Is there an official Chinese name for Monero?
私币 is logical but lacks poetry and seems too venial.
私宝币 is only slightly better.
自由币 Perhaps?

Liberty to create value is not a get-rich-quick scheme.

Security against extortionists does not yeild a rentier's coupon.

In each of these dilemmas, Monero offers the former, but lacks appeal for those seeking the latter.

Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way.  It is only the uncertainty of woolier, more timid minds that creates a mispricing to be exploited by those whose vision is bold and clear.

My speculation is that xmr will continue its steady longer term appreciation trend, with much less significant volatility than other leading crypto (BTC, ETH).  In the long run, XMR will appreciate significantly more than BTC, as it's use cases are greater, and the current valuation is 50x lower.

Depending on your criteria, you might deem various issues as "leading crypto" but market cap per se is clearly meaningless.  Bytecoin, dash, zcash and ripple are prime examples of that meaninglessness, for distinct reasons with similar implications, i.e. in each case the cap far exceeds the float - liquidity stinks, and every "greater fool" that comes along is just burying themselves under a deeper and deeper creaking overhang.  I do not deem any of these four in particular to be in the class of "leading crypto".  I still hope for a fair community launch of a zksnark crypto (or the incorporation of zksnarks into xmr.)

ETH is definitely leading crypto, but can't be classed as a monetary asset per se.  It is also heading for a legal and social catastrophe at an ever accelerating pace.  I much prefer the tortoise-style victory to which Monero is iterating, steering far clear of the snake oil and Ponzi complexes that besmirch the very concept of crypto.  The political and governance risks of XMR seem clearly to be much less than those of either BTC or (most especially) ETH.

Short term, not much.  Long term, it allows me to use proxy statistics to model the transactional economy, and apply Fisher's law to derive an approximate economic price support level.  I then buy when price is below a discounted fair value determined by Bayesian regression projection of that fair value, where the discounting rate as a function of horizon tenor is derived by historical backtest.  I try to make market short-term, in a small way, but whether I am rolling those gains into BTC or into xmr depends on where the price is relative to the current regression estimate.  After all, if it is trading too dear, one needs to stock powder for the coming reversion and overshoot, while if it is trading too cheap, one needs every xmr one can get - but not too fast since it can always get cheaper.  

While my technical monkey never did well at predicting crypto, the fundamentalist approach is doing quite a bit better, so far, although I haven't tried it on anything but xmr recently.

I recently went on a sabbatical (basically, called in rich and stopped  going to work), and so stopped using salary to buy xmr. I currently depend entirely on trading to increase my stocks.  Once I run out of back-logged home improvements, I may start taking contracts again and resume net inflow, or I might work on xmr software full-time, or maybe I will get that Ph.D. I have always kinda wanted - especially if my daughter decides to go to grad school, as it would be fun to collaborate with her on papers.  It all depends on events, not least of which are price events.  If I had to guess right now what I would be doing in 6 months it would be contract work, in 12 it would be xmr software dev, and in18 months, I would guess that I would have sold 5% of my xmr at $120, and would be engaged in a Ph.D. program.

It's a fun time to be alive, and a great time to be stacking Monero - or BTC even, if you have the stomach for the inevitable volatility that will continue to come from scaling politics.  Not so sure about eth though.  That one may be past the peak of the hype cycle now.  Bancor looks worse than the DAO.  Bancor could be the MTGOX to the DAO's Bitcoinica.

No, but I am familiar with Bayesian regression, which optimizes distribution estimates, given certain pre-conditions.
It is phatic cheerleading.  Much less than 99% though.
Buy the dip.  The longer it stays down, the more I will own.

Whenever I agree with the duck, it seems worthy of comment.  But what, pray tell, is "soon"?

On this we may significantly disagree.  Had I appreciated the severity of the flaws in versions of Monero before RingCT, and had no faith in the team to manage the issue as they did, in the breach, I would have been railing against Monero likewise, but not for intentionally centralizing and materially facilitating the defungibilization of the currency - only for lacking the competence to make a meaningful distinction as against, e.g., boolberry.  

I do think that the actual technical and economic characteristics of real hard money will dominate in the long run.  Monero has them.  To my mind anything that pretends to have similar utility and value but lacks those characteristics is an imposture and a fraud.  Stop calling it money when it doesn't have the essential qualities of money, stop classing it with Monero when it does not belong in the same class, and I will probably just ignore it.  As it is, I feel it is needful to warn against such schemes.

If you want to collect rare Pepes that's none of my business.  I would advise however that the cultural value of Putin's Patek-Phillipe is likely to be much more persistent.  Even Mao's very perishable mangos have greater persistent value than Dash.

