Personal fan of decentralization, personally not a fan of Ripple, but I think the centralization argument is quite moot. Ripple is a banker's coin that seeks to service financial institutions. What does it stand to gain by being decentralized? Is Amazon bad and destined to fail because it's centralized? It's a silly argument.

$160mm is a lot more than I would have expected. When I was working with an ICO in September, I remember the amount raised by the first half was something abyssmal, like $18mm. Of course a lot of it comes down to the individual projects that succeed to raise funds, but I think this is an indication that money is once again entering the space. Is 2019 our year?

I think Grin is more inflationary than gold in the long run (as well as the short run, ofc). There is a finite amount of gold on our planet, but an infinite supply of Grin. I suppose an argument could be made about the extraction of gold from astroids and extraterrestrial planets, but that's more of a philosophical discussion now more than anything else.

That's the core of the problem. You run the two largest communities in the space. Allowing yourself to unilaterally make decisions on behalf of these communities is a MASSIVE point of centralization that I don't think you would be fine with if the person running the show wasn't you. We saw Grin jump from $3 to over $200 on this announcement. I understand you may not have made this decision to influence the price of the coin, but the reaction is inevitable. What if you are wrong about Grin or you threw your support by some other project that turned out to be a scam? If someone needs to first show you that you made a wrong call and threw the weight of Bitcointalk and /r/bitcoin behind that call, it's already too late.

I'm struggling to understand the compatibility of the MimbleWimble backbone + unlimited supply:

For a potential "everyday use" cryptocurrency that dominates the global economy, I think some rate of inflation/emission is 100% necessary.

But I don't think Grin is trying to be that with the way everything else is situated. The elimination of denominations and addresses makes this currency fundamentally difficult to interact with. I also think an inherently private coin would be incompatible with the role of worldwide day-to-day use.

I don't see any other situation for Grin or any crypto where unlimited supply is a good thing to have. What's the justification?

I guess the argument is technically sound that Grin is different from most other altcoins... although there are plenty of shitcoins with the same backwards metrics that make the coin fundamentally moronic.

Theymos, for someone who touts the importance of decentralization above all else, your level of hypocrisy by allowing yourself to play such a central role in the crypto community simply because you were the first to jump major discussion mediums is quite astounding.

Take a look at the interesting and worthwhile developments of the past 5 years, and not just the few your buddies throw their weight behind.

We've built blockchains that are interoperable, language agnostic, free to use, highly scalable, highly secure (in some instances- more secure than Bitcoin)... the list goes on. Some of these are unpolished, like Grin (which you concede), but others are running as well oiled machines. Is there any argument behind your point of view besides ignorance of how the space has changed in the latter half of the decade? "I'm Theymos so I am right" only works so many times.

Why would you invest money into very high risk avenues and stop paying attention to it? At that rate- why take it off exchange? Just leave your garbage on Binance if you don't actually care for the project/what you can do with it.

Cloud mining is typically a thinly veiled ponzi scheme. If you are interested in renting hashrate to spec mine altcoins (large coins not profitable since you are paying a premium), it is best to do so through a hashrate marketplace, such as Nicehash.

With that being said, if you are interested n mining you are best off handling the operation yourself.

When the GAME network forked for a security upgrade, Yobit failed to update to the new chain. All the coins on Yobit are valid only on the old (defunct) chain. They may have put it in maintenance when users tried to send new GAME to old GAME wallets.


Would love for this to be the case... but who is accumulating??

Here's a hot tip: move beyond the best "currency" cases and find the utility previously impossible or massively improved by crypto. We already had our ideological pump, the next class of "winners" are going to be projects that are currently under the radar but gearing up for massive adoption. I've got two picks I'll share with you now:

Endor Protocol: mass market predictive analytics. I personally use it through a service called Algowave to receive price predictions on erc20 tokens with 80% accuracy. Mind boggling stuff. Already in use by some of the biggest brands out there, Like Mastercard and Coca Cola.

XAYA: First language agnostic blockchain network, among other things. Working "gamified" state channel scaling solution called game channels. First generation 3 blockchain geared specifically to gaming, from the original inventors of blockchain gaming. Soccer Manager franchise deploys a blockchain game on their mainnet next month. With well over 50 million downloads, Soccer Manager is by FAR the biggest entity to launch a blockchain game. Could be the first dapp with millions of users.

