There was a discussion in Economy section about US household income which somehow led to the topic of difference between direct transfers to the poor and subsidies to the rich.

I think, Indians are uniquely capable to assess this. In mixed economies like ours, there were multi billion dollar programs of Govt subsidy. This meant that the poor were given access to cheap goods, rations etc through an elaborate system of supplies managed by a mix of Govt and private agencies. The businesses involved were given subsidies for delivering goods to the poor. What actually happened was that all those businesses and agencies ate away the funding. This continued for almost 70 years and now the present govt has changed this system. Transfers are made directly to bank accounts. Failures on other economic fronts notwithstanding, opening bank accounts for billions of poor and actually activating a host of direct transfers has been one of the biggest achievements of the present Govt.

The next best thing we need is for Govt expenditure to be managed and tracked transparently. Bitcoin is eminently suitable for this. While a lot of people say that bitcoin should be a global reserve currency to realize its true potential, i have always felt that Govt spending is one of the best use-cases for blockchain/ bitcoin. Of course they would NEVER do that. Imagine if PNB's loan grants were public knowledge. How would have the likes of Nirav Modi ran away with so much public money at the behest of a few officials. There can be countless applications of this from the payments made to petty contractors in public departments to multi-million rupee public tenders.

Companies reinvesting and getting bigger is not the problem. Hoarding of wealth amongst the stockholders and an army of executives beyond luxury is. The rich really have no incentive to share their wealth except those who have such a calling. This is one of the reasons that the trickle down never really reaches those who need it the most.

This was always debated in developing countries that direct handouts are not going to help because of corruption and lack of information with the beneficiaries. Yet, as far as the experience in India is concerned, a technology based direct transfer scheme works much better than giving subsidies to businesses.

While its a welcome thing, the trend is just too short term to arrive at a conclusion that "The narrative that tax cuts only helps the rich" is false. Trump reversed a lot of climate legislation that had led to job losses in traditional industries like mining and power. The withdrawal from climate change and focusing on the revival of traditional industries (unsustainable and stupid as it may be) may have led to a big chunk of the blue collar workforce getting a boost. That could be a possible cause.

The article tries to paint a positive picture of Trump's policies but such unsustainable policies will eventually have bigger costs. It takes painstaking steps to restructure economy. What Trump did was basically throw all caution to the wind and go back to the old beer-guzzling, fuel burning heydays. Anybody could do that with investment, tax cuts, policy changes AND isolationism. Giving the credit to "Trump's unconventional policy" speaks of the author's confirmation bias.

Nobody understands it better than these billionaire's that their wealth is essentially numbers in the bank. Even just number on the market index.

You often hear statements like "Billions wiped out in wealth" whenever the shares of major companies tank. They are the ones who understand this best and are thus probably the easiest to convince to "buy" stocks into the world's biggest decentralized corporation that bitcoin is.

The only problem is that they would want to understand what the "company" does. It is a little hard any casual observer to arrive at the conclusion that bitcoin is the only real alternative to "Big Finance".

Thanks for the link. The article says nothing about the mix of regulatory issues as well as the instances of hacks and people losing money throughout these 3 years in scams, bitcoin forks and the resulting uncertainty that is inherent to crypto. There is a rather FOMO-inducing line about 50K-100K at the end. This is the kind of stuff that can easily make people throw caution to the wind and jump in with whatever they can.

A little too positive to be called unbiased reporting. Nobody should jump into bitcoin without understanding the security and privacy aspects first. Such reporting will only get us more of "I lost money" type posts later. Somebody tell the media houses to link to our sub here. We can treat the newbies better than them.

What investment model? What are you investing in that you think will make money if people just join in to market it.

What this means is that you are going to implement a smart contract on TRON (which itself is dubious with all the shenanigans from Justin Sun but seem to have a network effect)which is going to allot "income" distribution to people who join in. I haven't seen your smart-contract but how can any contract continue to add new people as well as ensure that they are distributed rewards. It can easily be gamed.

Right now, this pretty much sounds like what @manav24 pointed out, an MLM/ Ponzi/ Networking scheme.