I grant you that, but sometimes ignorance is innocent.  There will always be people who want to use cash tech for cash tech purposes. It is nefarious to offer cash tech but supply crash tech, which is also a thing, actually occuring.

Yeah, there is nothing disingenuous about promoting a Ponzi as a Ponzi (although there is something nefarious about it).  But I still wish I could convince people that their rational expectation is negative, even if I can not convince them that they should attend to the categorical imperative (of Kant, a/k/a the Golden Rule of Jesus Christ, sometimes attributed to Hillel) - and no less when investing, speculating, or even gambling, than otherwise.

Dash is not even remotely competitive.  It is simply and purely a scam to steal money from the foolish and ignorant. The market cap of dash is an illusion created by temporarily removing most of the supply into masternodes which monitor all the transactions and insure that 90% of the network traffic goes through NSA controlled routers.  When the scam bubble pops all of those masternodes will get liquidated in a huge rush to the exits, crushing all the innocent holders. The only reason why a masternode holder (other than a "national security" unit) is willing to take that risk is the illusion of yield.  Let me give you a hint: Hard money has no yield.  If it has a yield, it is a scam, and eventually that illusion will blow away.  It took 46 years for the soveriegn fiat illusion of yield to disappear.  I can assure you with confidence that it won't take that long for the dash masternode rentiers to get their come-uppance.  They lack armies and nuclear missiles, for one thing.

Another example of a moral crime against humanity is zcash, which taxes it's foolish users 20% for the priviledge of being subjected to infinite surprise dilution, and using gee whiz math that 99.999% of the buyers don't understand. I would not want to face that Nuremburg justice when it comes.

Ignorant and foolish people think they are clever because they are making money.  Well, a rising tide lifts all boats.  It is only when the tide goes out that we discover who was swimming naked. I will be covering my private parts with Monero when that happens, simply because I think it provides the best cover * liquidity value in known space.

You can call me arrongant or insensitive, trollish, or book talking, or whatever you like, but if one person is saved from embezzlement and  poverty by my warnings, I will consider the reputation burn well spent.

That said, yes, there will always be the possibility of some future deanonymizing innovation as long as we rely on computational asymmetries.  That is why defense in depth is so crucial.  Your contributions to Kovri now may be late to the party, but will nonetheless be welcomed (after thorough peer review).  Eventually we may incorporate a decoherence layer into peer communications to prevent information leakage, but the technology is not yet widely available.  Eventually q.c. will destroy even zksnarks, but by then we will have new quantum-ready tech in place, at least if I have anything to say about it.  

And I would not be alone, I am sure, in being willing to cowboy-fork if necessary, when that time comes.  Although, I do not believe it will be necessary, given the prudential responsibility demonstrated by the core team to date.  (Also, I do think any new quantum ready PRs would be very premature at this point. We won't want them until we expect to actually need them.  Until then they would just be valueless added risk.)

Anyhow, cheap coins, yo.  When the facts change, so do my opinions: I am buying anything under $52 these days.  I think in the very worst case they might be under water until August, but I still say the June/July scenario ranks are skewed positive, so I am willing to take that much duration risk. All it takes to prove me wrong is one large persistent seller in size, but so far all the evidence has been that transactions in size are overwhelmingly biased towards long term holds.  Hence, the intermittent level-up jumps, each time the float supply gets drained off into reserve demand.  Even a growing economy can't prevent some profit taking by speculators, after a big jump, so you have to expect some dips to follow the jumps.  That, my friends, is our great opportunity, as patient and prudent buyers.  The FUD storms help us, as much as I hate to admit it.  I much, much prefer gains by honest value-add and legitimate, well-reasoned and soundly founded "risk-taking".

And if you have held them until today, you have been extremely well rewarded for your foresight and consistency.

Surely you noticed this a long time ago.

The difference is that xmr is almost fit for use.  I can't name a single alternative which meets my criteria (mostly Aristotle's actually) of fitness for use as money.

Dude you are just outsmarting yourself.  I can think of maybe one person who has done better by dumping on highs and scooping on lows (TheKoziTwo) without resorting to pump and dump scamming.  Everyone else who gets rich on this stuff without being evil does it by picking a technically and economically sound coin with good community, and accumulating on lows.  I confess that I have done well on market making, but that is just nickel and dime stuff compared to the absurd returns on my buy-and-hold cold storage position.  I gave up on timing the market for the most part quite a while ago, and I very certainly do not regret that capitulation.   

