I prefer the Digital Currency Widget, and Blockfolio app.

It is the optionality on an asymmetric outcome, along with anticorrelation to legacy assets, which makes xmr an essential component of any diversified portfolio.  

For punters, it is a great bet, for the same reason: asymmetric return profile.  High risk yes, but the higher reward potential more than makes up for that (an understatement).  Moreover the risks are overblown: the skill which the core team and contributors have exhibited in managing the threats has increased my cofidence rather than decreased it.

Investments and bets mean different things to different people.  If you need what xmr offers then you should buy it.  If you do not, you should not.

Blockchain analysis using bayesian methods and markov chain Monte Carlo can easily surpass the "reasonable doubt" bar.  Not always, but as sufficient data is accumulated.

That is one factor.  The others are bear raids by real professionals (not cryptowhales), alphabay, and the fork drama.  Oh, and vitalik stole another 80mm usd.

I tried to describe a dual currency model, in which a fungible hard currency (monero) facilitates the productive functions of capital markets, and an inflationary or freigeld-class of currency floats against the hard money, at some market value.  It is the issuance and distribution of the latter which provides UBI.  But in order for capitalists to sell their goods, they need to accept and exchange freigeld.

Remember Gresham's law.  The currency undergoing inflation or demurrage will see transactional demand, while the hard money will see reserve demand.  The clearing exchange price will depend on where the ISLM curves of the two currencies balance.

The other way would be to put a gun to someone's head and make them pay for some unproductive loser's UBI.  Which would be (1) immoral, (2) counterproductive, and (3) unsustainable.  That is how it works now, except hard money is suppressed by overt threats and covert conspiracies.  It won't scale to UBI, in my opinion.

I see no reason to speculate on it: Space traffic is so surveiled that we would all know about it years before anyone lassos a hunk of platinum.  Just watch the space and you should have no trouble front-running the masses to the exits. 

But yeah, technology is why I think cultural artifacts and productive assets with low political risk are better for intergenerational wealth transfer than PMs.

People don't count for squat.  It's the amount of capital going into Monero that determines the float remaining, and the transaction volume over that float, which defines the clearing price.  

The coin that prevents you from being robbed is the one that will draw the most capital.  When no one can know what you have, no one is incentivized to take it from you at gunpoint, be they Vinnie from the hood or the IRS.

Jim Bell fan?


I am not iCEBREAKER, but I do, by 2024. The reasons are many and intertwined, but in short the post-ww2 baby-boomers burn down their assets in decrepitude, creating crashes, and crashes cause CB printing, which create a dilemma: hyperinflation or crushing, strangling central economic control.  Either scenario is bullish, with the latter being the best case for black markets.  2024 is the demographic bottom, but it may take 4-8 years for any real recovery to occur.

Never forget: Only black markets matter.  Because only black markets are free markets, and it is only in free markets that unbiased price discovery can occur, without which malinvestments and inefficiencies of rents and licenses - ranging from the mild but worsening cases in the u.s. and e.u. today,  to the mass-starvation-inducing cases we have seen in China (1950-60s), Russia (1930-40s), Venezuela  (2010s), Zimbabwe (2000s), etc. - cause inequality to balloon, and productivity to crash.

I think it is difficult for modern Yanks and Europeans to comprehend the levels of disruption which they are about to experience.  The educational systems created by Dewey et filia are factories designed to produce good consumers and factory workers, but the underlying economic apparatus, what Marx would have called substructure, just doesn't need people to fill "bullshit jobs" any more.  There is some measure of realism in the Eastern Eurozone, because the Iron Curtain and the Soviet collapse have not entirely faded from memory, yet, from Vienna to Nome we have a population of consumers and tax donkeys which is so soft, so compliant, so dependent of the provision of their masters, that they simply cannot imagine a world in which the warm teat of the corporation/government is taken from them.  

Collapse is a process, not an event.  It began in 1971-75 when the gold standard was replaced by the petrodollar fiat system.  Since 1971 every U.S. generation has experienced an increase in labor burden and a decline in real wealth compensated only by technological hedonic factors and the emergence of the two-income, no parent, household.  Well, there is no more blood to be wrung from that latter stone, and technological progress is (1) obsoleting the worker and (2) still dependent on unsustainable resource equations.

In order for technological advance to drag us out of the hole we are in, we need functioning markets with functioning price discovery, and, in my opinion, a UBI.  To me the former implies hard, non-inflationary money, with privacy and fungibility baked in, while the latter implies an inflationary fiat or a freigeld which floats against the hard money.  I do not believe that a knowledge-based economy can function without both forms of currency, at least not without the adoption of a regime of continuous recurring atrocity (which is the current trend).  The former is required for capital formation, required to build enterprise and conduct research involving capital equipment, while the latter is required to support excess consumers.

Either AB was busted by tracing a BTC xn (the official story), or by a ZEC backdoor (suspected only because both Wilcox and Green have alluded to unpublished  methods of  gaining xn details responsive, e.g., to a warrant). Either way it is bad news for XMR in the near term, and good news for XMR in the long term.  

The bad news is that XMR can't gain monetary value by gaining share on AB any more, and that every time the leading DNM gets busted, BTC trends down (and XMR is often correlated, i.e. has very high beta to BTC).  

