Invalidating inactive wallets means stealing your life savings.

I mean constant-value USD as of 2012.  It may be 300k USD2021 by the time a long-term equilibrium is reached.  I don't speculate on the future value of USD, just XMR

Awesome call, that was.  Lately I am more focussed on the (easier, on assumptions) longer-term estimation task:

Monero has consistently repriced higher with each positive development, and the number and scope of bullish developments in the pipe is increasing, not decreasing, as the price, hash and community all rise in tandem.  It's the foothills of the exponential phase of adoption here.  After, comes the super-exponential expansion phase, as n log n network effect  kicks in, composed with a FOMO function.  Eventually, the market saturates at a given development level, FOMO dies, and price pulls back, but until XMR denominates at least 10% of the 22 trillion  USD dark global GDP and at least 1% of the 80 trillion light GDP (for PQ = 3 tUSD) the cycle keeps repeating in a larger S-curve on a scale of ca. 10 years.  If the velocity is an historically typical 5, the market cap of XMR should top out in the neighborhood of 600 bn USD, and 1 XMR should be worth about 30k USD2012.

(The reason why BTC is over 4k now is not the size of the BTC economy, but the outsized reserve demand, which implies a much lower velocity of money.)

In the longer run (multiple decades) XMR value should grow with the global economy, so holding it will be like holding the DJ Global Index, in terms of future expectation at any given moment, which should be modulated by some XMR-specific risk factor.

ZEC principals produced and widely disseminated a paper which demonstrated that a large proportion of chain transactions from earlier revisions of the software could be linked and traced.  Their analysis was disingenuous in that it did not pertain to the current software.

To call a revision incorporating mandatory RingCT 2 "amateur" is to highly esteem amateur work, and also extends "amateur" to include the work of many mathematical and cryptographic software professionals.

Anyhow, all respectable crypto is amateur.  Professional crypto - RSA, anyone? - is uniformly backdoored AFAICT, while reliable crypto such as GPG and XMR is community-driven open source software, subjected to extensive peer review.  Given the public statements of Green and Wilcox that ZEC can be backdoored responsive to a subpeona and the corporate single point of governance failure embodied in ZEC, as well as the historical facts that Alphabay was taken down 5 days after implementing ZEC and that the Alphabay ZEC was traced (while the XMR was not) I cannot imagine how anyone aware of facts on the ground could risk themselves to ZEC, not when the situation is serious.

That was quicker than I thought. Personally, I am a buyer from here down.  I will keep some powder dry down to 018, but below that I go all-in. That is okay since I simply cannot be squeezed.  (In crypto, if you can be squeezed, you will be, so it is very not okay, and has cost many people their fortunes.)

re.match(ur'X.*M.*', ticker) && exchange.sweepBuy(ticker, wallet.shutupAndTakeMyMoney())

Now that is a novel form of factor analysis.  And I had thought I had seen them all.  Good thing XMR has alphabetic priority!


These are huge.  I do not want to be caught with insufficient Monero in April.  The question is: when do the front-runners kick in?  It would be reasonable to expect some ongoing retracement (3-4 weeks?) until they see some magic fib level and support kicks in.  .0178 would be a gift from heaven, 50% off the high.  I would be borrowing money again at that point.  More realistically the 38.2% at ,0220 would be near the support level expected from hashrate supply restriction, comparing support levels at hashrates in July and in (almost) October.

Right now I would guess that DHL is the lion's share of the darknet economy, and as I haven't been invited, I don't think I can see what is going on there.  Can we get a report from inside please?

My suspicion is that XMR is a small minority of darknet xns, BTC being the bulk still, but that this will change when a new open-to-the-public DNM takes the lead.  eMule, Kad, BitTorrent dominate over DirectConnect, for example. DHL will not lead for long, and with Cazes dangling by his neck in Bangkok, I think that coming leader will use XMR exclusively, p > 90%, to avoid a similar fate.

The big gains in XMR are yet to come.  Not so sure the same can be said for BTC or ETH.  Whether they first come from Evergreen or from DNMs, I will not concern myself.  As Jesse Livermore noted: You don't get paid to trade; you get paid to wait.

Rising difficulties always have the effect of upward price pressure, since the marginal miner is forced to hold out for higher prices, to remain profitable.  Pricing equilibria are determined at the margins.  

Current pricing seems fair to Fisher's law, but discounts the upside speculation far more than could be called rational, presumably because the tarnish affecting ICOs after bubble phenomena like FileCoin is creating a short-term contraction of the whole crypto sector.  But that won't last long.  The sector is much more diverse now, and the time preferences of the players are longer on average.  Duration is being bid. That means the dip will be much shallower and shorter than, e.g. the post-Gox debacle.

As regards taking a flyer on a whitepaper, the false positive rate is a deal-killer right now: Too many pikers chasing too few punts.  I would keep my punt in XMR.  

P.S. the secular gold bull, dollar bear is looming again.

Eth was toasted by the ICO ban in China and will get hammered by the lack of ICOS in the u.s. compliant with pages 9-10 of the SEC opinion paper.  Any ICOs offered to U.S. persons will necessarily be restricted to HNWIS and institutions for the foreseeable future, and frankly, the bond desk at some reinsurer isn't going to be dabbling in ICOs any time soon.  That leaves prop desks and family offices.  Prediction: Eth becomes a UK/swiss phenomenon by the end of November after new EU rules come out.  How long it can stay kicking in UK and derived (Gibraltar looks pretty good) jurisdictions remains to be seen.  So far they seem pretty darn friendly.

