Agreed on the RCB team balance.. but still I don't understand the purpose of some of the players. For example, why this Rajat Patidar guy gets selected after repeated failures? But I am happy with one change they made. They included Harshal Patel in the place of Navdeep Saini. That worked really well for them. And for KKR, the poor form of Dinesh Karthik should be the primary concern. He seems to be going through a lean patch of his career.

Here are the latest stats from 18th April 2021.

Total market cap: $1,972,676,585,785 (-3.47%)

Bitcoin: $1,026,683,497,608 (52.045%)
Bitcoin forks: $24,497,647,263 (1.242%)
Stablecoins: $70,213,337,782 (3.559%)
Altcoins: $843,098,634,841 (42.739%)
WBTC: $8,183,468,291 (0.415%)

This is the change compared to my last post:

Bitcoin: -2.454%
Bitcoin forks: +0.219%
Stablecoins: +0.355%
Altcoins: +1.891%
WBTC: -0.012%

Agreed with all this. But do you know that CoVID 19 is less dangerous in countries that have a low level of personal hygiene? Some of the experts are saying that the mortality rate from CoVID 19 is much lower in India and the South Asian nations, because the hygiene levels are low and the population has almost constant exposure to flu-virus. However the second wave of the pandemic is affecting these countries as well. Still the mortality rate in India is around 1%, while that in Latin America is almost three times that.

Do you really think that arresting these ICO scammers is going to be easy? Maddof was arrested because he dealt with fiat currency and that made it easy to trace him. On the other hand, the ICO promoters are mostly anonymous and they move their funds from one country to the other in a matter of minutes. Because of the trans-national nature of their crimes, it is extremely difficult to identify them and to get them deported to the country where they committed the crimes.

It is not Elon Musk who is messing up the cryptocurrency market. Blame the current state on stupid investors, who make their decision based on a single tweet by someone who has hardly any knowledge about cryptocurrency. When a cryptocurrency such as Dogecoin moves up in percentage terms 10 times more than Bitcoin (which is the original cryptocurrency), then you know that there is something wrong in the market. My assumption is that too many stupid people have become rich as a result of the current bull run and many of them are pouring their money in to shitcoins.

Read the OP and the replies once. No one is actually blaming Elon Musk. He has done a lot of great things to cryptocurrency, and I have a lot of respect for him. That said, a lot of people are concerned that the scammers are using his name to cheat people, for more than two years now. Inexperienced users continue to lose their hard earned money to these scams. There is hardly anything Musk could do to prevent all this. We need to make the new users aware of these traps.

So looks as if RCB will have another easy victory today? They had the best start to this edition of the IPL, while some of the more fancied teams such as the Mumbai Indians and the Kolkata Knight Riders are struggling. This may be a bit premature, but I think that finally Virat Kolhi may be having a good chance to lift the IPL trophy. KKR needs another 107 runs in 8 overs, with just 6 wickets remaining. Right now, it looks like a cakewalk for the Royal Challengers Bangalore.

Well.. the momentum was building for quite some time and the tweet just acted as the trigger. Reptilian overlords Janet Yellen and Elizabeth Warren were going ballistic a few weeks ago, asking for greater regulations and a "crackdown" on unauthorized transactions. Also, nowadays Kamala Harris is making most of the government decisions since Biden's health is not that good. Biden's term is going to be difficult for the cryptocurrency sector and we can expect more and more hostile actions from the government in the coming months.

In Blockchain.com, they calculate the fee in two ways. First is for priority confirmation (i.e confirmation in 5-20 minutes). Right now, the average fee in this sector is $20 to $25 per transaction. Then there is the fee for regular transaction (which can take up to 2 hours for confirmation). And this one is going at $10-$15 right now, for transaction of median size. If you are ready to wait for up to 24 hours, then it may be possible to get the transaction confirmed after paying much lower fee.

Ever since I made my first investment in cryptocurrency in 2012, I have invested in more than 50 different altcoins. And based on this experience, I would say that in 99% of the cases when there is a dump with an altcoin which is outside the top-20 list, the chances are that it will never make a recovery. If possible, keep an eye on the promoters. If they are selling their tokens and making the exit, then it is a very bad sign.