For much of its history, China was busy with the infighting and consolidating itself as a country. By the time it all fell into place, the wave of imperialism from the wide world had already begun. The non-imperialist history of China isn't due to some philosophical stance but due to the circumstances. It has only been around a decade that China has truly had the capacity to actually have economic and millitary influence outside its own borders. Within that time, it has shown enough aggression and unfounded claims for the world to realize that what exactly China wants. Saying that China is some sort of a peaceful country is stupid.

As far as this trade agreement is concerned, it is essentially uniting much of the ASEAN and the major export-oriented developed countries in the rest of Pacific. What is does is to remove a great deal of worry about one of the two strategic waterways for China, namely the Strait of Malacca. The only other bottleneck remaining after this for the Chinese is the Strait of Homruz through which a significant parts of its oil supplies flow. If anybody thinks that China is doing these things for trade and not for strategic influence will be in for a rude shock as the Chinese gradually give shape to their long term plan of strangleholding these smaller nations. This is the reason that India was had to opt out of RCEP.

Going down this path of ensuring that Govt agencies can access records of terrorist conversations will quickly make them realize that it is trivial for anybody to bypass the law if they want to. The next thing you know they'll be criminalizing all and any forms of encryption except those sanctioned by the government.
While the argument about "Spate of Islamic attacks" can help rally support for such a act from the unsuspecting populace, this is ultimately a tyrannical step. The leaders in EU should instead check their stupid politics which involves letting refugees pour in on one hand and then demonize their religion owing to geo-political upheavals. The solution to terrorism is peace measures, not a police state and fortification of the internet.

Those are bold claims about "unlimited money" reminiscent of several schemes that seek to entice newbies into forming groups that then buy into tokens creating a liquidity pool that the scammers can take advantage of.

That just sounds like a complicated way of saying that you work through referrals. While the idea of putting referrals onto the blockchain maybe different, how does it help the users in deciding that the projects in this club will be legitimate or even have a use-case.

I can't help but be skeptic about such schemes as most of the times they are just about building a "network" of hopeful newbies and milking them. Those who get on early will profit and become evangelists themselves without realizing that there is really nothing tangible holding these clubs "together".

Edit: Corrected the quotes

Amazon does a huge number of transactions and has every possible transaction system on board. The major hurdle in adopting bitcoin would be the decision regarding fees. Whether to pass to customer or bear them. LN could be useful here if Amazon decides to become a node themselves.

For these giant enterprises, adopting bitcoin is a huge decision to make as it will mean endorsing bitcoin. If Jeff Bezos was more like Jack Dorsey though, this would have been exciting. Another point to maybe consider is that Amazon may have some plans for its own AWS before endorsing bitcoin. Bitcoin's PoW doesn't really need the cloud.

Thanks you Royse for managing the pool. Here is my address. Sorry for the delay.
bc1qvanpq3kgzlvz6r0gvxkwn7m5tgnnam9yacm73f

Every bull run sees an uptick in interest which results in a lot of new people coming in and watching bitcoin. The fault lays with the altcoin space due to their aggressive, over-promised branding which actually pulls newbies in to think that they must get in. They FOMO into buying BTC at these prices. Then we have a whole legion of newbies pissed as the price normalizes.

Yet, we are here to assuage any fears for the long term having experienced this ourselves. Just buy what you can afford and they will be fine.

Well there isn't a debit card. But there are a few people trying to make bitcoin accessible for purchases in some way. The project announced here intends to make cashback on credit cards. What they need is interest from people like us so they can go ahead and pursue banks. That can open up opportunities for a debit card in the near future.

So get involved and share your ideas and thoughts.

All of these services are actually custodian services and are always going to have a central, middle party involved. The reason being that there is not yet a decentralized solution to implementing a two-way peg. Even the solution from blockstream, the Liquid sidechain has something called a federated peg. The funds are held in a multisig and the transfer is to parties in a "federation".

In the hype of DeFi, there is a German project that will actually let you BURN your BTC and in return you get their version of ERC-20 BTC pegged to these other custodial BTCs and some other ERC-20 tokens.

Thanks for sharing the personal experience. Such missed opportunities always tug at the heart making a man feel "What could have been?". HODL is different for everyone. Its not simply about holding the "same amount of bitcoin" for lifetime. To me, HODL means always making sure that apart from other assets, you will hold bitcoin for life too, keeping it a part of your portfolio for life and not consider it as some internet fad.