There is a "multiplier" effect that takes place when every dollar enters and exits the crypto space. As per an empirical study last year- I believe by Weiss Group, but I am not entirely certain- the multiplier effect for major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum is around 32.5x. When you start going down trading shitcoins, this multiplier continues to increase dramatically.

In other words, if Bitcoin marketcap drops by 100 million, it means about $3 million of real dollars have left the market.

Well today everyone who invested in CEFS is in a bad spot... with the "hack" and all. With that being said... Cryptopia volume has been down the drain for quite some time now, and CEFS has lot a lot of value even versus BTC since I made this post some months ago. I didn't invest and would have been a bad choice, hope nobody saw this and got burnt.

Why bother holding altcoins if you're going to just pick the highet valued ones on the market? Just hold Bitcoin then... Altcoins are great because you can pick out undervalued gems from heaps of garbage and reap the benefits. Can't do that with coins that are already among the highest market caps.

I've personally met several:

Jessica VerSteeg, CEO of Paragon

Tricia Martinez: Founder/director of Dala and Wala

Mary Jo Potter: CEO of Healthcare angels and blockchain angel investor

Alex Tinsman: North American lead of NEM

Off the top of my head also include the CEO of Bakkt and Golem, although am not sure of either's names. I'm sure there are dozens, if not hundreds more.

Would 100% love to learn more about Maker. It's likely the single project that deserves more of my attention than I've given it. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations have massive implications, and Maker seems to be leading the forefront. Outside of p2p lending, what other initiatives are possible through MKR?

I didn't invest in DeepOnion- which is why the campaign was "short lived" for me. They were primarily distributing DEEP via their highly curated signature campaign. I did it for a few weeks in November until they changed it so your campaign payout was proportionate to how many coins you were staking. This was in November of 2017, so I actually would have made a shitload more if I had stuck with it for a bit longer. The project is a scam- it was situated so that moderators and developers were earning most of the money, guys like me were doing alright, and everyone else was shilling the fuck out of the project for nothing.

Earnings are definitely lower than the bull market- but bounty hunting isn't dead. As a legendary member, I obviously earn more than the average participant, and by targeting campaigns that pay high premiums to legendary members, I'm doing pretty well. $1k per month for 1-2 hours of activity a day is still very achievable. Even the paid in BTC campaigns can pay a few hundred a month.

This "pity" is kind of ridiculous, imo. Many bounty hunters are far from destitute. When I participated in the DeepOnion campaign (although short lived), I was earning US$1,200 per week. That is more than many throughout the world earn in a year- for just a couple hours of work. Of course, most campaigns are not going to pay anywhere near that amount, but even earning 5-10% of that for a couple of hours of work a week is not bad income. Consider that people who quit jobs to do this full-time are working well over a couple hours a week.

Not that everyone does that well- lower accounts obviously don't earn as much and those without dilligence that sink time into scams can end up wasting a lot of their time. But overall, bounty hunters do alright.

Just to explain what others have mentioned- a "market maker" in the crypto space typically refers to a practice of spoofing volume on certain markets to convey a different message. Typically, to trick speculators into believing a coin has more liquidity and trading activity than it actually does. New exchanges perform this activity to propagate a much higher volume in an attempt to attract new traders.

Sometimes market makers are used for more robust activities- like inflating the price of the coin. The more "complex" the activities of the market makers, the more difficult for them to succeed.

But yes, in the case of Coinbase, "market makers" refer to traders who place market orders, rather than take them.

Plenty of projects are undervalued in this market. You're better off switching your garbage out for these ones and potentially earn BTC profit while price of Bitcoin is increasing in potential bill market. If you've already lost a majority of BTC value you'll probably have a hard time chasing riches if you pit it all back into Bitcoin

Daytrading XRP is essentially gambling... There are plenty of coins that I think are fine to daytrade but Ripple not one of them, imo. If you look at the coin in a more macro sense, I think it's fair to say the bear call came long ago. Bulls back soon )