In cryptocurrency sector, there is a saying that any sort of publicity is good. So even if it is negative publicity, it ends up boosting the coin exchange rates. Elon Musk never invested in Dogecoin, and if you carefully analyze his tweets then you can see that he was actually mocking DOGE. But due to the publicity that was generated as a result of the tweet, the coin went up like a rocket. At this point, I would just say one thing. When it will crash, it is going to crash really hard.

I just hope that they will persist with T20, because I don't think that T10 is cricket. For me, T10 has more similarities to baseball, than it has to cricket. And there is still a very good chance that the ICC will not support this move. Previously when Shashank Manohar was the head of the ICC, he was in favor of cricket's inclusion to the Olympics, but the cabal of BCCI-CA-ECB-NZC was against the move. Now ICC is headed by businessman Greg Barclay, who has no interest in spreading the game. So this time also the ICC and the BCCI will be in opposing camps.

That's true. When RCB went for Maxwell after spending such a big amount in the auctions, I was really surprised. But in the end, that money can be described as well spent. That said, it was de Villiers who went mental in the end. He scored 76 from just 34 balls (Maxwell got his 78 from 49 balls). I was expecting 170-180, and the Royal Challengers Bangalore ended up with a total of 204. The last 5 overs went for 70 runs.

Seriously? The stats suggest otherwise. Yesterday there were close to a million new cases and around 14,000 deaths from CoVID 19. If you think that this is a sign that the pandemic is coming to an end, then I don't know what to say about it. Previously I was thinking that the pandemic would be contained by the second half of this year. But now I think we'll have to live with it for at least the next 2-3 years. I am getting more and more skeptical with every passing day.

Well.. this is surprising.. actually I was expecting a valuation of >$100 billion and a share price of at least $500. But the listing was a huge disappointment and COIN (despite its impressive trade volumes) started going down almost immediately after it started trading. If I am not wrong, the high of around $430 per share was achieved in the initial half an hour or so. But then the prices crashed by around 25%-30%. For me, it was very disappointing.

South Africa was able to win one T20I and one ODI each. But in the end, we have to agree that Pakistan was the better team. IMO, South Africa is a team in decline. There is a lot of talent, but due to political issues most of this talent either gets wasted or the players simply migrate to other countries. On the other hand, Pakistan is going through some sort of a resurgence. Their pace bowlers are in excellent form, and Babar Azam is now the top ODI batsman as per the ICC rankings.

I don't see much growth for a further bull rally in the next 2-3 months, after the rather disappointing listing by Coinbase in NASDAQ. And I won't be surprised even if there is a major correction. But it will be interesting to know how the stock performs in the market for the next few months. Nowadays companies are almost always overpriced before their IPO, and this sours the market sentiment. Just for comparison, when Amazon went for the IPO in 1997, it's valuation was estimated at $300 million.

Profit booking is not a very bad idea, especially at a time when a lot of analysts are saying that BNB is overpriced. Maybe you can buy them back after the correction. A lot will depend on how the Coinbase listing turns out in NASDAQ. We need to wait till end of trading on Friday. If Coinbase is having a valuation of $100 billion plus, then we can expect the continuation of bull run with BNB. But if that is not the case, then a major correction can occur.

Well.. I have to say that this is strange. Binance is one of the competitors for Coinbase. So I wasn't really expecting Binance to list the Coinbase stock on their platform. But then, Binance allows stablecoins such as USDT and USDC, which can be considered as competitors to their own stablecoin (BUSD). So at least we can say that this is not something that is out of the blue. In the meantime everyone is patiently waiting for the COIN listing on NASDAQ. One of the biggest events in the history of cryptocurrency to this date.

This is the problem when the team is over-dependent on a few players. In the batting department they are dependent on Warner and Bairstow. And for bowling, they depend too much on Rashid Khan. And from what we have seen today, individual efforts are not enough to win a match. Rashid bowled his heart out (4-0-18-2). Similarly, Warner also made a half century with a strike rate of 145. But despite all this, they lost.