As it stands right now, USDT has withstood the test of time and trouble, so yes, I would trust it. Next up is USDC and then maybe BUSD

I find it hard to assess whether time is running in favor of China or not. In the end China is highly dependent on a well functioning global economy, but if every country is now investing heavily in military equipment and defense, there is less money to be spent on Chinese products as well.

Today at the security conference in Munich China emphasized that territorial integrity is to be respected by everyone in the world, but that was also implying that Taiwan actually is a part of China and they would only take back what belongs to them anyway. They will now also start a peace initiative regarding Russia and Ukraine, but they haven't really specified what that is going to look like. It didn't sound very convincing and the US made clear that they have their doubts. As far as I know it was quite a heated debate between Chinese representatives and US representatives.

There are a bunch of candidates as replacement and Euro is not among them. In fact in the future Europe's economy falls apart faster and worse than US economy as it is already evident from the inflation, recession and deindustrialization going on in the two continents.
Unfortunately one of the biggest replacement options seems to be Yuan! Then it would be China that abuses its power an ruins the world instead of US...

Stablecoin is centralized, if you don't fear the risk of holding a stable coin, why don't you use an intermediary exchange to stake? I mean, if you already trust USDT and USDC, then there's no reason you shouldn't trust Binance, Binance is still more reliable than both of those stablecoins. If you want daily passive income, then you can stake, but if you are willing to hold for long term profit, bitcoin will be better choice. Even though I still use USDT, I don't feel safe using them long-term.

Paper money will definitely be phased out but not because the government invented some CBDC bs but rather because its old world money. What we are going towards is a future of Bitcoin and crypto. CBDC will merely be one out of many options and it definitely will not be the prominent one.

People and even governments are starting to understand that Bitcoin is the next generation of money and once it is globally adopted, we will see a new future of finance.

Even the government acknowledged this simple fact indirectly by attempting to copy Bitcoin with their own version.

It seems SBF is not alone in trying to bring back FTX. After all, he seems to be treated more as a baby than a criminal. It seems like powerful personalities are trying to assemble back FTX for him. Well, without necessarily bringing back the customers whole again. He should be incarcerated right now. Instead, he's probably Netflixing and browsing the net.

Anyway, Binance was also involved in a hacking incident, a KYC leak, kicked out from certain countries, even investigated for possible criminal violations, and others and yet it remains to be the top exchange today. So I would not be surprised if a relaunched FTX would also rise to glory once more. We never learn our lessons.

I remember 20 years ago, before I invested or was involved in anything market related, they posted some debt/per person in the USA and it was crazy high. That was 20 years ago. People were saying that they had no choice but to default, did they?

No and they won't default anytime soon. They will just keep raising the debt limit and keep printing money. I don't think anyone wants them to default. It'll create more suffering than we already have. Plus the bonds are not showing any proof of defaults yet.

How to put this? May be the war rumors is actually a rumor to keep things tidy and neat for the years to come. Most of the USA's import is coming from China and most of the world's leading brands are relying on China for their virtually unlimited workforce. How cheap other countries can go when they have to finish the work? There are multi national companies which already have biggest conglomerates with the US base and China base together. They definitely have bigger commercial relationships rather than political one's. The war can broke out for any dumb reason and that's not the point here. But USA knows very well they have more than 50% reliance on the China's assets which includes raw materials as well.

I might be speaking in terms of commercial aspects here but let us not forget, world revolves around the money and money only trades when you have real stuff to sell.

Whenever brands like Tesla, Apple, Microsoft tried to move their giant manufacturing faculties elsewhere they were first slammed by various rules and regulations. However, china is country with only one goal and thats to produce and get those dollar funds in their treasury. The dominance is huge.

It's like both the ends are tieing the knot and no one wants to let go. War? Pretty sure its gonna take while.

Paid

honestly staking stablecoin at this point just not worth it because everyone else also wants to stake theirs that it makes the apy relatively lower, basically it's just enough to combat inflation but not enough to actually make real profit, if you think you only want to combat the inflation then maybe this is for you but if you want to generate profit then forget it already.

