https://themerkle.com/tabfor-lets-users-decide-upon-a-cause-for-in-browser-monero-mining/

I do believe that increasing hash rate feeds back into price support.  It is not unidirectionally causal, being more of a reflexive factor (in the sense of Mr. Soros), yet conditionally causal in the larger picture.

I have found that unless one hardens one's heart against mockery, it is impossible to act with conviction.  Reduction to absurdity in the sense of contradiction to known facts is a useful form of proof.  Reduction to absurdity in the sense of a socially derived giggle factor is just deceitful.  It is a tested and venerated method of propaganda.  For this reason I find garytheasshole's comment offensive to my sense of honesty.  (Why am I not surprised?)

"The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist." --Baudelaire

And trivial to implement: Just place your block store on IPFS (in a canonical form).  A more sophisticated implementation can then wait, perhaps indefinitely.

I will repeat the points which have prevented me from ever using Zcash.

I don't trust the "trusted setup".  On the one hand, 6 people are not enough to preclude collusion, or to provide enough eyes to do diligence against trickery.  On the other hand it is too many points of failure, given that the incentive to defect is on the order of at least hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially many billions.

I don't trust the design.  Sigint operatives have subverted NIST standards, inserted backdoors in commercial and open source operating systems, even intercepted hardware being shipped from a vendor and modified it to gain systems access.

Let's consider the known facts about the Zcash team in this light:

Greene is at UMd, and NSA is very tight with UMd. He has publicly stated that zerocash (upon which zcash is based) can be backdoored, in the interests of the government.

Zooko Wilcox, the most visible member if the Zcash team, after whom the currency is named (!!), has also made public statements - and subsequently retracted them - similar to Greene's.

Members of the development team include admitted former Mossad sigint operatives.  And I don't think one ever really leaves the Mossad.  The Mossad cooperates extensively with the U.S. intelligence agencies.

Now let's consider factors unrelated to the specific team:

The mathematics of zk-snarks is not adequately reviewed.  Few people understand it well, and nobody understands it well enough to publish a peer-reviewed proof of its security in any feasible implementation.  Existing proofs address much more narrowly restricted claims, and are easily used as a cover for insidious activities.

Anonymity is only useful if the participants in the anonymity set are many.  The overwhelming majority of Zcash transactions are not anonymous, by design.  This has terrible consequences for the privacy and security of those network participants who choose to use it's purported privacy features.

AlphaBay implemented Zcash on July 1st.  By July 5th their servers were seized, and within days the principal operator was found dead, hanging by the neck in a Bangkok jail cell.

My conclusion:

I can not prove, but on the evidence and facts do believe, that Zcash is an NSA/Mossad honeypot, like Dash, and if you use it in conjunction with an activity which members of the Anglo-Israeli signals intelligence community are incentivized to disrupt, your life is in danger.  

I have had extensive experience working with these people, and consider them to be ruthless sociopaths. Nice friends to have, and generally well-meaning and interesting individuals, but sociopaths none the less.  Hitler was kind to animals and children.  As Voltaire observed, if you can be made to believe absurdities, you can be made to commit atrocities.


Edit, in post script:

Besides which, I find it offensively stupid to pay the developers a 20% tax.  I believe in voluntary support of the common good, not stealthy embezzlement.  I am not volunteering to be anyone's tax donkey, let alone volunteering to be subject to invasive surveillance in the process.

There were late breaking bugs in Byzantium, so Parity Tech wants it pushed back, to avoid the possibility that a rushed fix does serious harm, but core seems hostile to the delay, in large degree because of the impending difficulty bomb: If Constantinople, and full-on PoS, doesn't come very soon, the bomb will create a lot of volatility, in block times, and in prices (just when EOS is set to become a serious competitor)... There are just too many ways for this to go wrong.  Each is unlikely in isolation, but in aggregate it adds up to an awful lot of risk, right after a massive pump.  That is likely to spur a lot of profit-taking, in my opinion.  

The golden boy of crypto is starting to look green around the edges, and a bad smell accompanies him into the room lately.  ICOs have been driving BTC, and ETH even more so.  Now that they are drying up or domiciling in third-world havens (unattractive to investors) as regulators crack down in all the first and second world countries, now that the only platform for ICOs that matters is beginning to shake, the ICO inflows are drying up, and the recent correction may very well be the start of a crypto sector cap shrink, another crypto winter, another bubble pop.  The tide may be going out, and we may soon see who has been swimming naked.  

