After all these well publicized scams, if people continue to pour their hard earned money in to the scam projects, then I have to say that it is their fault. Lack of experience and greed by the investors are the reasons why they get scammed so easily. Hopefully after getting scammed one or two times, they will learn the lesson the hard way and may become careful in the future.

I took part in bounty campaigns for at least 4 dozen ICOs, and out of that around 20% got listed eventually. The remaining (80%) never achieved the soft-cap and didn't even went for listing. And among the handful of the projects which managed to achieve the soft-cap, only a very few such as Mindol and IOUX gave positive returns. Others such as EBTC, KWH, RPM and WPP went down upon their listing.

Everyone is assuming that there will be a bull run this year, because of the block reward halving. A lot of people are accumulating coins and waiting for the halving event. I also expect the prices to go up. But there is a real chance that the prices may crash, just like what happened in the case of Litecoin last year. Let's also remember the fact that Bitcoin went up by 150% in 2019, and some of that price movement was caused by the hype surrounding the block reward halving.

LOL... it is funny that you guys still have doubts regarding that. Crag Wright first claimed that he was the real Satoshi many years back. And since then, he has failed to show a single piece of evidence to support his claim. Now I am 100% sure that he is not the real Satoshi. I'll tell you the reason:

Earlier this year (2019), Mr. Wright forked the BCH chain and came up with his own coin (BSV). After that he came up with some ingenious method to cheat the cryptocurrency users and make money for himself. 

First, he crashed the BSV exchange rates by filing lawsuits against those who said that he was not the real Satoshi. A lot of the exchanges and wallets (including Blockchain.info) delisted the BSV coin and its exchange rate crashed. Wright used this opportunity to accumulate BSV.

Once this step was completed, he filed for the patent in the United States and the BSV prices suddenly jumped by 200%. As per reliable sources, Mr. Wright sold a large part of his stash and made a few hundred million USD.

What he did was not illegal, per se. But it was very unethical and immoral. Now we know that Satoshi Nakamoto was a selfless individual who cared little about accumulating personal wealth. Wright's behavior is polar opposite of that of Satoshi.

I don't know what Bitcoin is going to gain from all this. China is one of the most important markets for Bitcoin, and the number of users there is approx. 100 times higher than what we have in Hong Kong. I am not taking any sides here... the ongoing demonstrations and riots represent an issue for the Chinese government with the pro-democracy protesters on the other side. Bitcoiners should remain neutral.

Blockchain is a part of the Bitcoin technology, and not the other way around. Blockchain will be in existence only if Bitcoin exists. A lot of people (including the governmental players) are trying to paint Blockchain as innovative technology and at the same time trying to whitewash Bitcoin as some illegal money payment system used by criminals. They need to understand that Blockchain is irreversibly connected to Bitcoin.

I don't understand the logic in claiming something like this. Let me ask you guys a very simple question. How can Libra disrupt the current financial/economical system, when it is a part of that very same system? If you are talking about Bitcoin, then it can be claimed that Bitcoin is falling outside the current system. But Libra is just a digital version of fiat and very much part of the current economic system.

Back in 2010, the first ever Bitcoin exchange (New Liberty Standard) used some sort of formula (based on the block reward and electricity cost for mining) to calculate the Bitcoin prices. They had fixed BTC vs USD exchange rates, which got revised every month or so. And if I remember correctly, for the first month the exchange rate was like 1 USD = 1,300 BTC.

Controlling the mining hash rate is not the same as controlling Bitcoin. And moreover, this 60% doesn't come from a single mining pool. There are several giant mining pools in China, and most of them are not in good terms with each other. And none of these mining pools (AFAIK) are controlled by the Chinese government. So there is no logic in saying that the Chinese government wields any noticeable influence on Bitcoin.

Well.. I am not sure about it.. In my opinion, the United States Dollar is still the strongest fiat currency out there. The vast majority of the international trade is being conducted using USD. And the only currency which can offer meaningful competition to the USD is the Japanese Yen. Euro looks stronger in paper, but its purchasing power, as well as the exchange rate has gone down against the USD during the last few years.

