I don't understand why everyone is blaming Bitcoin for their losses with altcoin. Let me be clear about it, if the altcoins are down, that is because people don't want to invest in these shitcoins. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin. For sure, Bitcoin is not forcibly asking the cryptocurrency users to stay away from altcoins. So my advice is to take care of all the flaws and bugs, rather than putting the blame on BTC.

The motto should be MAGA (make altcoins great again!!)

Too bad. You fell victim to one of the most common scams around here. Before installing any altcoin wallet, you need to scan the exe file with a reputed anti-virus software such as Kaspersky. If that is not possible, then you should at least read the reviews about the wallet. There are chances that users might have flagged it already for suspicious activity. Anyway, please be careful from now on.

People are ready to invest if good projects are there. The major issue facing the ICO market is not the lack of investors, but the lack of good projects. There are some good projects, but they are few and far in between. And in many cases, these projects fail to advertise themselves properly. There is some hesitation from the investors due to the previous bad experiences with the ICOs, but if there is a good project with unique idea, then the chances are that it will get enough attention in the market.

Read the post again. He is saying that out of the transactions related to ransomware/malware (not all the transactions), Bitcoin is being used 98% of the time. According to various studies, 1% to 2% of all the Bitcoin transactions can be classified as illegal. This 98% share from ransomware is included in that figure. Vast majority of Bitcoin transactions are perfectly legal.

The most surprising thing about the news is that the BSV prices have remained stable. I would have expected them to crash by at least 50%, after the judgement was pronounced. The last time I checked, the exchange rates showed hardly any change against BTC. That could mean that the market is not taking this news seriously. Either the traders are not aware of it, or they don't think that this order can be implemented.

Cricket in India grew by leaps and bounds ever since the IPL was introduced. Same with Australia after the BBL. Even domestic cricketers could earn salaries in excess of half a million USD, and this ensured a very large player pool in these two countries. England already had such a large pool, in the form of the 18 county teams (17 in England and Glamorgan from Wales).

Is that really surprising? How many cricket teams were there back in 1900? Many of the countries, such as Argentina and Cuba could send only one athlete each, as token representation. Only countries 6 had more than two dozen athletes: Belgium, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. Out of them, only GB and Netherlands had proper cricket teams and somehow Netherlands skipped the event and was replaced by the amateur team from France.

Yes. Steve Smith will be part of the playing XI for the 4th test. You can check this:

https://www.espncricinfo.com/series/18659/scorecard/1169534/derbyshire-vs-australians-tour-match-australia-in-eng-2019

He is currently part of the playing XI in the warm up match against Derbyshire. So in all probability, he will be playing in the 4th test. But I think you are a bit overoptimistic when you say that Australia is going to win "easily" if Smith makes it to the playing XI. From what I have seen, one-man armies are not very efficient in winning the matches on a constant basis (Kohli is another example). Cricket is a team sport and you need at least some support from the remaining 10 players to win the game.

Monero offers additional anonymity, but it lacks the liquidity that Bitcoin possesses. It is not very easy to convert Bitcoins to Monero in an anonymous manner. Cashing out Monero is even more difficult, if you don't want to reveal your real identity. ETH is more liquid, but if anonymity is considered it ranks much lower than BTC and XMR. 

I don't agree with users claiming Ben Stokes as one of the best players in the world right now. IMO, he is a very over-rated player and he is incapable of single-handedly leading his team to victory. On the other hand, Steve Smith and Virat Kohli have led their team to victories all by themselves several times. Stokes has done that on a few occasions, but he is miles behind Smith / Kohli.

They are in the select panel for the umpires, which means that they are supposed to be the world's best. I would never expect such a horrible decision from someone at that level. I agree that they are humans and therefore we can't expect them to be 100% perfect. But my question is why only England benefits from such errors? Why no other team?

Royse is one of the most helpful users I have ever come across on this forum. I always found him unbiased and cool. His contributions are much appreciated, especially in the gambling section. I am not sure about the requirements for becoming a merit source, but I should say that whatever the requirements be, it will be very difficult to find someone more deserving than Royse.

Australia wasted a review and there is no doubt that it cost them the match. But the fact remains that Joel Wilson made a very poor decision, as it looked plumb in front of the stumps for me. You may find umpires giving not out in cases where the ball is hitting the off-stump or the leg-stump, but in this case it was clearly hitting the middle-stump. In the end, only the result matters as you said. No one cares whether they won the match fairly or not. And this gives advantage to teams such as England.

Not really. From my last 3 years of experience, these are some of the hints that I have noticed while studying the scam projects:

1. Most of the whitepapers will be plagiarized from other projects and you can see different style of writing in different sections of the white-paper (due to the promoters plagiarizing content from different sources).

2. The identity of the promoters won't be revealed during the ICO and in some cases the given identities will be fake.

3. If you check the website, you can see evidence of plagiarism there as well. There will be very little original content.

4. They won't be having any listing plans with the major exchanges. At the most, they may hire 1-2 minor exchanges which are willing to list the tokens in exchange for a small fee.

5. The bounty managers will be mostly inexperienced guys from third world nations.

Right now Bitcoin looks like the most attractive option, as the other coins are going down in value. Very few of the new projects are successful, and the ICO market has been in hibernation for a while. But in the short term, I don't expect any big movements with Bitcoin. If there is going to be a spike, that will occur only after the block reward halving in 2020.

Your post is not clear enough. Do you want to increase the number of coins, or do you want to increase the value of the coins that you are holding right now? An intelligent investor would go for the latter option. In case you want to increase the number of coins, then you can try PoW mining with coins which are mined using that algorithm, such as Dash.

With the ongoing trade war between China and the United States getting worse, I don't expect China to allow Libra in its territory. The problem with Libra is that it is just a digital version of the United States Dollar. I don't think that China will allow the circulation of USD or its equivalent in its territory, as it can weaken the national currency (Chinese Yuan).

I would say that a slight advantage is with Australia. Their pacers have been spewing fire throughout the series and none of the English batsmen have been able to adjust with their pace and bounce. If Australia wins this match, then they'll be up 2-0 and it will be a big blow for England. But the big issue for Australia is that right now only two of their bowlers are in form.

We have already seen what happens to the smaller altcoins. Some of them have only a few thousands or even a few hundreds of users and if a dump occurs, it may never recover and die out within a few months.

An example is here:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum-gold/

Ethereum Gold was a shitcoin that had a peak market capitalization of more than $5 million. But once the promoters exited after creating a pump and dump cycle, the coin lost its value within two years. Now the coin is virtually dead and no longer actively traded in any of the exchanges.

Such a scenario will never happen to ETH, due to its huge user base. It may lose some value, but may not die out in a couple of years.

I have to agree with you on this. As of now, we are stuck with using the banks and there is no other safe option. I thought about a few other options, such as converting some of the cash to gold ETF. But the liquidity will be lost and in case we are faced with some emergency expenses then we'll incur even more losses when we convert the ETF back to fiat cash. So I agree, we have no other option.

But one question. A negative interest rate of -0.25% or even -0.5% may be OK for now. But what you'll do in case they further decrease the rates. Will you be OK with -2% or -3% per year? There is no guarantee that they'll not do that.