The good news is that DNMs are growing in size and xn volume, becoming more sophisticated, more secure, and adopting XMR.  All it takes is one guy using a KYC compliant exchange, or one lucky backdoored xn, and your whole house comes down. There is no way on God's green earth that I would let anyone take any BTC home from a DNM under my watch.  You can let the rubes transact in BTC, if they insist, but the management MUST NEVER TOUCH BTC. All payouts must be in XMR.  That means the market needs to accumulate XMR reserves. Which means it is in the interest of management to encourage, if not require sales transacted in XMR.  So it is doubly bullish, with growing reserve reducing supply, and a simultaneous growing xn demand.

On that reasoning, I am taking advantage of the dip, for which I am truly thankful.

It's called 'constructive knowledge', and is used e.g. when the source of probable cause for a search is such as would disclose methods of evidence collection which LEO'S prefer not to disclose in open court.  Sometimes such methods are unlawful.

I heard that Wall Street Market is now working with XMR.  That would make it the third DNM to add XMR.  DNMs really need to decentralize.  Hansa is a step in the right direction, and seems to be getting most of the AB diaspora ATM.

All that really matters outside dnm is payment processors like e.g. bitpay.  Alpaca socks and paintings amount to nothing.

If you are referring to AB, after starting as BTC only, they added XMR; then they added ETH; then when they added ZEC they got raided almost immediately.  At no point did they drop any crypto from the support list.

I wonder whether ETH and ZEC will still be supported if they resume ops?  It will be interesting to follow the AB reddit for a while.

AFAIK AB was turning over most of the non-financial transactions, but counting requires using proxy statistics because of CT etc. I have been too busy lately to do that work.  Maybe soon, when the dnm situation is stable again.

I personally bought lots of stuff with xmr.  Notably, 8 works of art, two automobiles, one prescribed drug, an undisclosed amount of physical gold and silver, and an undisclosed amount of currency.  But I am not a typical transactional user.  A typical transactional user today will use it for dnm, and in future will use it for remittances.

When I use it, I gradually repurchase, to maintain a constant level of holdings overall, in the long run.  Most of the demand is still reserve demand - and probably always will be, since nothing else on the planet is as immune to extortion, theft, or disaster, so it is the ideal savings vehicle.  If you want some sense of the float which will be used in the xmr economy I think the polo stock is probably a good first order approximation, so around 200k of xmr supply, the rest being held in reserve.

Hansa is immune to exit scam by design.  Integrated multisig can not come fast enough.

July 1, alphabay starts zcash.  July 5, dnm raids in Quebec, alphabay goes offline.

https://mobile.twitter.com/zooko/status/863202798883577856

Coincidence?

If btc keeps wandering between 2500 and 2600 until 1 August, I expect market making ROI to go up ... a lot.

Looks better on a cellphone anyhow.  Waiting for the "premium on site service" I paid for to get fulfilled by dell right now. 

I do not intend that I would convert holdings to btc with xmr over 60usd, but rather that gains on market making operations will be taken off exchange in the form of btc, rather than xmr.  I could certainly change.my mind about the number, but at some level - and a previous ATH is a natural resistance and support level - in the interests of increasing the likelihood that I am buying low and selling high, I would book in btc so that upon a retrace I could compound by trending towards all-in xmr.  One should never run out of powder.  I like to buy powder when it is cheap.  But the purpose of powder is to be used, at some point, when weakness is observed.

Supply consists of dishoarding, transaction churn, and mining.  Mining means almost nothing, relative to daily volume.  Dishoarding seems to have come to its end, at this price, leaving market makers and transactional flips to dominate the exchanges.  The flip rate appears to be, therefore, about 3mm USD per diem.  Using pq=mv and assuming the pessimal velocity of 365 / escrow time (21d) = 17.4, we can estimate the transactional float as 3mm*365 / 17.4 = m = 63mm USD = 1.3mm XMR. (The global velocity is then about 1.6, which is rather low for a healthy economy but pretty good compared to major global currencies ATM).

Assuming reserve demand to be stable (again, a pessimistic assumption), doubling the transaction rate while holding velocity steady should double the clearing price.  Pessimistically, then, the clearing price should be directly proportional to transaction flow rate.

There are thus three ways to increase the clearing price: Add reserve demand (reducing the effective float), add transaction demand (increasing the size of the economy) or decrease the velocity (reducing transactional supply).

In fact, I would expect velocity of the effective float to rise rather than fall, so hope of future appreciation is either speculation (on the madness of crowds), or else it is dependent on the fundamental assumption of rising reserve and/or transactional demand.  In practice these two demand factors are highly correlated:  observing a rising transactional demand motivates an increased reserve demand, while a rising price motivates dishoarding, which is subject to re-hoarding in a process of saver churn, known as "stronger hands".  

Notionally, the reserve market is discounting the future transactional market as well as its own dishoarding rate.  R_now = R_eq  + r * Dt * (dM/dt + dR/dP) , where Dt is the equilibrium horizon, P is the clearing price, dR/dP is a negative value, - dR/dP << dM/dt, and r is a discounting ratio per unit of t (time).  For fixed velocity, then, knowing the growth rate of the transactional market, dM/dt, would allow one to estimate the mean discounting rate and the dishoarding rate by observing a sequence of equilibrium prices, and hence provide a prediction of the price over time as a functor parameterized by the equilibrium horizon.  (I made one particularly egregious simplification, of the kind that motivates the moniker "dismal science", in order to keep this post short).

I have returned to booking gains as XMR until the next time XMR exceeds $60, whereupon I intend to return to booking gains in BTC.