Yeah for now it's just a ban on centralized staking, like Kraken and Coinbase did. It doesn't affect liquid staking service like Lido and solo staking for now, but who knows. It's unlikely but the SEC might be going for them too in the future.

In fact, the market is taking this as a good news for liquid staking tokens (e.g. LDO, RPL). This news, along with the upcoming Shanghai update, was the catalyst for the brief pump a few days ago although most of the upside has been retraced now.

First of all, we need to understand that FTX scammed all of us and the scammers usually do not return our money. So if anyone thinks that SBF or ftx will return all this money , it Is not going to happen.

The game plan by the scammers can be that they will want to re-enter in the market with a promise to again make an exchange and later return people money. I hope people do not believe thier false promises if they ever come up with such a plan to regain customers confidence and also again start collecting money from the people.

With the SEC targeting exchanges for allowing staking you never know what might happen in the future with the POS hype train, the developers will be reviewing that development and hopefully will not make a bad decision on moving to POS that might make them easier for the authorities to target a privacy centric project.

They are not going to default, they will do what they have been doing all this time when the nation debt sets a new record, they just increase the debt ceiling and continue printing more dollars.

The only thing that is concerning is the world dumping US dollar which means all the trillions and trillions of dollars they have been printing without it being backed by anything is coming back to America and will become a tsunami hitting US economy.
In which case US will experience Venezuela like hyper inflation but on steroids and it would the time for every American to buy as much bitcoin as they can to flee the sinking ship. That means there is this possibility that bitcoin price could reach levels that we can not imagine now.

Fiat currencies have existed for many centuries, and gold has been valued for even longer. Everything has some sort of life span, but it can be long enough to neglect that at some point it will end. The world is changing very fast, and it's really hard to predict where it's going. I don't see why Bitcoin wouldn't prosper in the next several decades, but if something major happens like a quantum computing breakthrough or a global crisis which makes widespread usage of the Internet and electricity impossible, then of course Bitcoin will go away along with lots of other things. Digitalization hasn't been going for long enough to see if it's just a phase in humanity's development or a long-term thing. But if the Internet is staying, I think cryptos are staying as well, including Bitcoin.

Many exchanges fake volume and this was already done by the Chinese like Huobi in 2014, so I bet FTX was messing around with it too.

They had a lot of deposits but mostly from people they lured into the scam by paying them like Tom Brady who got paid to promote it and moved his own money into the exchange thinking it to be legit.

A few days ago I heard they even own money to Netflix. I don't know what that company was doing with FTX but that's apparently a fact. Binance also helped them a lot by investing and promoting them which pumped the exchange more than it should. Many people are guilty here like O'leary and CNBC who kept talking about the generous billionaire all the time.

FTX is dead, it should stay that way and shady people involved in these scams should be avoided like a plague.

Monero guys are the guys who are more concerned about security and privacy. Since POS fails to provide both of these, the consensus will not win to go for POS.

The government is trying to crack XMR so if they switch POS, this is like selling the users in this network.  It would be the end of it and they will dump XMR once this happens.

Every gain that it gives is worth it. But most of these platforms have their own risks based on the security that they have. If it's for these De-Fi apps, they're mostly being targeted and sometimes, a bug can be seen and abused by users.
When it happens, the funds are being sucked by those abusers and then if they're hacked, you don't expect something in return through a refund because, at most times, they don't have a reserve. As for the other options, the best possible other options you can make is to convert it to bitcoin.

Economic implications?  If any of the big world powers end up in a war, economics might come down to how many cockroaches you can scrounge up to feed whatever is left of your family, assuming any of us are alive at the end of said war.

But before the nukes start flying, I'd expect severe sanctions to be imposed on all sides, just like with Russia.  As far as the US is concerned, if China were to impose sanctions like that, it'd cripple our economy (or at least put a big ding in it).  I'm hoping none of this happens--for the sake of generations to come, because a war between China and the US would probably wind up as a full-blown world war, and as you probably all are aware we've got much more powerful weapons now than during the last world war.

And yet we have all of these UFOs flying around....kinda makes you wonder if the rumors Abiky referenced are true.  I don't suspect they're from outer space; they're probably Chinese spy-things gathering intel.  Ugh.