Yeah.. I remember what happened with Mohammad Amir. He was banned in 2010 for five years. He was not allowed to play any domestic cricket from 2010 to 2015. He returned to the domestic circuit in 2015, and then played his first match for Pakistan (after the ban) in 2016. So hope remains for Umar Akmal. Perhaps he can also resume his career, similar to Amir.

Only 1-2 weeks remain for the next Bitcoin block reward halving, and therefore the prices have already started going up. And this spike is not just visible with Bitcoin, but with the altcoins as well. Short term investors can make use of this opportunity to make some quick profits. But then, it is difficult to predict whether the spike will continue after the halving event.

Well.. I understood that it was sarcasm. I was just pointing out the recent attempts to include these pseudo-sports in Olympics. The most outrageous suggestion was to include Esports. Others in the list include DanceSport, Tug of war, Bodybuilding, Paragliding, Sumo.etc. To tell the truth, I don't even consider chess as an Olympic sport. People need to understand these games don't have anything to do with physical activity.

On the other hand, I am in favor of including Cricket, MMA, Capoeira, Sepak takraw.etc.

No one is having any doubt regarding the merit of that project. But questions are being raised about the continued development and the commitment from the part of the promoters to take care of the security issues and bugs without much delay. On this regard, I have to say that the response is not that great. For example, the rollout of ETH 2.0 has been postponed quite a few times.

When my father purchased a television, it was the first time that someone did that in my village. And that was in 1996, just before the world cup. Before that, whatever little information we had about cricket came from the AIR (All India Radio) and newspapers. A lot of people used to listen to the radio commentary. At least where I live, very few of the residents actually watched the 1992 world cup.

Apart from Bitcoin, Litecoin is perhaps the oldest coin I have in my wallet right now. I lost the vast majority of my LTC holdings when BTC-e/Wex.nz closed down, and then again lost some when Cryptopia ceased its operations. So my current holdings are rather small. Apart from Litecoin, I have some Ethereum and Stellar Lumens in my wallets, but these coins are not that old.

I would agree with you about this "boring match" argument. Some of the most boring matches that I have watched involved two test playing nations. On the other hand, some of the most exciting matches involved one associate nation playing against one of the test playing nations. The defeat of West Indies during the 1996 World Cup to Kenya is still fresh in my mind. I was a small kid back then, and I was amazed by the Kenyan performance.

That said, Olympics doesn't allow too many automatic qualification slots. At the most, they may allow direct entry for 4 teams. That means that the remaining test nations need to play qualifiers and I don't think that the ICC will agree to this.

Well.. with the current state of market, it will be really risky to invest in little known coins. The situation is different from the one we had back in 2017. Back then, those who invested in some of the new coins got up to 100x or 200x profit. But nowadays, we need to remember that only a small fraction of the new projects are successful. An even smaller proportion gives good returns to the investors.

This is not the first time that PCB is banning someone for corruption charges. But the difference is that in earlier occasions, the players were banned only from the national team. They were allowed to take part in domestic cricket, as well as in English county cricket (please correct me in case I am wrong). Even in the case of Steve Smith/David Warner, they were allowed to take part in the T20 leagues.

I don't know why anyone would even compare ETH with BNB. Both are miles apart. I am not a big fan of the altcoins, but that said Ethereum is one of the coins that I have in my portfolio. And there are reasons for that. Ethereum was the first among the second-generation altcoins and it was the first one to make use of the smart contract system. On the other hand, BNB is just an exchange token.

Ludo, Chess.etc are not real sports. They don't involve any physical activity. You can call them as "games", but not as "sports". And that is the reason why they are not included in competitions such as the Olympics and Asian Games. There is a crazy demand to include Esports in the Olympics, but I hope that the International Olympic Committee will reject this demand.

If any country can make use of the situation, it is China. They are one of the few nations with surplus cash. Even a large part of the US federal debt is owned by the Chinese government (in the form of US treasury bonds). They may or may not be willing to invest their hard earned cash in this situation. But then, the other countries should allow that as well.

Kapil Dev retired in 1994 and TV coverage was not that widespread when he was playing at his peak. During the 1980s, very few people in India were having television sets. That's the reason why he never achieved the level of fandom, that Sachin Tendulkar, Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Virat Kohli had. But he remains one of the legends in Indian cricket.

I don't understand why the stock prices are getting affected by the drop in the oil prices. Apart from a few countries such as the GCC emirates, Nigeria and Russia, most of the other countries are importing crude oil from the oil producing cartels. So if the oil prices go down, it should actually benefit the economies of these nations (especially that of the United States).

A T20 match takes around 3 hours to complete. Just slightly longer than a football match and therefore I don't think that duration is an issue here. We can have 4 groups of 4 teams each for a total of 16 teams. Each team will play 3 matches during the group phase, with the top ranking team proceeding to the semi-finals. So each team plays a maximum of 5 matches. Entire tournament can be completed in 8-10 days.

There can be some positive outcomes as well. Working from home may become the new normal. This can be beneficial for family life, especially in work-crazy countries such as South Korea and Japan. Another positive aspect can be that online avenues for earning money may become popular. Internet may become a major revenue spinner. Ecommerce is witnessing a huge boost nowadays.

I would disagree here. The most hardcore voters are those who support Trump, especially those middle aged and elderly Evangelical voters. They will vote no matter what, as per the advice given from their church (they will vote for Trump, so that he can turn the SCOTUS to conservative majority). Hardcore Biden voters are students and activists, and the polling percentage has been historically lower among this group. So my guess is that it will hurt Biden more than Trump.

There is too much fragmentation out there, and that is the reason why they are not bouncing back. For each niche domain, we have dozens of altcoins and tokens in circulation. So obviously the investment get fragmented. In the near future, I expect the vast majority of the less promising cryptocurrencies to die out. This will clean up the market a little bit and the remaining alts should rally once that happens.

I would love to see two dozen teams in the T20 World Cup. But then, the ICC would never agree. On paper, they have 16 teams. But 8 of these teams are restricted to the first phase, and only 4 out of the 8 will advance to the proper tournament.

I am not a big fan of T10 format. It is too short for me. I watched the 2019 T10 league on TV and didn't liked it that much. It has nothing for the bowlers. Even T20 is heavily in favor of the batsmen, but T10 is just like a bowler's gas chamber. Why can't we have T20 in the Olympics?

As of now, cryptocurrency is having a purpose entirely different form that of fiat currency. There is only minimal overlap, in the function of these two two assets. The conclusion is - cryptocurrency is not competing with fiat currency for market share. The real competition is with some of the other assets, such as mutual funds, bullion and real estate.