genuine one and those users who attempted to login to their MEW wallets using this link had their accounts hacked and whatever tokens they had in the wallet stolen.

XRP is like a ticking time bomb. A lot of users have that coin in their portfolio, because previously it had given very good returns. But at the same time, somewhere around 70% to 80% of all the total supply is being owned by a handful of promoters, and this makes this coin extremely risky when compared to the other cryptocurrencies. I would definitely not recommend having XRP above 20% in the portfolio. If your proportion is more than this, then it may not be a bad idea to convert some of this XRP to either Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Agreed. In trading, it is not possible to avoid loss all the time. Depending on your skills and luck, you may incur profit or loss during your trades. And if there was a method to do trading without loss, then all the 7.5 billion people in the world would be doing it. That said, there are ways to limit your losses in trading. If you follow the stop-loss targets strictly, then your losses will be down to manageable levels, even if your trades go wrong. Manytimes, it will save you from complete annihilation at the market.

The cryptocurrency users does not regard Ethereum as superior to Bitcoin, as evident from the exchange rates and trade volumes. I agree that smart contracts and tokens are very innovative, but for the ordinary cryptocurrency users these things doesn't matter much. What matters for them is the use of Bitcoin as an investment asset, or as a currency, and in this case Ethereum is not superior to Bitcoin in anyway.

IMO, we are doing the mistake by grouping Ethereum together with Bitcoin. That is not right, because both of them are entirely different assets with only a few similarities. Ethereum is more like a platform and Bitcoin is an asset which is protected from inflation (suitable for use as store of value). And the users are also realizing it. Earlier the exchange rate of ETH and BTC used to be in sync. That situation has changed now.

I don't know what you are talking about, but there is no cryptocurrency out there whose exchange rate is pegged to that of Bitcoin. Even in the case of Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash, their price movements are not always in sync with that of Bitcoin. For example, the Ethereum prices have fallen by 40% during the last 4-5 months, while Bitcoin is not showing a similar price movement. Bitcoin Cash have also gone down by a similar percentage during the same time. It may have happened in the past, but that is definitely not the case now.

Bitcoin has survived for more than a decade, because it represents an idea. It is not the best coin out there in terms of technology, and neither does it represent the most secure cryptocurrency among the thousands of different coins. And the scene is constantly changing, with new coins and tokens being listed every day. Under such circumstances, I don't expect an altcoin to maintain its peak acceptability and user base for more than 2-3 years. Sooner or later, it will be replaced by a technologically superior alternative. So you need to keep that in mind before deciding for long-term holding.

It is not very surprising to see the weakness from Ethereum. Ever since the ICO market went bust, Ethereum has been sliding down. And things haven't been helped by the slow progress of various initiatives, such as Ethereum 2.0. As of now, ETH has found strong support around the $180 level and we can expect the price to hover around the $180-200 levels for the next few weeks. But in the long term, I am a bit more pessimistic. There is no doubt that the interest in Ethereum is on the decline.

I got my first coins during the 4th quarter of 2012. Back then the exchange rates were around $10 per coin. But it was not easy to purchase Bitcoin back then. A few international exchanges such as BTC-e and Mt Gox were online during that time, but it was not very easy to deposit cash in these exchanges, especially if you are residing in Asia. So I got my coins from Localbitcoins, after paying a premium of 20%.

And I was very nervous when I made my first purchase. I was scammed a few times in the internet before that, and I was not completely sure whether Bitcoin was genuine or not. But a few months after I purchased my first coins, the first Bitcoin bull run occurred. The exchange rates shot up from $10 to $261, and later that year, they rose to $1,250 per coin.

This is old news. They have been planning this for quite some time. The government first announced that they will be ending the tax benefits for Bitcoin sometime during mid-2018. As a first step, they had made cryptocurrency exchanges ineligible for the income and corporate tax deductions, which are provided to small and medium-sized enterprises.

This was a major blow to many of the exchanges. For example, Bithumb paid 27.2 billion won as corporate tax on its net profit of 250 billion won during 2017-18. Under new rules, they are liable to pay almost double that amount (close to 54 billion won). For the past several years, the finance minister (Hong Nam-ki) had adopted a hostile stance towards cryptocurrency and I don't expect it to change anytime soon.

1.43 doesn't looks good. I would not take such a high risk with those odds. I checked various websites and all of them have odds for England at around that range (2/5 or 4/9). South Africa looked shaky during their semi-final (unlike England who managed to beat New Zealand), but in my opinion both these teams have almost equal chances today.

Know what? I joined this forum back in 2012. And back then, the exchange rate was somewhere between $5 and $10 per coin. A lot of people used to complain that a few months back, the prices used to be around $0.10 per coin and Bitcoin has become too expensive. I purchased my coins at that time, and despite all those complaints, it still gave me almost 1,000x returns (100,000%).

And by mid-2013, the prices increased to $260 per coin. Then the guys were complaining that the prices used to be in single digits in 2012. And imagine what happened when the prices shot up to $1260 per coin by December 2013.

Then for a while things were relatively calm. And it went on till 2017, when Bitcoin suddenly spiked to $20,000 per coin. And after that the OP posted this thread.... 

There is a real chance that the upcoming T20 match between India and Sri Lanka may be shifted from New Delhi. The air pollution level has been rated as "Hazardous" in that city and previously teams (both domestic and international) have refused to play in Delhi due to the high pollution levels. We still have a week to go for the match, so it is possible for the BCCI to move the match to some other location.


What you forgot is the fact that the pitch at Melbourne was very supportive of the batsmen. Also, you are ignoring the fact that one of the key Australian players skipped this match (Ben McDermott came in for Glenn Maxwell). IMO, I couldn't find any improvement in the performance of Sri Lanka. We'll talk about their improvement when they are able to win matches.

Compared to my last post, Bitcoin has gained around 1% market share, with all the other 3 categories losing their share.
 
Bitcoin: $165,119,849,713 (67.397%)
Bitcoin forks: $7,666,932,613 (3.129%)
Stablecoins: $5,030,243,349 (2.053%)
Altcoins: $67,177,008,357 (27.420%)

This is the change compared to my last post:

Bitcoin: +0.858%
Bitcoin forks: -0.012%
Stablecoins: -0.125%
Altcoins: -0.721%

It is ridiculous to charge high ticket prices for the economy stands. The BCCI gets most of their revenue from TV rights and sponsorship and the gate receipts represent a very minuscule share. Even then, they can charge whatever they want for the premium stands. But I would request them to price the economy stand tickets at around $2 or $3 (compared to the current price of around $10). It can fill the stadiums even during the weekdays, as the Indians are really crazy about their national team.