One thing is sure. Bitcoin is showing a lot of strength. During the past one month, we had two bouts of correction, during which the price went below $8,000 per coin. In both cases, the recovery occurred really fast and the 8K level was reached in a matter of days. This shows that the demand remains strong and there is no excess supply of the coins in the market.

^^^ It is not a hoax. Bloomberg is a reputed mainstream media channel and they will never print a story without ascertaining the facts. And Bloomberg was not the only media channel to publish this news. I saw this in other websites as well.

If you remember, even when Raghuram Rajan was the RBI governor there were talks about banning the crypto-currency. At that time, the government decided against it citing the difficulty in implementing the measure. But now it looks like they have taken a hardline approach.

The odds have changed during the last two weeks. When I checked the betting sites last month, most of them were offering between 2.35 and 2.45 for Manny. And this has come down to 2.00-2.10 now. I guess a lot of users have placed bets in favor of Pacquiao and therefore the betting sites were forced to reduce the returns (in order to reduce the risk).

I don't know why this guy (Mark Karpeles) is not behind bars. He ruined the lives of tens of thousands of people, when Mt Gox went down. Dozens of individuals committed suicide after their life savings were stolen. Till now the identity of the Mt Gox hacker has not been established. But it is clear that Karpeles knew about the ongoing robbery for a very long time.

The next elections are scheduled for 2024.

But voting for another party is hardly going to bring any change. As far as I know, none of the political parties have supported the idea of legalizing Bitcoin in India. Also, Bitcoin users are not an important voting bloc in India. The most important bloc is composed of the rural farmers, and they voted en bloc for the ruling party during the last elections.

The problem is that unlike the case with the Indian sub-continent, the rainfall is very uniform throughout the year in the British Isles. You can shift the world cup to August-September, but there is no guarantee that matches will not get washed out by rain. IMO, the only viable option is to have reserve days, or to conduct the matches in stadiums with retractable roof.

If the match is abandoned, then no one gets any points at superbru.

But I agree with your first point. It is very unfair to the stronger side. Especially when there are no reserve days (which is appalling, considering the importance of this tournament). One option is to give all the 2 points to the higher ranked side, but then the other team will complain that they are being treated unfairly by the ICC.

^^^ There are more than a million active Bitcoin users in India (including approx. 150,000 regular crypto-traders). I don't think that it will be practical for the government to arrest all of them (the total prison population in India right now is 450,000). At the most, they may arrest a few high profile traders and use this incident to frighten the others.

Bitcoin is a currency that we can store on our own. We don't need banks or lockers to store Bitcoin. And this is very helpful, when the authorities try to seize our wealth. I still remember what happened to Burt Wagner (Bitcointalk username BurtW) a few years back. The authorities framed him on false charges and seized all his assets. This can happen to any of us in the future. And if we have a part of our wealth in the form of crypto, then it becomes difficult for these people to seize that.

The gold prices have gone down heavily since 2011. It has been almost a decade and they haven't recovered yet. The demand for gold has gone down in countries such as China and India. People no longer consider gold as a safe asset. Or may be the case is that many of them consider gold as over-priced. I either case, I would say that BTC is a better option.

When I first invested in Bitcoin in 2017, a lot of my friends tried to discourage me. They told me that BTC is a ponzi scheme and some were even saying that cryptocurrency is illegal and I can go to jail for using it. But in the end, I made them admit that they don't know anything about crypto. Their knowledge about BTC came from propaganda pieces published in mainstream media and social media.

Things changed later that year. BTC gave me 20x returns, and many of those who mocked me earlier congratulated me for my success. A few of them even sought my advice for their own crypto investment plans.

I am from India, and I need to say that this is a very worrying development.

As many of the users have posted here, it is true that this is just a proposal. But the plans have been finalized and this draft bill is supported by the members of the ruling party. The opposition is also likely to support this bill, as I can't find a reason why they should oppose. Anyway the ruling party is having an outright majority and they can easily pass the bill in the two houses of the parliament. Till now, not a single one out of the 543 parliamentarians have spoken out against this bill.

The next step is getting the approval of the president. And here, the president is a member of the ruling party, and the chances of him refusing to sign is virtually zero.

The only step that is left now is to challenge this bill in the Supreme Court of India. But there is no guarantee that the judges will side with the Bitcoin users. And also, any such litigation can take at least a few years time. And that duration is enough for the authorities to harass the million+ crypto users in India.

In general, the noobs are very desperate to get their hands in to some crypto. And unless you manages to improve your forum rank to at least a senior member, doing that is very difficult here in this forum. So there are limited options available for them. They may refuse KYC initially, but in the end at least some of them may get frustrated enough to undergo this process.

First of all, everyone needs to understand that there can be no better investment than Bitcoin itself. That is, unlike the case with the fiat currencies you don't need to invest your cash in to assets such as stocks and real estate. If you want to use your BTC for investment in assets such as crypto-stocks and crypto-bonds, then it is your call, but I would never prefer something like that.

Those early pioneers who plan on colonizing Mars will be the citizens of some UN member state, right? In that case, what prevents them from using fiat currency? Unless the territory in Mars declare itself as an independent nation and mints its own national currency, the fiat currencies such as US Dollar and Euro may remain as the preferred mode for payments.

This is not the first exist scam in the crypto-exchange sector, and definitely this is not going to be the last one. On top of that, most of the crypto-currency exchanges located in Eastern Europe are having a shady reputation. The users should have taken the necessary precautions by not keeping their coins in the exchange wallet.

Actually I was surprised when India included two spinners in their XI (Yuzvendra Chahal and Kuldeep Yadav), as I thought that the pitch conditions were favoring the pacers. But in between, the two of them have picked up 5 of the total 7 wickets that has fallen. At the same time, Buvi and Hardik Pandya have gone wicketless, till now.

The advantage for Ethereum is that currently ETH enjoys a complete monopoly as far as smart contract platforms are considered. IT's competitors, such as Stellar, Waves and NEO are showing not much growth, both in terms of development and acceptability. ETH can make use of this opportunity and by the time of the next bull run it can reach new ATH. 

This is a classic example of what happens when people get emotional with their investment. With any asset, be it crypto or equity, you need to know when to quit and cut your losses when something goes wrong. If a particular coin goes down continuously, then there is a strong chance that it may get delisted in the near future. What you'll do after that?

Back in 2014, the Ethereum ICO had a hard-cap of just 18 million USD, despite its heavy promotion and years of planning. Compared to that, some of the recent ICOs ask for as much as $200 million or $300 million, without a proper road-map or initial results. Until this situation change, we may not see a recovery in the ICO sector.