This was important back when bitcoin was a novelty and seen as "free, internet money". It has come a long way since and is now a separate asset class which widens your options as a member of the global economy. You need to use it and also be a part of the ecosystem and community that recognizes and supports bitcoin. If you have option to spend using your cheaply obtained BTC stash, then as a HODLer, you can use it for your living expenses but keep replacing the BTC by spending your fiat earning.

As explained, there are more than one ways to hold. If you take profit, become successful and still keep a cold-storage, you will be a worthy of being called a HODLer. If you just sell at the top and forget all about Bitcoin and its ethos, then you are just another person who hit the lottery.

Just a sign of our desperate times. By the way, if you see negative trust on icopress that means you may need to take a look at your own trust list a bit. I see him as +4. Most of his negative trust seems to be from butthurt users while positive trust is from quite a few normal users. Hhampuz always takes care of these things. Negative trust is not a death sentence if you are in general one of the constructive forum participants.

Most importantly, if you are a constructive participant, you generally don't need to proclaim that or defend it.

There are two ways:

First:
You can join bounties, promote alt-coins, make fake twitter and FB account. You will hear stories of airdrops that get listed and go to moon. A miniscule chance. That path means you will be following three new projects everyday which will give you a shitload of shitty information pretending to be a real product. Your mind will be fed garbage and you will end up chasing gains in an unintelligent and pitiful manner.

Second:
You realize that crypto is essentially about Bitcoin. You learn the best resources and gain an understanding of the need for sound money and of maintaining your privacy like cypherpunks do. You read good resources like https://nakamotoinstitute.org/. You try to realize the technical aspects behind blockchain and gain an understanding of how Bitcoin protocol works. You make yourself capable of intelligent discussion and decisions. Armed with this knowledge and a good posting history on this forum, you will be well on your way to a future of options and promises.

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When a newbie asks such questions as his maiden post on this forum, they mostly go towards the first path and end up disillusioned and scammed. I suggest you not be that person and take the red pill. It takes time and effort, but its totally worth it when you get to stop bullets.

Flooding of coastal areas due to erratic weather patterns is going to increase with time as climate scientists have been warning for a long time. We have already seen how things have taken a turn for the worst when it comes to weather related calamities. People living along coastal areas are going to have to be extra careful and ready themselves for such situations.
Calamities have always been a part of human life and as humans we just adapt. A large section of people still want to deny climate change and just say that it is part of earth's cycles. Cycles or not, one thing is sure that we will have to make communities more resilient till enough can be done to avoid long term climate disaster. 

People are gullible but the scammers are also pretty innovative. Finding bitcoin and Ethereum for the first time on the internet can led you to believe a lot of people. Greed is your worst enemy but so can be over enthusiasm. I got almost scammed when i believed a guy on OLX offering to sell GPU's at the same prices as that in the US, even though they were at a 50-70% premium on all normal Indian websites like primeabgb, mdcomputers etc. The guy was from Pune and he sent me elaborate receipts, pictures, videos of the cards etc.

@Spectr Max, I see that the BTC bullrun may have brought you to the forum. We are always looking for newbies who can engage in good discussion and think for themselves on the Indian sub. If you are from around these parts (and have no issue in declaring so), then you are welcome to post an intro post on this link. Don't give any personally identifiable information. Just some tidbits about your experience with crypto. People like giving away merit to good stories there.

Thanks for the ANN thread. The 20% cashback is similar to purse.io and this is something the community should be pretty excited to have. There is a concept in the BTC world that everytime you use BTC to buy something, you also buy the same amount of bitcoin. This is to ensure that your BTC stash doesn't go low. I would love something that gives me an option to spend BTC but we don't have many of those in India. Purse.io doesn't seem to work very well.

In festival season, a young, middle class family can spend 20-30K on shopping for clothes, decor etc for home. If i can get a 20% cashback in form of BTC for these spends, then it is a good deal to have. Looking forward to a website and details on getting that card.

@hmrawal, Glad to find a newbie whose first question is in Development section and the other on a real product aimed at Indian market. We need more of you guys in here at the Indian sub. Welcome to the forum and hope to see more engagement from you. Its the Diwali weekend and most people will be out lighting crackers and Diyas. Happy Diwali to you all.