Crazy shit going on.. but I suspected something like this after we had the first upset yesterday (Czechia vs Netherlands). Bad for me, because I refrained myself from placing a bet on Croatia. Spain was unimpressive in their group matches, but I thought that Croatia was also in bad form. 3-3 score after regulation time means that those who made the bets in favor of both Spain and Croatia will lose their money. But even draw was very attractive at around +400. Don't know how many made a bet in favor of that result.

There is no Republican/Democrat divide in supporting most corrupt dictators. The most powerful dictator in the world right now is Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and he enjoys unlimited support from the Democrats. And Twitter never takes any action against any of the dictators from the middle east region, because a large fraction of the company ownership is in the hands of Arabs.

Now coming to the argument that Twitter is a private business and they can ban anyone who they don't like. If they argue like this, then they have to take responsibility for all the tweets made on their platform. That is not the case and Twitter claims that it is just an intermediary. And the issue here is that, an intermediary can't ban people who they don't like.

I would say that even 18-20 sounds a bit on the higher side. Among the younger generation, you will find very few fans of test cricket. Among people like me, the interest remains high at least when a high profile series like the Ashes or Border-Gavaskar gets going. But if ICC sticks with the least popular format of cricket and allots a large part of the calendar, then eventually it will result in financial loss and a decrease in overall popularity for the sport.

If political stability is there, then the crime rate may remain low. From what I heard about President Bukele, he is a very genuine guy who has been very tough on crime and corruption. Within the last 2-3 years, he has managed to bring crime rate in El Salvador under control. And it was no easy task, as El Salvador was famous for some of the most violent gangs, such as Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS 13) and Barrio 18. I am just saying that those who want to move to El Salvador needs to be cautious. It may not turn out to be the paradise which you are expecting.

It has been a rollercoaster ride for the last 12 months. At one point in January, the dominance touched 70% level (first week of January 2021). Then it started sliding and reached 39.97% one month ago. The market share of Ethereum increased by almost 1.5x (from 12% to 18%). The % increase was higher for some of the other coins  - BNB went up from 0.7% to 3.5% (5x). Doge went up by 15x (0.14% to 2.50%). Then there are a few others, such as XRP and Cardano which increased their market share. Now Bitcoin is slowly regaining some of the lost market share. 

2 years would make sense if the existing setup of 9 teams is divided into two divisions. Else, 8 test tours in 24 months is asking for too much. And apart from the pig 3 (plus New Zealand), test cricket is dying elsewhere. Recent test matches involving countries such as Sri Lanka, West Indies and Bangladesh have failed to attract any interest from the cricket fans. I would suggest creating a top tier, with pig 3, New Zealand and one other team (preferably South Africa or Pakistan) and then placing the remaining 4 teams in the second tier.

If the smaller teams such as Ireland make it to the semifinal stage, then the ICC will just exclude them from the next tournament. This is exactly what happened in 2007. After India and Pakistan were kicked out in the group stage by the smaller teams, the ICC decided to reduce the number of participating teams from 16 to 10. The message from pig 3 is loud and clear - if the associate nations want to participate in the global tournaments, then they should allow the full members (or at least the pig 3) to qualify to the semis.

One negative about Belgium that I have noticed so far is that Lukaku is not very keen on passing the ball to others. In the last match also, Belgium wasted a couple of good chances because he didn't passed the ball to others who had better chance of scoring a goal. Belgium has some of the best players in this tournament, but the team coordination is a bit on the lower side. On the other hand, in the Italian camp it was rumored that they were having some differences between the coach and the players. But they seems to have overcome it.

Latest stats from 27th June 2021.

Total market cap: $1,313,971,254,297 (-7.34%)

Bitcoin: $618,141,191,929 (47.044%)
Bitcoin forks: $12,298,031,091 (0.936%)
Stablecoins: $108,399,057,679 (8.250%)
Altcoins: $568,827,733,064 (43.291%)
WBTC: $6,305,240,534 (0.480%)

This is the change compared to my last post:

Bitcoin: +2.015%
Bitcoin forks: -0.047%
Stablecoins: +0.741%
Altcoins: -2.730%
WBTC: +0.020%

He used innovative methods to evade taxes. He refused to file his tax returns (and therefore didn't mentioned his crypto holdings, which is mandatory for US nationals, irrespective of the fact whether they are residing in the US or not). The fiat payments he received for pumping these shitcoins (he charged $105,000 for a single tweet) were received in account of his girlfriend (who is not a citizen of the United States). According to the charge sheet put up by the IRS for extradition, the last time he filed his tax return was in 2013. After that he simply refused to file them. The justification given was that "taxation is illegal".

https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/1080953136985133062

It was the Kumbh festival which created the spike, combined with the farmer protests and local elections. The Delta variant was first discovered during the farmer protests in Delhi and it spread to the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh (where the Kumbh festival was underway). When pilgrims returned to their home states, they carried the new variant with them, which triggered the second wave all over India.

