Just downloaded, installed and it's working beautifully. Thank you for the brilliant work BTCCrew. Quite a few contributors now, very cool to see.

Funny how this thread gets almost no attention compared to some of the others From reading some parts of the board, you'd wonder if Bitcoin even existed anymore. (without a healthy, regularly updated Ignore list, that is)

It's only high quality work being delivered yet again, nothing worth writing about 

I'm good for the bet. I'm just not sure you'll pay me if you lose My word is good, I will pay you 100XMR if AB isn't online due to an exit scam, LE raid, etc, 6 months from now. Say April 22nd 2017.. And you owe me 100XMR if it is still operating on April 22nd 2017. Just for fun.. Hopefully the price will go parabolic and we both forget the bet ;P

I'll happily wager this if you're keen? No need for escrow person.. I'd feel bad taking your money actually fuck it

Alpha and Dream are probably the biggest right now, by a long shot. They operate in the same way.

I don't think people sell drugs on Open Bazar..  It's discouraged I think.

Yikes, that's the truth right there. They should just legalize/decriminalize and regulate most of that stuff, like ah Portugal is it? The country that legalized pretty much everything with great results.

Still, it doesn't matter a great deal because funds don't stay on the site long these days. Money goes in and immediately gets spent, if it's a medium/high value item between repeat transactors, there's a good chance there's no Escrow anymore so the seller gets the coins before even shipping. This is how the bulk of transactions now occur. It isn't a huge problem but more of an inconvenience when they do decide to shut and run.

Do you want to bet on this?

"It is 100% safe that AB will somewhen disappear (by no later than 6 month). T"

Put your money where your mouth is, we each send 100XRM (or whatever) to a trusted 3rd party escrow, winner gets all.

You are betting AB "disappears" in 31 days, let's say. I am betting it will still be open, ha ha ha.

"DASH was ~45% accepted in Nucleus Market. "

I guess that isn't a surprise, since they were likely always planning to steal the house money. Maybe they even opened dozens of fake vendor accounts offering amazing deals in DASH, just to make it easier to steal. I don't think they got away with much however did they? Not in DASH anyway because as i recall, it wasn't used at all pretty much mate. I tend to remember these things.

It is a shitty move, but I guess "exit scam" does kind of beat jail for these dudes, so you have a point there. Still, AB could have exit scammed so much by now a long long time ago - they have built trust, they likely won't disappear with everyones coin.. They might close shop one day, but unless something major changes they are the type who'd give back the money.

It's becoming more of an option, slow and steady, as more people look into it and 'get it', they add the option to pay in XMR. People know another currency option like this would be very useful, when the right one comes along it makes sense these communities adopt it.

Agreed! There's a huge number of use cases for the Monero style blockchain. That's why it's exciting to me - it can do things Bitcoin absolutely cannot. Bitcoin's core value proposition is that it's a censorship resistant open ledger.. Something very very different and of course, valuable just like XMR is for it's unique feature set.

Most coins that come along, it's fairly easy (in general) to make that case; That using Bitcoin for whatever the new coin's purpose was, works better than bothering with a new coin at all. Most are redundant. But it seems that XMR does fill a legit space in the crypto currency market. Only time will tell of course if that's enough to really give it the market cap it needs to support a bit of price stability and sizable investors. We got a long way to grow, but usually when price corrections happen, they happen so quickly (those big ole upwards ones that come out of nowhere), it's not worth risking too much trying to time the short term..

I was thinking the same.. Not sure how much it's increased, but it is sticking around - and very slowly, people are picking it up. The prospect of being in on the ground floor for many of the participants of the DNM's is really nice too. Heaps of people on the markets were around since the early SR days and are well aware of the 'opportunity of a lifetime' that buying a nice chunk of BTC in the $1-20 park would have done for you. Pretty much everyone missed that. One guy even tried to hire me to research XMR and school him on it. I gave him my opinion and let him know I wasn't qualified at all, and he could master it himself quite easily - with a bit of research, I gave him all those good links (he accepts it on quite a few listings now).

