The worse you feel, the more you buy.  The happier you feel, the more you sell.  It is one of the simplest forms of contrarianism, and one that works well in high volatility instruments with a persistent long-term uptrend.  It is also one of the psychologically most difficult rules to follow. It also requires cash in hand, or cash flows, during lows.

I generally expect BTC supply to diminish after April 15, and again Oct 15:  Big gains in 2017 mean big tax bills.  Summer may pop, but if not, then the holidays should pop even more.  It is starting to become a predictable cycle, so there will be a lot of effort sunk into front-running the cycle (whether real or imagined), so July or August seems like a good time to buy.

It doesn't have to be illicit or illegal.  DNMs broker many lawful transactions. There seems to be a presumption of guilt in operation.

If you are threatened by Bitcoin, then the answer is yes.  If you are not, then the answer is no.

Green also used it as a pulpit to tout zcash.  Clearly he is pretty motivated to sensationalize this rehash of 2013 btct topics.

Then again, so am I.

Short-term correlations do not always correlate with long-term correlations.  Crypto is somewhat like the broad equity or bond market, and all varieties correlate with Bitcoin for many immediate impulses, because so much accounting is done with Bitcoin numeraire, just as alpha-seeking is done with reference to a broad index. Within crypto there are sectors, such as contract- focussed or PoS, or various hash algos, for which both psychological and fundamental factors cause increased correlations in their impulse response to some triggering events. But in the long run, the small but persistent fundamental factors drive dispersion, as each stock (or alt) is driven pseudo-randomly by short-term factors of high correlation, but consistently and monotonically by long-term fundamental factors which differentiate it from it's "peers", and do not correlate.

Monero is unlike its "peers" because it has moneyness in spades. A tighter regulatory regime will cause a price shock, but if your time preference is long-term, it will not matter.  The same contraction which drives the price down short-term will only drive the price up in the long run.  The privacy sector will suffer shocks, but they will only serve to expose the fundamental factors which create demand for privacy, and discriminate Monero as the highest quality private currency (in terms of factors that matter:  liquidity, usability, and antifragility).

Gold is a larger, more integrated part of the economy (compared to crypto), moving on scales of decades and centuries.  How successful were Keynes, Roosevelt, Nixon, and Mao in suppressing the price and/or global trade in gold? How successful was the London gold pool?  In the short-term their actions shocked the market.  In the long run, they are history while gold persists, and inexorably rises in price.  Monero is much, much more like gold (but faster) than are it's "peers", which are more like the North Korean Won, or Theranos shares.

In fact, I contend that the crypto which is amenable to surveillance and central control will lose value in the long run, simply because it is surveilled and controlled - and not to your benefit - while the more decentralized and private crypto will experience consistent, persistent demand which inexorably pushes the price up.  A smack-down punch can take the price arbitrarily low, but the inexorable forces of demand will continue.  In fact, even in the near-term, the smacks just cause corresponding spikes later because they encourage speculators to enter.

Surveillance and centralized control serve the surveillor and controller, but privacy serves the users of the currency, and thus the denominated economy.  Hence the free economy will inexorably grow and produce wealth, while the slave economy founders and creates poverty.  We have seen this repeatedly throughout history.  So vivid is this lesson that Will Durant considers it the first and foremost "lesson of history”: There is and endless cycle in alternating ascendance of the forces of accumulation and centralization, on the one hand, and the forces of distribution and liberty on the other.

Electroneum. It was paying better than XMR, accounted in spot USD, the last time that I checked.

Once you go ASIC positive you can't go back. I consider the advent of BCH a negative. My impression is that the market nearly flipped, and that in large part due to the centralizing influence of ASICs.  It is not a future I would want for Monero.

Imagine if a similar proportion of the daily liquidity in usd was dumped into FX markets over a couple of months.  That would amount to roughly 700bn.  Nuclear winter? Perhaps literally so.  Roughly guessing, USD might trade 2.5 to the EUR.  But in fact it would never happen ceteris paribus - other central banks would double down on their printing, to keep up.  It would amount to a global devaluation.  Hmmm... perhaps cryptoland resembles that remark.

