This is probably posturing. SYRIZA (Tsipras, Varoufakis etc) as a party is committed to the eurozone / euro etc. Varoufakis' theories in particular were shot down in 2013 when Cyprus was facing a liquidity crisis. Varoufakis always maintained (prior to that) that the ECB will never resort to that - yet it did. And people were crowding his blog and telling him "Yannis, what do you have to say now?"... and he said "Aaaahhh Greece might be different because it's bigger than Cyprus", LOL.

Costas Lapavitas, another economist that has been elected with SYRIZA, is a straight shooter in relation to the euro and the national currency. He said that it is in Greece's best interest to erase debt and leave the euro. Dimitris Kazakis, another economist (not of SYRIZA) also maintains the same position. Lafazanis of SYRIZA is also in the same wavelength.

The whole political spectrum in Greece is sold-out. To give you an idea, in the question of whether Greeks prefer

-memorandums and the euro
or
-no memorandums and the drachma

...the majority says the later. Yet the parliamentary representation of a ~52-60% wave in society is just ...5% in terms of parliament seats. Why? Because unlike Italy, where ITexit is the political position of most opposition parties and leaders, in Greece most parties are aligned to the euro which has destroyed us.

The treaty of Maastricht predicted sovereign debt level at <60% as a barrier of entry to the euro. Greece signed up for the euro at 100% debt which was 70% over the target. At that point (2001), a mountain of drachma-denominated debt was converted to euros that could never be repaid - only rolled over to the next bond buyer. It was the scam of the century. 8-9 years later it all collapsed as bond buyers didn't want to take the risk.

SYRIZA and Varoufakis maintain that if we erase half the debt we can actually have a viable debt. This is bullshit. With 90% (instead of 180% now) debt-to-gdp ratio we are going nowhere. Even if the entire debt was erased, Greece would still have to go out and get brand new debt. Why? Because of its banking system that is not supported by ECB directly. The ECB requires the country to guarantee the loans, creating new government debt.

Cyprus didn't have an issue of debt, yet due to a few billions of liquidity missing from the Cyprus banking system, they now have a debt issue for this very reason.

With the national currency you can automatically guarantee your banks (in the new currency, say the Drachma) and then proceed with your economic planning to restore development. You might face a -20 / -30% one-off drop in GDP but then you climb back up in a very rapid manner. As it happened here, we have the -30% in GDP since 2009 but no recovery in sight. Debt went from 120% to 180% and unemployment from 7-8% to 30%.

Everything that we were told that would happen if we left the euro, actually happened while in it: Unemployment, problem in acquiring fuel, food, medicine (not because they were not available on the market, but because people's purchasing power dropped dramatically), drop in purchasing power, people losing their houses etc. The whole situation would have been resolved and Greece would be ok if in 2010 we erased the debt and got on to the national currency.

As for Oblox's question about the national currency and trade, well, international trade is always conducted through the "buffer" of foreign reserves that a country has. All the european countries outside the euro do that, as did the eurozone countries prior to entering the euro, as do all other countries globally. It's not an issue as long as your trade of goods and services is balanced. In other words if you import 50bn euro stuff and export 40bn euro stuff, you need 10bn euro in loans - or you'll have to prioritize imports. Greek imports are larger than the exports but in the services sector (primarily ships and tourism) we have a huge surplus which balances both out. So goods+services together are balanced in terms of in/outflows.

Being a Greek I always found Varoufakis to be full of shit (even a puppet of the Elite that plays controlled opposition role) - and I'm from the "anti-memorandum / anti-troika" group so to speak.

The reason is that his agenda is more pro-european than pro-greek. He is pro-euro (the currency) in a degree that is disgusting. Greece needs to have a sovereign currency. The euro and the euro-policies have buried us alive. His "no" to the troika this afternoon is actually a no to the low-level employees and beaurocrats that were checking in on the government progress. He said he is committed to the ecb, imf and eu and keeping government surpluses running though.

By the way he dislikes bitcoin, its apolitical nature and he has drawn parallels to tulip mania. That's another reason why he is full of shit.

Not really... Traders positioned themselves slightly above Otoh... then when a few dumps happened they got a few thousands coins... now they want to make some profit so, predictably, they want to sell it above 0.0066-67... let's say somewhere near 0.007-0.0073. That's all there is to it me thinks.

Let's see if the whale dumper dumps...

WTF

I told ya that it was at least 5bn when they were claiming that the bank run was just 2.5bn...

Gold sovereign coins (the most popular gold coin in circulation in Greece) is sold by the national bank with quite a hefty premium (currently at 296 euros vs 289 yesterday), an indication that a lot of money has been converted to gold coins and gold coins are now much harder to find (hence the large premium).

It still had 4 times less coin generation than what LTC currently has... and it was also the benchmark coin, not just a coin.


Inflation is a huge factor in cryptocurrencies, at least as long as the investment money flowing into crypto is relatively limited.