Vendors especially, they are very busy and have a lot of risk on their plate each day - but when they get around to researching XMR, if they are satisfied it's truly bringing something new (that BTC can't do) to the table - and that if enough buyers and sellers decide to shift even a portion of their trade into XMR - it would benefit them all very much.  

Not just the inevitable price rise, but having another class of asset to spread the risk. Insurance against unforeseen catastrophic BTC disaster. Splitting the risk/value storage among 2 awesome but unique systems is a good thing. It does not hurt in any way to have an additional working, very private (and this will need to be proven over time, that it does hold up as well as it looks to), currency & store of value, which just so happens to be perfect for this sort of trade.

I am going to do a very simple search and see what numbers I get, I will pick a single item (say, only weed) and post below the results.

I wanted to include the whole world, but there are too many items listed. So I will measure only sellers in "Australia", a country in which DNM use is quite high per capita. I suspect this is because, in comparison to the rest of the world - the price and quality of common street drugs was. It does seem to be coming more in-line with international norms over the past couple years - I doubt DNM's account for enough trade to impact country-wide stats. It's a small group but it is growing, as long as all these (mostly far less harmful than booze) compounds are made illegal, enterprises like these will flourish. Whichever currencies are choice for the trade will earn a constant boost. Here, the best type of money really does win - there's nothing stopping people from using the best currency avaliable. And in this case, until prohibition ends anyway, there's going to be constant demand for these types of currencies.

All vendors, but only 1 category "Cannabis & Hashish" in Australia ONLY:

Individual listings (items) accepting Monero:
31
Individual listings (items) accepting BTC:
316

(9.81 % Accepting Monero - on 21st Oct, in-case I check in say 1 months time)

Some vendors offer Monero for some products and not others, hence the choice to go by individuals item rather than the vendor status (accepting or not), I think this might give a clearer picture.

If anybody is interested, I can check some other categories in this exact way ^

Then, in a month, I could do the same - it would act as a very small indicator of how XMR use is working out.

Like it or not, I do believe XMR will have to be "accepted" by DNM's, just like BTC was, if it's actually going to become anything more than a medium sized project. The DNM's seem to test a currency, they make the decision on if it is suitable - or in this case, if it is advantageous in any way, to BTC, the only real alternative today. It's what's needed to ready it for the world I'd say.

So far, there have been a number of other coins accepted on markets for varying amounts of time. LTC,dash(was it?) and others I don't remember, they all faded away because they were never used. I think it would be useful to check in every month and take some measurements, perhaps the method can be improved a bit, but accurate data on how DNM adoption is going would be a huge clue as to how future adoption will go IMO.

I'm not sure what gave MoneroMarket folks the idea a brand new DNM would be swamped with business.
You know there are dozens of empty markets?

It would take months and months to build trust. Why the heck would somebody use this one and not one of the established markets which allows XMR? I never saw the site, but if they quit this quickly I am guessing it was also constructed at a similar speed.

Seems like they thought "because drugs" they would open a market and see money flooding in. It's likely for the best they closed down, the lack of understanding they are showing suggests that would not have ended well if the site actually did stick around and gain some users.

Very nicely said. Strongly agree too.

That page reads like some of the joke currencies the comedians round here have thought up.

Not that it matters, because it Helps Nature.

"Hub Culture members have already helped us put over 25,000 acres of Amazon rainforest under protection using Ven."

How is this flying under the radar? It's been used so much, they have protected 25k acres of rain-forest. Wow!

"Holding Ven increases the ability of the Central Ven Reserve to buy carbon assets backing the currency. "

That makes perfect sense   Sadly, once more, the only thing this will accomplish is the lightening of the pockets of the misinformed and gullible.

Jorge Stolfi is a big supporter of Ven, it checks out according to his logic - that's how he gets paid for his FUD contributions to the Bitcoin community.

