It is going to be fun, but as per my understanding Keith Thurman will be stepping in to the ring with a huge advantage. I agree that his last win by KO was almost 6 years ago.. but I searched in YouTube for footage from his more recent fights, and I was quite a bit impressed. The fight against Josesito López was quite one-sided, although he wasn't able to get a KO. ON top of that, Thurman is a decade younger than Manny and according to reliable sources he seems to be on good form.

Looking at the volumes, it is clear that a lot of the investors are currently accumulating Bitcoin (and the other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash). They will be setting targets such as $15,000 per coin or $20,000 per coin. So the impact from those users who are booking profit at 8K levels will be more or less neutralized.

A large part of the expenses incurred by the miners can be attributed to the capital costs. Setting up a mining farm can be very expensive, with all those mining rigs and air conditioners. Right now, there are only a few manufacturers that produce the mining rigs. And they don't have the spare capacity to increase the production 100x.

The main problem is with the legality of Bitcoin and crypto-currency. Bitcoin is 100% legal only in a handful of nations such as Japan and Switzerland. And now comes the question of what to do with all those customers, who hail from those nations where it is not fully legal. Another issue is with dealing in fiat. The banks have shown a deep aversion for anything related to crypto.

Yes. We can call them scammers.

And no. This is not normal in the trading world. I have been involved in equity and mutual funds trading for the last 10-12 years. They never fake the trading volumes. In case someone does that and get caught, then it is very likely that he goes to jail. Faking the data can't be justified, no matter for whatever purpose they are doing that.

A few days back I was thinking about making a bet in favor of Pacquiao. Many of the betting sites were having him at +135 or even +145. But now I am getting reluctant to place the bets... If the betting sites are favoring Keith Thurman by such large margins, then for sure there is some solid reason for that. These betting sites receive information from sources, where common people don't have any access. Either Pacquiao is not in good shape, or Thurman is in tremendous form.

The opposition in India is even more hostile to the idea of crypto-currency. The very first anti-Bitcoin measures in India were taken by Raghuram Rajan (then the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India), who was an appointee of the opposition party. Ironically, his successor (Urjit Patel) also followed the same policy, despite having a different political affiliation. The problem with India is not with the NDA (ruling alliance) or the UPA (opposition alliance). The problem is with their third world mindset.

The advantage with Bitcoin is that it acts as an investment asset, and as a currency at the same time. On the other hand, if you have USD in your bank account, you need to invest that currency in some other asset, so as to maintain the purchasing power. Because USD is not protected against inflation and its purchasing power goes down every day. Therefore USD can't act as a storage asset for money/wealth. But this is possible with Bitcoin, since it is protected against inflation.

Hackers will find more ways to hack, only if they exist. You need to remember that 99% of the hacking incidents occur because of the carelessness of the user. All you need to do is to adhere to a few basic safety precautions. In case you are using an online wallet such as Blockchain.info, then you need to enable 2FA and email authentication. These simple steps will make your wallet out of reach for the hackers. Another option is to purchase a hardware wallet. They are not very expensive, IMO.

Very sad to hear about your loss. But at the same time, I don't know why you chose to store Deeponion in Cryptopia. Lite-wallet is available for Deep Onion, and it takes just 50 MB of your disk space. You had the option of storing these coins in your laptop. And if you had done so, then you would have been a happier man now. This option is not available for the vast majority of the altcoins, which ask you to install the full desktop wallet, which can take anywhere from 5 GB to 15 GB of your hard disk space. Examples are Veil and Cardano.

If you are holding altcoins outside the top-25 list, then there are few options to store them. Not all of them may be supported in hardware wallets. So the users tend to store them in exchange wallets. The problem is that they lose all of their holdings, when the exchanges get closed down, due to hack or some other reason. Also, traders have no option but to store their coins in exchanges.

McAfee is interested in only two things. First one is to make money for himself. And the second is to remain in the media limelight, so that he can win the Libertarian primaries, and then contest in the 2020 presidential elections. But unfortunately for him, Larry Sharpe is surging ahead of all the other candidates, and McAfee may struggle to compete against him.

The problem with USD is that the $20 trillion federal debt is hanging above its head like the sword of Damocles. The debt has grown to 100% of the GDP, and at some point of time, there is going to be a collapse. And once that happens, the purchasing power of USD will go down drastically. No such risk for Bitcoin, as it is a decentralized asset free from central bank interference.

Not a single Indian politician has spoken in favor of cryptocurrency till now. And the RBI officials have adopted a very hostile stance towards Bitcoin and closed down all the exchanges and Bitcoin ATMs. I would say that as a third world nation, India is at least a decade away from regulating Bitcoin. We can expect this to happen sometime after 2030.

He was probably mentioning about the transaction fee for Bitcoin. A few weeks back, the average cost of transaction used to be somewhere between $0.10 and $0.30. Now this has gone up by almost 10 times, to $3.00 per transaction. And in case the bull run continues for the next couple of months, then we can expect the fee to touch $10.00 per transaction.

Personally I haven't checked any of the betting sites, but according to the bettinginsiderjournal, these are the odds:

Mybookie: Thurman at -145 and Pacquiao at +125 {here}
bettinginsiderjournal.com: Manny Pacquiao: (+120), Keith Thurman: (-150) {here}
supremeboxinginc.com: Thurman -155, Pacquiao +135 {here}
Betway: Keith Thurman at 4/6, with Manny Pacquiao at 6/5 and the draw listed at 18/1

In two months from now, Manny Pacquiao will be fighting against Keith Thurman. Probably Thurman will take on Floyd, in case he wins his fight against Manny (he is the favorite according to the betting odds). But that possibility is for 2020 and not for 2019. I think Floyd doesn't have any immediate plans to fight anyone this year (especially after his low profile MMA fight a few months back).

Since they got hacked once, then the probability will always remain. The hackers are now aware that the Binance firewalls can be breached. And I am not sure what additional security precautions are being taken by the exchange, in order to avoid any such incidence in the future. Binance is one of the largest exchanges out there, and therefore it will remain as one of the prime targets.

This may be true for the smaller media outlets. But media giants can't be manipulated by Bitcoin traders, although they may get influenced by the government policies and by the bankers. IMO, there is no truth in the allegation that whales are manipulating the media, so that they could purchase cryptocurrencies at very low prices.

You are right. I still remember the mainstream media coverage about Bitcoin back in 2013/14. It was overwhelmingly negative. But I believe that even this coverage resulted in the influx of a number of users to the world of cryptocurrency. That's why I have always said that any sort of publicity is good for Bitcoin, be it positive publicity or negative publicity.