BCASH just saw the lowest hashrate since 12/17 day before yesterday.

I know BTC hash has dropped quite a bit in the last little while.  In fact we are at levels not seen since 2019.

But the fork coins have fared much worse.  BCASH made a new low yesterday that had not been seen since 12/17, and BCASH SV is flirting with ALL TIME lows.

I have to admit this pleases me.

I think if I had lower swining balls I could hav e made an aweful lot of Monero trading it's very clear ranges.  It SO OFTEN does this sort of thing...



Time to sell?  Or going to break out?

Okay! So all of those paranoid scenarios of State attacks and other craziness didn't pan out just like I said they wouldn't!



Hash rate might be at least stabilizing. Too early to say. But that's where my money is.

But seriously, this is super bullish I think. Because hash rate will be coming back online and a lot of it will be new because there's an incentive to compete right now. I really do think the whole Elon farce and then China fud has finally pretty much worked its way through the system. With a little luck I think we should be seeing some upward momentum soon.

That was actually my favorite part. Well no that isn't true... CSW is a fraud.  But that part is really good. AND nuanced. It's not just a block size increase we need. But we will need that too eventually... We be hard to predict the way it plays out.

Interesting take. But monero cannot be a "dumping ground" since it's fungible. One you own monero you them have the issue of buying the toxic Bitcoin back from the same market.

I also can't see how this has a negative impact on monero prices. Because all of the market is going to be using monero as a tool. Some will be buying it and then dumping it back and others will be buying it and holding on to it for a period of time but there will be a demand for monero that becomes constant. And the demand for coming back into Bitcoin will carry a premium that will be paid by the person doing that trade.

At first it will be impossible for there to be more supply than demand on the monero side. Because monero is what has the premium in this trade. If they want to use these trading vehicles they'll have to pay whatever is being asked.

It is an extremely interesting dynamic. I wonder if there are any other free market money systems that offered this kind of trade. In the first realm...

I agree that it may up the ante on monero as a money laundering tool. But we're never going to get away from that reality. That is why monero is valuable in the first place. Not for money laundering specifically but for the privacy and freedom that allows that use to occur.

The samurai news (again)...

Someone tell me if I am over emphasizing this news. But I currently feel like very little talk is happening about something fundamentally very large coming to the Monero blockchain.

I've been digging in more deeply to the samurai wallet developers implementing the Bitcoin side of atomic swaps in their privacy centric wallet and what that may mean for our community.

It's interesting to watch them dance around the Bitcoin maxi types that are angry at them for having anything to do with a shitcoin. But the samurai team are cypherpunk privacy maxies before anything else so in their world using monero is an obvious play.

I have not been able to get clarity on how they intend to implement this. So far what I'm reading is they intend to use monero to deal with the toxic (or sometimes I hear it called doxxic) change problem. If I'm understanding this correctly this is currently thousands of Bitcoin left over from whirlpool activities that are sort of having to be abandoned because for some reason being change in these transactions taints them. And the idea is that Bitcoin will be able to be swapped back and forth with monero perhaps multiple times to mix it, using a completely different method than what they built so far in their privacy stack.

They would not be holding any monero in the samurai wallet. So presumably if you have a monero side of this you'll have to deal with that in a monero wallet (Monerujo, cake, etc?).

I cannot tell yet if this functionality would be able to be used easily for people who want to just swap back and forth manually. It sounds more like they're building it as part of their privacy stack and it will be more of a sort of underneath the hood transaction. So that's one interesting detail that remains to be seen.

This is going to be on ramps and off ramps into monero that bring significant traffic to our blockchain. This is going to swiftly increase the demand for monero liquidity.

And frankly I just don't see how this can't have an impact on the price. Because it's possible that this function ends up dominating the use of an enormous amount of monero liquidity.

As exchanges delist us because we're dangerous (!) All of that traffic is going to be driven straight into the arms of this new functionality. And it's an upgrade not a workaround. I would imagine at first liquidity might be choppy and prices might be all over the place kind of like Bisq. But over time I believe we will see the market smooth out into one of the first true crypto free market expressions we've ever seen.

All of this cosplay on ethereum around defi and useless garbage being built there  amounts to fantastic Rube Goldberg structures but does nothing valuable.  We are about to see what the real thing is. This is a real world smart contract decentralized trading system with an actual fundamental and extremely compelling purpose.

I have been singing the song of monero being a compliment to Bitcoin for years. And I have become very distraught recently seeing this anti Bitcoin tide rise in the monero community. I suppose it makes sense and I do agree with some of the ideas as is often quoted "monero is what you thought you were buying when you got Bitcoin". But monero does something Bitcoin can't do and Bitcoin does things that monero doesn't do as well.

After a decade nearly of meaningless crypto trading we are about to see one of the first actual uses that the word needs built between two blockchains.

One future looking question. How long before the developers and users of samurai realize that this privacy method is way more efficient and effective than all of the whirlpool stuff they've already built. I would think at some point people will begin to think moving just into and out of monero is extremely effective. And then inevitably some of them will start to wonder why to even move back.

I just think we're completely underestimating what's about to hit.

So far Max Kaiser hopium has been about exactly one cycle too late... He was saying "35k is in play!" circa 2018.  And he was right!  Today.

Let's hope he is in the right epoch this time.  I actually think so. I think it's in the mass case. I think fringe case is quite a bit higher.

I understand the block adjustment gizmotronics fairly well... But the 139 minute blocktime this morning was an anomaly deviation wise.

13 minuted blocks are one thing.  This was an order of magnitude over that...  Not necessarily significant.  But nice and spooky given the backdrop.