Now the Delta variant itself is a mutated version of the "Kent variant", which was first reported in the United Kingdom. Some of the UK nationals, who arrived in India to take part in the farmer protests carried the virus with them and infected others at the protest site. In due course, this variant mutated itself into the more deadly Delta variant.

Even if a memecoin is listed in a big exchange such as Binance, there is no guarantee that it will perform well if a correction occurs. Listing on a large platform gives it the visibility, but the trade volumes and exchange rates will drop, if the fundamentals are not strong enough. Exchanges are only for trade. The promoters need to increase the rates of adoption for that particular cryptocurrency. And unless that happens, the coin will not find much success, irrespective of the fact that it may be listed in some of the largest exchanges.

If Tesla and Elon are so confident about Dogecoin, then why don't they convert their BTC holdings to DOGE? It surprises me that they are bad-mouthing Bitcoin on one side and then holding large amounts of BTC on the other. Elon has put so many tweets explaining why Dogecoin is better than BTC. Then why can't they do this swap? The reason is that even Elon knows that Doge is a shitcoin and in the long term this coin is guaranteed to lose most of its value. The big blow for Doge will come when Elon surfaces with his own version of the cryptocurrency.

After all these years, we are still debating whether cryptocurrency is safe or not. It is actually very simple. There is no asset that can be considered as 100% safe. If you want to go for a safe asset (which is still only around 99.99% safe), then you can go for US treasury bonds. But the return is like 1.2% per year. Now there are assets such as equity and bank deposits, which have a higher probability of return. But the risk factor increases with the potential return. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are at the opposite end. The risk involved here is extreme, but there is also a chance for 10x or 20x return in a few years, which is not available with any of the other assets.

At least now some of the users have realized that all of this is not entirely a coincidence. Chinese government is trying to manipulate the cryptocurrency market, similar to the way they manipulate each and every financial institution in their country. However this time they are facing some backlash. Some of the miners have already shifted their mining operations to Kazakhstan and some of the other neighboring nations. If the trend continues, then we will see the overall influence of China in the cryptocurrency market decreasing in next 2-3 years.

Czech Republic was unimpressive in their group matches and you think that they will be able to beat one of the strongest teams in this competition? Czech Rep couldn't manage to finish among the top two in their group. They progressed to the knockout phase, because they were one of the best third placed sides. They lost their match against England and their only win came against a weak Croatia side. If they somehow manage to beat the Netherlands, then it will be one of the most shocking upsets in the history of Euro cup.

What if his wife is not saying the truth? If she admits that she can access those coins, then they will be seized by the FBI (because most of the coins were earned through scams in 2017 and 2018). His wife may be having the private key with her to access those wallets. But she is not going to spend them, unless those coins can be mixed and then washed. I really don't think that someone like McAfee would keep the wallet backups to himself without sharing them with his spouse. For those who were scammed by McAfee, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. They are not going to get any compensation.

If you are losing money regularly, then you should not be gambling in the first place. But you need to analyze your condition after a while. The house advantage is usually 1% or 2% depending on the casino. So if you are playing a game with 50% chance of win, you should at least win 4 out of 10 games. If it is like 1 out of 10, it is time to take a break and admit that it is not your lucky day. If this can't be done easily, then another way to follow it is not to carry too much cash to the casino. Take only limited amount of cash and don't take your credit card along. Once the money is finished, you won't be able to gamble again.

Italy was not up to the mark during their match against Austria, but that doesn't take away the fact that they were the best team during the group phase of this tournament. They scored a total of 7 goals in 3 matches and conceded none (the only other team not to concede any goal was England, but they themselves managed to score only 2 goals from their group matches). I would treat the last match as an outlier. For me, as the things stand, Italy is the team having maximum possibility to win this tournament.

That is the current Indian team - always overconfident and arrogant. They refused to play warm-up matches and didn't took their opponents seriously. In the end, Virat Kohli has another loss in the final of an ICC tournament to his name. I want to know whether there will be any change in their attitude for the upcoming T20 world cup. I don't expect any, due to the culture of complacency that has developed over the past few years. There is simply no accountability. At least the coach should have been kicked out after such a pathetic loss.