For that to happen, the merchants should display the prices in BTC and not in fiat. And I don't think that it is going to happen anytime soon. Even in various online stores that accept BTC, they first convert the fiat price to the price in BTC (as per the prevailing exchange rate) and use it to accept payments. The original pricing is in fiat and not in BTC. The reason is that BTC is too volatile to be used to quantify the pricing. Yes.. this was one of the targets of Satoshi, but I don't think that it will be practical anytime soon.

Tulsi Gabbard is very popular here (India), partly because of her religion (she happens to be one of the few Hindus among the US politicians). And personally I like her, as she had stated earlier that she had purchased crypto in 2017. But at the same time, I won't be overjoyed or excited with her presidential bid. Although she may be pro-Bitcoin, her party (the Dems) have taken a very hostile stance towards the cryptocurrency (look at what is happening in the state of New York). My opinion is that the GOP is more pro-crypto, when compared to the Dems.

BTW, it may be better to move this thread to the Politics sub-forum.

Here in India, a private crypto firm had installed a few Bitcoin ATMS in the city of Bangalore (South India). But only after a few days, these ATMs were confiscated by the authorities and the people who were behind the installation were charged with criminal charges. This was really confusing, because Bitcoin is currently not banned in India (although the politicians have plans for doing that) and no law or regulation states that it is illegal to own or operate a Bitcoin ATM within the national borders.

A low transaction fee can be one of the factors which can accelerate the global adoption of Bitcoin as a mode of payment. But that said, there are several factors and the transaction fee is only one of them. Along with the high transaction fee, another concern for the users is the volatility in the transaction fees. For example, in 2019 I have paid an average of $1 for Bitcoin transactions. But this amount is not constant. I still remember paying transaction fee of $40 during the 4th quarter of 2017.

World War II happened more than 7 decades ago. Can we just stop fighting over the repatriations? Israel has got its fair share of repatriations from Germany and the other axis nations. On the other hand, countries such as the (former) USSR, Poland and Serbia lost millions of civilians to Nazi atrocities (in the most barbaric conditions) and still they received only a fraction of what the Israelis got.

I am not saying that the Israelis received too much money. All I want to say is that things were settled long back and making new demands would be like opening the Pandora's box.

I can't agree with your argument. Sanders may be far-left, but all of the opinion polls had him leading over Trump by double digits. And most importantly, Sanders was much more popular than Hillary in the rust-belt and the other swing states. On the other hand, Hillary derived most of her support from the deep blue states such as California and NY.

And that is the reason why Hillary lost, although she got more votes. Her support came from the deep blue states, which were always solid Dem. She needed to win states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Now the last thing I want is the useless alts to go up, just like what happened in 2017. Back then, a lot of scam coins went up by 100x and 200x, propelled by just wild rumors. The price rise of established alts such as Monero and Stellar Lumens can be justified. But there are useless coins such as Bytecoin and Bitsend, which are very susceptible to pump and dump cycles.

Bitcoin remains as volatile as ever. A few hours back when the prices declined from 7.5K to 7.0K, I was expecting a slight correction, with stabilization to follow it. But in a matter of hours, this correction was over and the prices were back to 7.5K. Now I don't think that there will be any road blocks for 10K. This time, the bull run is full of steam.

They are studying the crypto-currencies ever since 2013. And even after 6 years, they haven't decided whether they should allow it or ban it. To say the truth, India is a third world nation and the vast majority of the politicians don't have enough educational skills to understand the basic concepts of cryptocurrency. So they are dependent on their advisers, who on most part are ex-bankers.

I have carefully read the white paper and many of the posts made by Satoshi here in this forum. He never considered himself as a savior to alleviate poverty from the face of the earth. After all, it is not his job. The governments should do that, right? As far as I know, Satoshi was deeply disturbed by the exploitative role being played by the third parties such as banks and payment processors. Bitcoin was his answer to end their exploitation. And believe it or not, it can play a large role in reducing the global poverty.