Right.  I am definitely on heightened... umm heightened something.

But my antennas have served me well over the decades.  I have learned not to discount them.  Especially when they are receiving such an overwhelmingly strong signal.

Tough part is I usually have a bit of insight as to what the signal means. But I am not sure where we are headed.... I just seem to be picking up that we are in for a pretty wild ride.

You know how animals act funny before an earthquake, or trees turn their leaves up before a good rain?

My antennas are literally vibrating.

OK.  What the hell?  I really like Tradingview, and there are some gems of shadetree analysis on there.  Some really interesting ideas and insights.  But WHY, WHY, WHY does ANYONE think shit like this is useful at all?

This guy is one of the top follows on there.  What the heck is wrong with people?

He needs to come sit under the zen feet of Toxic for a while and learn about ducks diving for salamanders and things like that.

OK... I need y'all to talk me off the ledge.

My state attack paranoid theory along with the 139 minute block time this morning between 689300 and 689301 has me all would up thinking about reorgs etc.

_edit_

So I have been doing a little math (remember that I am a musician primarily... so math is a dark art for me), and putting aside things like the first few blocks and amazingly long times then, my figuring based on reasonable swings in hashrate (including the one we are in now) this type of gap should not happen more frequently than like 3+ halving Epochs.  I might have my figuring wrong, and some of it is on my head-napkin.  It could be even more EV rare than that.

Where is the fuck off button?

Ah yes.. there it is...

It would be one of the best tests, and if it happens it will end up being seen as the birth of the new financial network and the beginning of the end for the old.

But like all births it could hurt.

And yes, I am starting to think 15% is a low estimate.  Boo.

On the other hand... if this diff adjustment goes smoothly I expect we should see some positive movement in responce to the fact that there were NOT shenanigans behind this, and to start pricing in all the mining coming back online and miners having less needs to sell without the extra CAPEX of moving.

That is my other scenario that I have not talked about as much and I am more positive about. I think we are on the cusp of a face melter... it's just if we see a monster dip (beyond this one) in front of it.

(multi) State attack:

-China (and other states or central banks?) decide to bring down hashrate to force the diff adjustment either with cooperative firms, or by force.
-Send out pics of miners "moving" (precedent: pics of people dying in the street from covid, and doors being barred).
-Concurrently stockpile net new miners. this could also be coordinated between multiple state actors.
-Wait for the drop.
-BOOM - Bring on all the miners you control.
-Attempt to fork the chain.
-Blast narratives on Twitter, Reddit and here to divide the community.
-Start the "CDBCs won't be flawed like this" campaign.

Like JayBot points out, I am a little wiggy/fringe.

I think we are bound to get a pretty big move soon.  Maybe this weekend. Up or Down?  Dunno.

Miner fud/reality.
Difficulty adjustment in 236 blocks (<2 days).

I can't get the state attack paranoia out of my damn goofy head.

I hope I am wrong but my spidey senses are really going zoinkers.  Y'all can make fun of me forever if it turns out to be a nothing-burger. I won't mind.  I would rather be crazy than right.  And I still think it's the smaller possibility.

But how on earth is this about to happen and NOT betaken advantage of.  We are about to see a LOT of money on the table.

1.  We can only really hope that the "good guys" have plans and enough resources to counter the "bad guys".
2.  In the WORST case scenario we get two things... a rare BTFD event, and proof (after the dust clears) that Bitcoin cannot be stopped.

Wow.
Even with the recent Haveno connection this was hard for me to imagine.  I mean, I did imagine it briefly back then, and then tossed out the possibility since Samourai is sort of an ultra-maxi approved project.



Their stand on why they are doing this is brave to say the least.  And it fulfills a prophesy I think I made back in 2015.  I wish I could find it, but that was when I began to wonder if we might see a day that XMR would be bitcoin's "privacy layer".  Seems the "Spooks" at Samourai have figured out this will be one of the most viable ways to do privacy with bitcoin.

Interesting times for sure... I feel like this is not even close to priced in.  If they can make any headway at all into the social issue around this it will be interesting.  That's the question though.  This will split the privacy focused maxis.  And I would *guess* those in favor of it will be in the minority.

At the same time the Samourai devs have never given a single shit about toeing any lines.  I deleted their thing a long time ago...  Seems I might be reinstalling it, lol.

(edit - reduced the ginourmous image a little)

I am not surprised at the mixed response to Popescu's demise.  He was an amazingly prolific probable genius, and he was an (in my opinion) awful person.

I would be extremely surprised if the mass of his coins, however many there were, were not set up in a fairly tight system.  I think there is a VERY good chance they are lost as in a donation to us all ala Satoshi.  And in this case the size of the donation could be ridiculous... as much as 5-7% of the remaining float, maybe even more.

Of course no one knows (yet) how many there really were, and like the satoshi coins we most likely will never be able to know for SURE that some sex-slave who got close enough to figure out his system would not be able to access them and rock the markets, lol.  Seriously it's a possible time bomb the size of the Satoshi stash itself.

He was so twistedly brilliant I would also not be surprised if he set them in some convoluted dead man switch setup.  He could surprise us from the grave.

Assuming he is dead at all.

The intrigue in our little world runs deep!

Does anyone know yet what killed him?

-Edit- well look at that.  An actual boating accident?  He supposedly drowned. lol.

I also bristle somewhat at the moniker "Father of Bitcoin Maximalism".  THere is certainly crossover there, but most "Maximalists" today have no idea who he was, and his brand of maximalism differed I think.  i think the title "The earliest bitcoin maximallist" would be more accurate.

Extremely important post.  Better to handle these things sooner rather than later...