5% is very high interest rate and here in India, most of the banks are giving somewhere between 3% and 4% per year. But then you can't compare fiat currency with Bitcoin. Fiat currency have been around for many centuries and Bitcoin is just 11 years old. There is always an advantage for the early adopters and those who invested in Bitcoin during the early days got that advantage.

I don't know how any of this can specifically help cryptocurrency. For example, digital payment methods are being favored now. But that seems have benefited digital fiat-currency based payments (such as Visa and PayPal) rather than cryptocurrencies. Personally, I am yet to see any boost for the cryptocurrency sector, resulting from this COVID 19 pandemic.

I personally know a few guys with gambling addition (within friend circle as well as within family), and I know how hard it can be to get rid of it. That said, I am not sure whether this is the right time for doing it. Most of the countries are under lockdowns and people are sitting at home without any work. And when the gamblers are idle, then there is a larger chance for them to relapse to old gambling habits.

It is too early to say that. There have been some positives, such as the reduction in deaths from traffic accidents and improvement of air quality. But at the same time, we should not forget the fact that this pandemic resulted in tens of millions of people losing their jobs, in addition to more than a hundred thousand deaths. I would say that the negatives have been more significant than the positives.

Contrary to what Pakhi posted here, Sourav Ganguly didn't made any big announcement today.

For those who are outside India, I will give a few quick updates on the situation here. There is a mix of good and bad news. The good news is that the rate of growth in the new infections is slowing. But the bad news is that, even now anywhere between 800 to 1,000 people are getting infected per day and that casts a dark cloud on the future of IPL 2020.

The Prime Minister will be addressing the nation tomorrow (on the last day of the lockdown). By all probability, he will be extending the lockdown, by at least two more weeks. However, there are indications that there may be relaxations in a few sectors.

In a row of 3 people, the airlines may be allowed to place only one passenger. That means that the flight occupancy will be around 33% at the most. Can this be viable? If the passengers are willing to pay 3 times the ticket cost, then the airlines companies can survive. Else I am not sure about how this is gong to turn up in the end. I would personally say that this is a very stupid proposal. Allow 100% occupancy, after testing all the passengers. How can airlines operate with 30% occupancy? 

Hmm... perhaps I need to clarify a bit. If the players don't play, then their salaries may get reduced. What I am saying is that even if the players remain at home for 3 months, they may not witness a sharp reduction in their earnings. They will get 100% of their contract fees, and earnings from advertisements and endorsements. At the most, they may face a 10% or 20% reduction in the annual salary (in the form of forfeited match fees).

I used to favor the HODL ideology, but no more. We can't hold our coins for an infinite period of time. At some point, we need to sell them so that we can profit out of our investments. And IMO, the future outlook is not looking very rosy. We are just a few weeks away from the block reward halving, and there is no spike related to that event. If the markets are bearish, then we can expect a major drop after the event.

There are still a number of good airdrops out there. But now they are occurring few and far between. Similar to any scheme, it is the early adopters who benefit the most. Back in 2017 and 2018, a lot many of the users benefited from bounty campaigns and airdrops. But then, the number of bounty hunters increased beyond a limit and the reward per hunter went down proportionately.

There is always a certain degree of risk associated with using Tether (USDT) despite its widespread acceptability. The problem is that the USDT promoters have lied in the past about the backup funds. They claimed that the token was 100% backed up with real assets, when in reality it was established that the backup level was much lower than what they claimed. And then came the Bitfinex-Tether scandal, in which the exchange used funds from Tether backup for trading, without any intimation to the users.

I was checking the previous posts. A lot have been posted on dirty coins ending up at the decentralized exchanges and mixers. But we all ignore the fact that the majority of these dirty coins end up in mainstream exchanges such as ZB and Gate.io, which are operating 100% legally. Let me take the example of the coins from the PlusToken scam. An unbelievable 50% of the coins laundered so far from this scam ended up at Huobi, with smaller amounts being diverted to exchanges such as Upbit and OkEx.

I am someone who has invested in both the assets. I invested in Bitcoin more than three years ago (January 2017) and BTC has given me returns of +700%. On the other hand, my investments in gold (December 2018) have given me returns of around +45%. I am happy with my investment outcome in both the cases, although in the recent times, Bitcoin has given a better return.

Well.. there are several factors that should be considered here. First of all, many of those who own the casinos are billionaire themselves. I am talking about people such as Sheldon Adelson, Kunio Busujima, John Paulsen, James Packer, Lui Che Woo and even Donald Trump. These people can spend just 0.1% of their wealth and the casino workers can get their salaries for this period. Also, we should not overlook the fact that casinos pay some of the heaviest taxes on any of the commercial establishments. So the government has a duty to help them in bad times.

Well... I can understand. The establishment plays a large role in deciding the Veep candidate. And I consider Joe Biden as someone who is very much a part of this establishment, and therefore it may not be very surprising if they go for Hillary. And if the betting sites are giving such high odds for Hillary Clinton, then there may be a valid reason for that.

Demand for decentralized economy is increasing? I am yet to witness any of that. We are a few months in to this pandemic and I haven't heard about any mention regarding the decentralized economy. Even if we had a decentralized economy, how it could have fared any better than the current one that we have? As of now, we have a centralized economic setup where the governments decide about all the policies. And in the near future also, I can't foresee any big change to that.

Well.. you can call me whatever you want, but the BCCI is capable of "making money out of thin air". A large part of their revenues come from sponsorships and endorsements and the TV rights are sold until 2023. If the IPL gets cancelled, they may be in red by $1 billion, but unlike the other cricket boards, they have rainy day funds and can extract funds from these reserve accounts and survive without much damage for a long time.

There is no doubt that the ongoing COVID 19 outbreak is definitely one of the major reasons for the bearish movements in the cryptocurrency market. But at the same time, there are a lot of other events which are taking place in the background and they don't get much media attention. During the past 2-3 weeks, we had two major dumps by PlusToken scammers, which tanked the exchange rates by close to $1,000 each on both occasions.

Just two days back, I had to get an appointment with the doctor as well. I was having severe pain on the lower backside of my head. The doctor told me that it is occurring because I am now working without a large monitor/screen and my small laptop screen is causing a lot of strain to my eyes. But what can I do now? India is under complete lockdown, and it's not possible to get a monitor now.

I just hope that your case is not that bad.

Recently, the Chinese government made it mandatory for the merchants to accept payments in physical cash, after promoting digital payments for more than a decade. A lot of the citizens (especially the elderly), still find it very challenging to use the online payment methods. And not all of them own smartphones. But for cryptocurrency users, we can get around this problem by making physical Bitcoins. Anyone remember the Casascius physical bitcoins?

Even if Sourav goes ahead with the press meeting tomorrow, there is no guarantee that he will mention anything about the IPL schedule. Yesterday in India, we had more than 1,000 new cases (the largest increase till now), and it looks that the situation is not getting any better. It may take a few months, before the government may be able to control the ground situation. Until then, the BCCI can't plan for the rescheduling of IPL 2020.