If you want a laugh, check this out:

http://ven.vc/features

I'm not even sure if you can call it an alt. I think it's basically a database..

Who's funding this crapola?

Nice find! Interesting stuff. I remember seeing some spreadsheets a while back, and surprisingly he wasn't actually keeping much profit at all. Spending all the BTC coming in most months on all sorts of stuff, it was an expensive operation. The auction money was customer deposits mostly I recall?

I knew hedging would carry a risk, but I (wrongly) assumed he found some way to make it work. Sound like it was actually costing him a bunch, either from vendors purposely exploiting it or it just wasn't viable at what he was charging for it.

Anyhow, offtopic, sorry! Back to Monero speculation.

I'll throw my little bit in - I have witnessed some real XMR adoption on the markets, not a great deal, 5% overall on Alpha would be stretching it. But, for example - from a few well know vendors with good reputations, some are accepting XMR for all products (smaller stalls) and there are a handful of larger sellers who have elected to sell a few of their smaller items (<$150) for XMR. I believe they are very keen for XMR to prove truly "private", many are waiting I suspect to see that it continues to function(stability/safely) for a bit longer, that the price doesn't crash to 0, that it can't be 'hacked' - this isn't Bitcoin, so trust has to be built, will happen pretty quickly now that people know BTC. Generally after learning the ropes with Monero, my feeling is that most folks will be keen to offer it as an option and to get their own stash together ASAP. It's just going to take some time, and for the necessity of such a currency in this area to become apparent. Will likely happen a lot quicker than it did for BTC, it paved the way for things to move much faster (eg. 1bn market cap for ETH).

"New financial technologies such as bitcoin may become increasingly attractive to investors as a protection against central bank low- and negative-interest-rate policies that threaten capitalism, according to billionaire bond manager Bill Gross.

Policies by the Federal Reserve, Bank of Japan and European Central Bank are destroying historical business models that foster savings, investment and economic growth, Gross, who runs the $1.5 billion Janus Global Unconstrained Bond Fund, said in an October investment outlook released Tuesday.

He said that as investors lose faith in the system, they will increasingly seek havens."

Full Article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-04/janus-s-gross-says-bitcoin-blockchain-may-counter-central-banks

I believe the original SR had such a system in-place. A seller of goods could "Lock In" an exchange rate, for a particular deal, if they were worried the rate would move against them and make the sale unprofitable. This feature was there fairly early on. Before there were several advanced markets where a trader could do this, SR made it possible for anybody to do it without needing to know what long/short even means.

Perhaps some of today's markets have incorporated this too? I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't, the price of BTC is actually considered pretty stable now. If no such hedging system exists, perhaps they should look at it again - for Monero now especially. I'd say this is one of the big reasons larger traders aren't adopting it right away, the volatility compared to BTC. If they could hedge against the price volatility, same way SR1 made it possible, it would make accepting XMR a no-brainer.

When SR was just getting started, Bitcoin's volatility was worse than Monero's today - we had moves between $1 and $20 for a while, despite this, the demand was so strong a vibrant dark-market was created. In it's wake, hundreds of new markets formed to fill it's place.

SR was way ahead of it's time, looking back on it now..  Great community vibe back then too, that was all killed, not unlike the FUD/troll attacks on the community we've seen on bitcointalk, attempting to make the place hostile and divided.. We must remember what is truly important; Crypto money provides a path to real financial freedom, freedom from central bankers and other organized financial crimes which have been legitimized. Such games are not possible when you play on our system. BTC and XMR can worth together masterfully to help the people reclaim what's rightfully ours. A fair playing field, that is all.

Among the long-term, active participants of the network I know personally, they are generally very happy with the state of the network and core dev's rate of innovation/new contributions/management of the release. It works reliably well, it's stable. When it comes to commerce this is what you want above all else.

My god she's hard to listen to.. So many words, so little content.

Listening to the interview, it's pretty clear she's in over her head..


Wow.. Thanks for the link btw.

Seems to be doing alright.