Other sports bodies such as FIFA are being run by former players. But ICC and the national cricket boards are mostly controlled by politicians and businessmen. BCCI is nominally under Sourav Ganguly, but the real power lies with people such as N Srinivasan, Jay Shah, Anurag Thakur and Sharad Pawar. These people always think about money first and have no incentive to make cricket a popular sport.

Nowadays the tracks are getting more and more batsmen friendly and scores in excess of 500 are very common in subcontinental test matches. Now limiting the days/overs to 4/360 may be a good idea in countries such as England and Australia, but it is going to increase the proportion of drawn matches in India, Pakistan.etc. Another issue is that rain interruption is increasing in frequency and with climate change worsening, a lot of the matches are getting washed away. Reducing the duration to 4 days may negatively impact such matches.

All the anonymous cryptocurrencies (including Monero, Zcash, Deep Onion, Veil, Verge.etc) are facing issues of liquidity. Trading them in the exchanges (where KYC is enabled) is going to attract unwanted attention from the authorities. And there is not enough liquidity available in the DEX sites and P2P platforms to trade these currencies. The 24-hour trade volume for XMR used to be in the $200-300 million range. Now it has decreased to a fraction of that number.

It has nothing to do with Bitcoin community having the money or the power. Just because a coin claims that it is superior to Bitcoin, the users are not going to suddenly dump BTC and go after that particular cryptocurrency. There should be clear reason for that. As of now, Bitcoin is not 100% perfect. The other coins are not able to replace it, because they themselves are not that good either.

I am not sure whether BNB is a scam coin (from what I have heard till now, that is not the case). But no one can deny the fact that BNB is a centralized asset and it has no purpose other than being used for trading in the Binance exchange. Now anyone dreaming about such a cryptocurrency replacing Bitcoin as the no.1 crypto is either living in a fool's paradise, or have serious problems with their mental capabilities.

At $20,000 per coin, Bitcoin would be having a market capitalization of almost $400 billion. And this figure is more than the market capitalization of many of the giant corporations, such as Boeing and PepsiCo. And if we want Bitcoin to have such a huge market cap, then it needs to put a lot of things in order. First and foremost, there should be clarity on the legality. Even now, the legal status of Bitcoin is not clearly defined in the vast majority of the nations.

Ideally no more than 10% to 15% of the portfolio should be composed of high risk assets, such as Bitcoin. In that way, even if anything goes wrong you will be able to stand on your foot. Diversifying is a good idea and I would say that you did the right thing by converting some of your stocks in to cryptocurrency. But you should draw a line and decide how much risk taking you can afford, depending on your financial stability.

In normal cases, the success rate of a business startup is somewhere around 10% to 15%. However, in case of startups related to cryptocurrency, the success rate is even lower, in the range of 5%. So first you need to decide whether you want to take this much risk or not. My personal opinion is that cryptocurrency itself is a good investment option, and if you hold on to your coins for 3-4 years, then you will be able to get good ROI.

Altcoins need to prove that they can be used in some domain, where the usage of Bitcoin is not suitable. One example is that of Monero. It can be used as an anonymous payment method, as opposed to the lack of anonymity with Bitcoin. But less than 1% of the current batch of altcoins are able to do this. And that is the reason why there is no recovery in their exchange rates.

I don't think that the chart is very accurate. For example, Bitcoin was first listed in New Liberty Standard in 2010 and the exchange rate was $0.0007 per coin. The current exchange rate is $7,200 per coin. So if you had invested $100 back then (in 2010), then that investment would have (theoretically) grown to $1,028,571,400 ($1 billion). On top of that, you can add the returns from the forked coins such as BCH and BSV.

Similar story for Ethereum as well. The ICO price for Ethereum was $0.31 per coin. The current price is $133. So in case you had invested $100 during the Ethereum ICO in 2015, then your investment would be worth $42,900 now. On top of that, you can add forked coins, such as Ethereum Classic.