It was very interesting to read all the posts made in this thread. My opinion is that, either you can claim the moral high ground and lie that you are here primarily for making Bitcoin more popular. Or like me, you can tell the truth and admit that along with the popularization of Bitcoin, you are also looking for profiting out if it. Anyway, we deserve the rewards for our hard work, right?

I hate to say this, but the price of Monero seems to be directly proportional to the popularity of the dark markets. Crypto may be going up right now, but we need to remember that many of the dark markets are down. Some of the most popular dark markets, which had millions of users were taken down by the FBI through various operations. So my expectations from XMR is more realistic.

There is only one "perfect" cryptocurrency out there and it is none other than Bitcoin. The idea of cryptocurrency was originally implemented in Bitcoin. All the other cryptocurrencies (LTC, ETH, XMR, XLM, XRP.etc), no matter how advanced they are as far as the technology is concerned, have copied some or all of their aspect from Bitcoin.

Another point that should be noted is that despite being in circulation for more than 10 years, so far none of the hackers have been able to mess up with the Bitcoin Blockchain. That proves that it is the perfect cryptocurrency.

A lot of the users are recommending BNB. I would avoid it like plague, at least until Binance conducts an audit of their wallet and accurately quantify the coins in their hot / cold wallets.

These are my picks for 2019, based on quite a bit of research by me:

1. Monero: Still remains as the no.1 anonymous altcoin. No major competition as of yet.
2. Cardano: Technologically one of the best coins.
3. NEO: Robust technology and loyal userbase
4. ETH: Complete monopoly among platforms
5. BCH: A favorite of the whales.

You can call me crazy. But there is another possibility which all of you are ignoring now.

What if the recent exchange hacks were inside jobs? For example, now we all know that Bitfinex lost almost $850 million by placing some crazy trading bets with their users' funds. And imagine what would have happened, had they managed to keep this incident hidden. Now the management will think about ways to recover this amount. One of the methods is to claim that the exchange got hacked and the coins got stolen. And in reality the coins will be just moved to one of the cold storage wallets owned by the exchange.

This is a distant possibility, but I am finding something mysterious with all these frequent exchange hacks.

If the promoters of an ICO project want to assure their investors that the project will last for long, then they should consider the following methods:

1. Keep a significant amount in escrow, either as BTC, ETH or USDT.
2. Take insurance against business failure
3. Get a an auditor from a reputed third party.

I know very few people are going to agree with my suggestions. But I can tell this with 100% certainty. Unless we impose these measures, the scammers will continue to cheat the investors and vanish with their money.

Due to the prevailing volatility in the crypto market, a crypto-equivalent of USD is needed. Right now we have several options such as Tether and TrueUSD and out of them Tether is having the largest market cap. But the Bitfinex scandal has seen some of the users dumping their USDT holdings. Its reputation has been tarnished. And we all know what will happen to a cryptocurrency, if its reputation is damaged.

I don't know whether money was involved or not. But the Indian umpire who oversaw the match yesterday (Nitin Menon) had an excellent tournament. He was correct on 99% of the occasions and he is one of the world's best.

Shane Watson's run out was unnecessary, but you can't blame the umpire for that. Anyway, I have a feeling that it didn't did much damage to CSK, as he was a bit slow with his batting. The last ball LBW was a perfect decision and the hawkeye confirmed it.

Doni's run out was also a good decision. It was Nigel Llong who have him out, and IMO it was one of the best decisions in this edition of the IPL. From the side angle, when the bails were off no part of the bat was behind the white line.

I was checking the scoreboards of various matches that have happened in England and Ireland during the past few weeks. In almost all of the matches, scores in excess of 300 were recorded. This is very different from the conditions that had prevailed during the cricket world cup of 1999, when most of the teams were struggling to cross 200.

I still remember when I started crypto-gambling. It was sometime in 2016 or 2017, when prime dice had some crazy promotional offers around. It was actually possible to gamble using the bonus amount, and then withdraw the coins (if you were really lucky). And I got my first crypto from this promotional offer. After that I tried various gambling sites, somewhat occasionally. Sometimes I won coins, and sometimes I lost.