Now if you could ICO a token with a known NAV... that would be interesting.  I don't think prop desks and family offices will play a game of bigger fool.  That one is over. The eth winter will be a long one.  Btc will comeback soon because 21e6.  New ICOS will need to market better and show some substance to due-diligence in order to thrive.  Once that second generation of ICOs starts to pop up, eth will soon bottom out, until they all start using Lisk (for ease of coding) or Tezos (for ease of correctness proof) in which case Eth may never come back.

Today is a good day to Monero.

Amanda B. Johnson

That happenned. I sold some, now bought it back.

It is by such just-so stories that LEO methods are concealed.  Anyhow, I think this smells more of ZEC, with the July 1 introduction and July 5 bust.


Not in the U.S., as the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that the constitution guarantees a right to privacy.


Yes. Monero was designed for scalability, with adaptive parameters.

The next Alphabay will have a much, much larger impact on the fundamental value of XMR.  For one thing, it won't allow BTC or ZEC (insert image of Cazes hanging by his belt in a Bankok jail cell).  For another, it will grow faster and to a much larger size:. The pent-up demand will be enormous, and the fear factor involved in using BTC or ZEC won't be there to inhibit transactions.

But bootstrapping trust requires magic.  How long that will take, I do not know.  If it takes too long, a technical solution will emerge.

 The dominant theory of currency adoption holds that the embedded social value of the network grows according to a modified Metcalf's law,  v(n) :: n ln n, and the reasoning is that the social value of a network increases with each added link between nodes (n), but that the values of randomly selected links within the network follow a Zipf distribution (hence, "modified").  Now the embedded social value of a communication or transactional network may vary with many other factors, so this is by no means the whole story, but with enough smoothing and compensation for event-driven price movement, the modified Metcalf rule does a fair job of predicting the value of Bitcoin, and I think it will play a significant role in the price evolution of Monero as well.

What tends to go through quasi linear, parabolic, exponential and even super-exponential phases is the adoption curve, i.e. The growth rate of the "n" value in modified Metcalf.  There was a really fun paper out of Princeton a couple of years ago which used epidemiologic models to estimate Facebook's growth curve in this way.

In technology, these "epidemics" tend to follow a series of hype cycles, and when the growth ratios of each cycle start to decline rather than increase, you know that adoption is approaching a saturation point, and super-exponential appreciation is unlikely unless some limiting factor is removed.  I consider that Bitcoin may be tapering it's successive cycle ratios, while those of Monero are likely to expand for a while yet.  The super-exponential growth phase of Monero remains in the future.  Past growth will be negligible in comparison to future growth.

'suppression' talk just makes you sound like a historian conspiracy theorist.  I prefer to say that redistribution into stronger hands is the inevitable consequence of natural profit-taking.  I will admit that I own considerably fewer xmr today than I did 2 years ago, the more fool I, and I would have thought mine to be among the strongest hands out there.  

I have tried to get them all back with market making, but the heavy bias of the jump component to the upside and the relative neutrality of the diffusion component has made that very, very difficult to do without an awfully good timing indicator - better than anything I have been using, certainly.  I need a little RangeDriver sitting on my shoulder.

Then there are cases like Risto....again, his should have been among the strongest of hands, but poor risk management devastated him (from what little I have heard of that conflicted drama).

And let's not forget those like TheKoziTwo, who have top-icked the spikes and scooped up in size when they were cheap, which also has a 'supression' effect (but really is just good market-making taken to a superlative extreme).

It is generally healthier to think of the market as being right by definition - like God, in that sense -  even when it changes it's mind faster than a rooster on acid.  When mcap is over 2bn and there is no facility for naked shorts it really does take both massive cojones and exquisite finesse to suppress and scoop profitably.  I only wish I had such powers.  I am happy, OTOH, to have higher morals - or at least enough respect for the difficulty and risk of the process to simulate higher morals.

Yeah, starting to look like the next level hop takes us to 200usd per.  What will the catalyst be?  Mandatory RingCT fork on 9/21?

Those comments are predicated on the notion that all crypto are created equal endowed by their creator with certain natural rights which are common to all but this is not true. In fact all crypto are created very unequal, some endowed with marvelous potential which has yet to be realized, others with Ponzi fatal flaws, many of which have already fallen by the wayside. Monero will not fall by the wayside, because of the capabilities of its community of developers and supporters. Even when a serious flaw in Monero has appeared in the past it is always been dealt with in a disciplined and orderly manner, allowing Monero to overcome hazards which would have rapidly strangled any lesser coin in its crib.

Today 40 XMR make 1 BTC, but when the economic potential of Monero is fully realized 40 BTC may make 1 XMR.  "People" may not care about privacy, although they are fools if so, but they do care about fungibility, whether they know it or not. They also care about extortion, taxation, theft, embezzlement, and kidnapping. Monero protects you against these things while Bitcoin does not.

If I were to produce a physical Bitcoin today the obverse would bear a vivid image of Cazes hanging by his neck in a Bangkok jail cell. So, yes, I am expecting 200 to 300 this  year simply on the basis of speculation discounting future fundamentals, and 1000 sometime next year on the basis of the emergence of a new functioning darknet economy, and furthermore expect fomo to rapidly push that up to 2500 before that bubble pops.

If so, I shall be very, very happy to buy them.

Better to ask Rangedriver for short term. As far as I am concerned it's all just reindeer games until there are credible dnm's again. I save my brightest light for Christmas Eve.

Yes.  Works for me.