On the other hand, this is just the sort of fraught situation which creates a wall of worry, and persistent hidden demand could force price to climb that wall.  It seems very binary to me.  (And when everyone thinks so, then price will stagnate, plateau, and form a long term base.  Such is the contrarian's reality: A hall of mirrors, Spy vs. Spy.)

Perhaps that, and Nicolas Bourbaki.

I don't know how depressed the market will be.  I don't know if ETH will save itself with a technical hail Mary, or by delaying the fork - or even experience a catastrophic failure (not likely, that).  We might just be seeing a healthy retrace in the broad sector, which will reverse on good sector news of some sort, for all I know.  Independent Catalonia could adopt Bitcoin as hard money. The next ICO could be so compelling that Soros goes all-in.  Predictions are hard, especially ones about the future.

What I do know with empirical certainty is that XMR is selling for half of what I sold it for on the last spike, so it feels plenty cheap to me.  

What I do know by force of market logic is that DNM demand will eventually (certainly less than a year, maybe less than 6 months) force a massive repricing.  I want to be holding big bags at that time.

After that... well I am still waiting for the demographic multiple slide to kick in.  It is late already.  When that happens we should see capital flight demand ramp up, and the biggest Monero bubble of all. The economic world around us will look pretty bad then.  Clearly it is not yet time, but it remains inevitable: Unless human immortality arrives to save the boomers, or robots create a new demand source, we are looking at a hard bottom in u.s. equities in 2024-2025, with SPX P/E in the 4-6 range.

Historical comparables to the coming secular bear are: 1965-1982, 17 years; 1915-1921, 6 years. (The 1929-1932 bear was not a generational one, so it is not comparable. It was more like the 2007-2009 crisis, leverage and policy driven. WW2 masked a secular bottom with total war, so that one is inadmissible.) We only have 7-8 years left before the bottom, so it should turn soon-ish, but central banks pumping cocaine into the veins of the economy could push the bull out to 2020, for all I know.  It will just make the crash more brutal in the end.

I probably won't live to see the next generational top after that, unless quantum immortality is a thing, or a friendly AGI appears.

Folks are jaded, skeptical, fatigued by hype, and have no vision.  So fatigued that their hands weaken.  BTC ramp will retrace, and everyone is on edge, ready to dump on weakness, chasing the falling knife. A bubble pop in BTC will devalue all crypto.  This BTC ramp was mostly due to ETH demand, as the fiat on ramp is still wider for BTC.  Now, ETH has hard fork drama which could be catastrophic, so everything built on ETH suddenly looks super risky.  That could pop the bubble.  

DNMs don't care what the price is, just that the tech works to transmit wealth.  They will be just as happy to use $0.25 Monero as $2500 Monero.  In fact it is more appealling to adopt Monero if you can front-run the market, because you know about your DNM in advance.  Anyhow the skeptical market we have now, pulling back from the ICO bubble, won't become a bull until monetary demand starts to make itself felt more seriously.  Until then, the floor of support for XMR is the miner break-even.  Some capitulation sales may push us below that briefly, but it will hold in the main...so more browser mining would be nice.

XMR was first offered by it's first miner. That was a kind of ICO.  Today "ICO" is understood to mean what old timers used to call a "pre-mine scam", crypto which lacks "fair distribution" - but then it was deemed a monetary instrument, owned as commons, a public good, while ICO tokens now are more like equity shares, a capitalization tool, a private good.

As regards price, I would say most Monero speculators are all-in at this point, and the reversal comes after bulls capitulate, and supply becomes constrained.  Whoever buys then will see the best gains which it is possible to obtain at this point in time.  Personally I am buying slowly as I don't know when next it takes off, although I hazard to guess that multisig (rumor or news) could be a catalyst. Below USD 80 I will speed up my accumulation.

Oh yeah..."sink in"..."water damage"...I get it now...I think?

This being speculation, I infer:  linkin87 means to ask when he can sell without taking a loss.  I will (worthlessly) speculate: Sometime this month.  Place a limit order if you can wait that long.  If you can wait until March, place the limit nearer to twice that.  If you can wait 10 years, don't place a limit order, because you will almost certainly place it too low, by orders of magnitude.

And: Y'all may not realize, but the second person plural is a useful declension, for which function many a Yankee and a scattering of Rosbifs have embraced the pronominal my readers embody, although it's fairly used as shibboleth, on priors.

Finally: What fun! ETH hard fork is a trainwreck, ICOs are the devil's work according to the central planners, and Bitcoin is a bubble. May you live in interesting times...