Looks like we have bottomed out.

Short term speculation in moderate amounts of ZEC would be within my own risk tolerances, if I found a comparative advantage. Not large speculations or long-term holding.  

Fundamentally, I don't see any scenario in which there is a saturating adoption curve for ZEC  It is disqualified from DNMs by optional privacy.  Optional privacy is compromised privacy. The likelihood of TLA backdoors is high because of the SIGINT background of devs and public statements about backdooring it made by Wilcox and Greene (even ignoring the Bangkok incident).  The novelty and complexity of the crypto makes for higher vulnerability, ceteris paribus.  Finally, it is gradually choking itself to death even with little or no economic use; try supporting a DNM unicorn on ZEC, I dare you. Scalability problems will bring your business to a crawl, and the work-arounds compromise privacy even further. Although, frankly, I would be surprised if you stayed in business long enough to die from scaling.

No, too much risk for me.  If I wouldn't eat the dog food, why would I buy it? Anyhow, I have a cat already, which handles the mice quite well.

With vps, perhaps, but a Xeon phi board sells for less than 500 on eBay.  Anyhow, there is an xmr mining thread for such discussion.

Thank you for your thoughts.  Please take them to a relevant thread. 

SHUM

I didn't deserve it, but I am very grateful for my bag.

youtu.be/rnDEr9R0snU

In the U.S. SEC Rule 15c3-3 limits rehypothecation. Broker-dealers can rehypothecate collateral up to 140% of the amount of the loan to the posting client.

In the U.K. it is unbounded AFAICT. So of course multinational banks just move it all into a City office.  Regulatory arbitrage FTW!

Long compute times and higher fees for especially sensitive transactions would be fine.  RingCT2 or its direct successor might be used alongside zk-STARKs, or one class embedded with the other.  I have no idea if this can be done without creating new information flows with adverse privacy implications for either class of transaction.  This has probably been discussed elsewhere.

The crypto market, like any other, is based on supply and demand.  Price moves quickly when the balance between supply and demand changes quickly, and slowly when it does not.  Fear and greed are two labile forces which play a significant role in supply and demand, but their lability makes their effects transient, while economic uses and emission rates are typically more gentle but always more persistent forces in determining the trajectory of clearing. PoW difficulty has an intermediate persistence/lability and is a feed back link between supply flow constraint and clearing price, which reinforces systemic momentum.  PoS systems simpliciter lack this specific form of feedback, but master node systems add back a near analog.  "Hype" plays a role in accelerating greed, while "FUD" does likewise for fear.

It is really a differential-algebraic system with complex component nodes.  The dynamics of the system as a whole are not hard to model (except numerically, due to awful condition numbers) but some of the more complex component nodes have a lot of latent structure which needs to be elucidated in order to make the predictive value of such a model quantitatively and quantifiably useful.  Specifically the allocations of holdings and preferences amongst market agents needs to be sufficiently defined.

The nice thing (and the awful thing) about models is that, like standards, there are so many too choose from.

So far, but .03 xmrbtc has been a strong resistance level, with only short, false breakouts.  Once again, into the fray!  With BTC 10k, that means xmr 300 is an emerging psychological line.  Pop that and we should rise steadily to 400 again.

BTC should see strong resistance at 10kUSD, which seems like a good time for XMRBTC to rise, since XMRUSD has no correlated psychological line.

I have found it  quite easy to sell xmr for monetary consideration.  My buyers have worn khakis and oxfords, or suits and wingtips, and met me on a water taxi (New Jersey waters) or a hotel lobby in Denver. Gender split has been 80% male, 20% female.

Anyhow, selling seems like a bad idea, in general.  Use it, then replenish.

I wonder if Monero makes a good Valentine's gift.  Perhaps, for a certain demographic.

Regarding monerov, I'd like to see all the nodes DDOSed as fast as they can be discovered.  Not that I would do that myself of course, but it would be fun to see.