Maybe someday, when xmr is within an order of magnitude of it's long-term fundamental (Fisher's law) value, and the jumps are less biased to the upside, there will be more opportunity to extract technical alpha, but we are not even close to that level yet.  Just get as much as you can reliably hold for the long term.  Don't load yourself up with regrets by trying to time events which are so difficult to model.  You just have to be in when the magic happens, over and over again.  Any time spent out just makes it more certain that you will miss out on the upward leaps.

I am not aware of any specific reason why they would not be able to operate from their old chain db while waiting for the new scan to finish, but my surmise is that they want to perform their own iteration of the checks (already done by the core.team) to insure that there are.no.double spends on the chain as a result of the (now.fixed) small subgroup bug.

N · log N is the working estimation of the value added by network growth, observed in bitcoin historically, and derivable by a credible a priori model, so one should anticipate a 92% annual appreciation in value on the basis of this factor alone.  However, there are other factors in play which suggest significantly faster growth than that, during the coming 3 to 6 months.

Have you tried tumbling bitcoin lately?  How much do you think that costs, and how long do you think that takes?

I mean that the overwhelming majority of scenarios favor appreciation over depreciation.  Such an overwhelming majority that I am no longer willing to risk capital waiting for a lower price, although one is always possible.  That '10x' comment was not intended as a comment on the degree of such appreciation, nor was it intended, very specifically, as a central estimate of any predictive distribution, on any given horizon.  (Were I to make such an estimate it would require much more rigor than I am presently prepared to supply.)

You might ask why I would invite others to front-run me in this way.  I hope they do.  I seek to invest in the manner of a Kantian categorical imperative.  Golden rule investing...  My expectation is that the corrupt minds of corrupt men will rob them blind, and those who seek to invest so as to most improve the lot of mankind tomorrow and into ha'olam will reap the benefit of that robbery.  It is a ludicrous notion.  The Orthodox among us might deem it a holy folly.  So far it is working pretty well for me, but then a rising tide does tend to lift all boats, doesn't it?  So I hedge vigorously with nasdaq bear spreads.  So much for high principles, I guess.

Well I am all in again, so I could not care less what the price does until the next ATH. Prices in the 016s seem unlikely to come again, ever.  I could not leave anything unmopped on the floor, so long as I could wring out another drop.

Sometimes you are in sync with the market and sometimes you aren't.  Lately I have been fortunate in this regard.  I found the inability to withdraw xmr from poloniex to be a great opportunity, while it lasted. It still persists but I think the resulting lows are already in.  Scenarios are roughly 10x overweighted to the upside from here.  Enough x's so that I gave up counting, at least.

When the window finally opens, these are the next coins going into long-term cold storage.  Ka-freakkin-ching.

Obviously they are rescanning the chain with new software.  Given the number of xns which are directly relevant to their accounts, and the amount of cross-checking and validation they have to do, I would be surprised if they finished by Monday.

I guess some folks are just fond of herring.

_ insert fish-slapping dance _

Sadly for you, they are also unusable.  You might get lucky in the fork, however.

Oh I totally agree that fluffygate is a red herring - one dangled by concern trolls bent on getting your monero cheaply.  That is so over.  We are back to stable USD pricing , which always seems to hold.until shazam, we suddenly rush ahead of all the btc gains in the intermin, while btc retraces or just stagnates.

If you want to find the real source of the p&d on xmr from the 22d to the 25th, I suggest starting with:


And the classic


"Is it true?"

Personally I am proud to have been selling to the scammers from 0188 to 0225, and front running their buys from 0179 down to 0171.  The only losers in that operation were, I hope, the p&d scammers.  Sadly they probably burned a few hard working folks in the process.  It is the sort of case that makes me ask "where is Batman?"

And I did, substantially increasing my monero stocks - although it took more than a single evening to reach my buy point, and I quickly recycled those gains into fresh powder, for the coming lows.  I have some hope to catch the last few knives of the season again tonight, not because of a rumor, but becase of bitcoin.

That btc, which is complety unfit for use at this point, should rise while xmr, which outshines all other crypto as a long-term reserve asset AND as a liquidity transmission vehicle, barely keeps up, if that...well, it is clearly an irrational mispricing.  It may persist a long while, but in the meantime the resulting volatility makes market making in xmrusd a spectacularly good risk-adjusted return vehicle, so long as gains are booked in the appreciating leg.  I see no reason to hold any btc until the inevitable unlimited/lightning fork is imminent, no matter how bubbly it might get in the meantime.

'No plan survives contact with the enemy', but when it pivots nicely, and comes together nonetheless, the results can be magic.