If you run out of powder close to the bottom, you are doing it right.

Not quite. Economics dictates that any such increase in combined value after market discounting should occur once the split is expected.  But hyperbolic discounting tendencies in crypto create a persistent "arbitrage" relative to rational discounting, for the convicted expector.

Difficulty is up over 100% in 3 months. Very close to reversal now on a weekly chart scale (DeMark analysis).  I like to buy when there is FUD in the streets.

ETH should go from 300 to 500 USD over the next 6 months, on difficulty.  XMR should double.  I should place a 176 USD sell order on my trading stock and go to Kona for the winter.

Meanwhile, everybody wants to be in btc ahead of the segwit2x fork.

Well, a turtle is basically a bubble of keratin with a lizard poking out...

Probably low quality, but for what it is worth,  "First Crypto ETF" to hold XMR https://themerkle.com/first-crypto-etf-launches-a-pre-ico-guarantees-to-buyback-tokens/

Yes.  I would add: Bubble is subjective.  It's made of bubbles.  Bubbles all the way down.  When the panic comes, everyone will say, oh that was a bubble.  In fact the panic is equally a mispricing, but the doomsayers will consider it their (fleeting) vindication. There is a well understood fundamental attractor for price (Fisher's law), but it is only partially observable in the market, and there are quasicyclical factors as well (technically, "quasiperiodic on time scales", some of which may be predictable given sufficient observation, and a low model error - but that is an awful lot of hard work).  

Whenever the price moves there are winners and losers, support and resistance.   The price will have to move a LOT in order to achieve fundamental value over the coming years.  So there will be BIG winners and losers.  So there will be a LOT of resistance and support.  It will be painful for everyone.  Too much drama for my taste, certainly. But, the holders will be the winners after the smoke clears.  That's where I want to be sitting.

Suppose the "end point" (your investment horizon) has XMR denominating 1% of JUST the global black markets. (Although in reality it is more likely to be 10%, and another 2% of the "regulated" market besides.). You all know the numbers by now.  In order to reach even 20kUSD it has to go through all the levels between here and there.  That's a vast battlefield.  It will not be crossed without much blood.  Call me a coward but I do not want to bleed.  I will mostly just sit on the side, and hold.  Maybe pick a dead man's pocket or two when the action is far away, or the blood is deep in the streets.

The brute, incontestible fact is that Monero has a growing share of a growing sector (crypto).  It is going to do fantastically well over the long haul.  It has already done so, when the future was relatively dark.  Now that it  has enough cap to make technical development much easier to support, the future is brilliant, and one day the market will suddenly price that in.  I want to be holding on that day.  And indeed, to pass my (unknowable, inalienable) wealth to my heirs, if I can't find a better use for it in my lifetime. BTC on the other hand, has a declining share of that growing sector.  It may do very well, but not so well as XMR.

Whenever someone tries to pry your fingers apart with FUD, remember the facts, remember the logic, remember that markets rise by climbing a "wall of worry", and hold.  It is a scary rip tide, but it is a rising tide.  Stay in the fracking boat!

It's not optimism to follow the logic.  There is no comparable digital cash.

As I understand it, ETH handles this by giving a (reduced) reward to "uncles" mined before the winner is commited. It is a significant decentralizing influence, AFAICT.  Personally, I think that being a viable CPU coin saves XMR from centralization of mining.  The barrier to entry for browser mining is so low, any moderately competent user of enscripten can roll one in a few hours.  I would be surprised if there wasn't one on GitHub already, in fact.

This thread is mostly an echo chamber for XMR advocacy, yo, but I am more than happy to contribute to that end, because XMR is good stuff, and anyone who is influenced to buy it is likely to benefit greatly from doing so.  I have been pumping this stuff since it was a nickel OTC, and everyone who ever bought and held it was made wealthier by it. Those who didn't were not.  

When I actually expect the price to decline I say so.  I think it remains possible certainly, but not very likely much, because we seem to be near the level where miners tend to hold, given the difficulty/price ratio, dramatically changing the marginal price dynamics, and expect that anyone who buys here will probably achieve near the maximum possible gains on a 6 to 12 month time scale which it is still possible to achieve in Monero.  

In general you can't win (or lose) if you aren't in the game, so I am encouraging everyone to get in the game and maintain exposure to XMR at this level, and to do as I do, continuing to buy on weakness, at least down to 018 if we should be blessed with such an unlikely event.

Personally I think XMR > ETH in 1 year, XMR > BTC in 5 years.  That's my primary time-scale.