DRK is rarer than both LTC and BTC, in market cap, coins generated per day and max coins that will ever be mined. Its upward momentum is easier as measured by price per unit. That's aside from other things that DRK can do (which LTC can't).

LTC has a "fundamentals" problem. No one needs to badmouth it or hate it so that it can self-destroy itself.

I said, back when LTC cost 10$ per coin, that 28800 coins per day X 10$ = 288.000 USD per day = 105mn USD per year required just to buy annual production.

You sit there and ask yourself: Are there people who are willing to buy >100mn USD worth of Litecoins over a year just to keep its price steady? If the answer is no, then you better buy something else. It's really that simple.

The analysis does not factor for the "how many coins are mined by miners" parameter.

Darkcoin has a low emission rate of just 2800 coins per day of which only 80% (currently lower) go to miners and the rest to masternode owners. In other words, inflation (no matter how the coins were mined) cannot seriously account for a drastic drop in price. The situation with Mintpal had a far more serious effect since there was dumping like no tomorrow at unreasonable prices (down to 0.002x). Mintpal had something like 400-500.000 DRKs in their wallets.

I believe it can only spike to a low price but not actually stay there. There are people who cashed BTCs from $600-$1000 range and would gladly buy "a few" back at 10-15x discount - to repeat what they've done in the past. The thing with cheap coins is that it doesn't need much money to sweep the offers.

When you have no clue of the motives or the nature of the BTCs being dumped you cannot assume any profit-making possibility. I dumped a few DRKs when it was around 0.003x (and someone was selling even lower at 0.002x) so I was like "ok I'll buy more from the dumper". The rationale was sell @ 0.003x and buy back at high 0.002x or low 0.0003x... it didn't happen and lost these DRKs for nothing. I had to accept my bad trade and rebuy (less of them) at 0.0045.

When the dumping is massive and irrational it's probably hacked / stolen coins. You can't tell when the dump is ending, how low the dumper is going etc etc. It's pretty risky stuff. The success of a "good trade" is really a gamble under these circumstances (if you want to sell and rebuy). What's less of a gamble is having orders set to buy oversold levels (-20% or more from prior market value). Stuff tends to spike back up after dumps. Usually...

As I see it, it depends on the investment horizon one has.

If you are invested into crypto for the long run, it doesn't matter what price BTC has today, in a month or six months. It might interest you though what its price would be in two years. And if you can multiply your USD-equivalent of your portfolio in said timeframe by investing in altcoins that outperform BTC, all the better.

If, on the other hand, you are a day trader where you pick up massive losses by buying high and selling low, that's another issue altogether.

In terms of politics, there is an issue that a change in government could lead to gr-exit (greece exiting the euro). In that scenario, withdrawing euro (in cash) or moving the money abroad in foreign banks is seen as a better alternative compared to a new national currency which is expected to be devalued after its introduction.

If it happens, and say the new national currency starts from 1:1 and it goes to something like 4:1 or 3:1 vs the euro, then someone who withdrew their money in euros prior to grexit will be able to buy more national currency after that. The euro is already pretty sufficient for what some Greeks want to do (so in that sense there is no real need for cryptocurrencies). This is unlike the Cyprus issue with monetary controls after the bank bail-in.

Cryptos are great for situations where

a) The national currency is weak (Greece has the euro), precious metal buying is restricted and a stable and internationally accepted cryptocurrency can act as value of storage / wealth preservation tool.

b) A country has imposed severe international trading restrictions for imports, bank wires etc - usually because it has run dry in foreign reserves. Crypto is very good for that. Greece doesn't really need foreign reserves as it has the euro which is widely accepted. Cyprus was running low on their euros due to the ECB not supporting the Cypriot banks.

In any case, both parties that are running first and second for the Greek elections don't have gr-exit in their agendas.

I'd estimate at least 5bn...

The important thing is to have a dev that can code. If he can do that, then he can also change or adapt the code to things that will come up.

Interesting that DRK is becoming the #1 coin of choice (after BTC) for gambling and precious metal buying...

One way would be to use CPU only algo which would make CPU mining from the wallet relevant, but it might create new issues with rented hashpower or botnets.

An alternative would be to heavily optimize CPU mining to increase speed by 3-5-10 times. Or create a seamless GPU-mining experience from the wallet.

The only "problem" of SDC is

a) that people have been burned off too many times by scamcoins / p&d coins that were trying to get into the anon market with false promises

b) the lack of technical knowledge to evaluate whether a solution is real or scam (which led to (a) in the first place)

For me it is clear that SDC is in the running in the anon market along with DRK and Cryptonote coins. Is any solution perfect? No, as most solutions have big tradeoffs, but at least they aren't vaporware / promises / "white papers" etc.

Technically speaking, it'd be interesting for the dev team to run a testnet simulation to check anonymity and bloat / scaling impact, as well as spam attack vectors against the blockchain.

I've stated it before but online games are the way... massive user base (tens of millions of young gamers) who are tech-knowledgeable and won't have an issue using cryptos.

Want to sell a virtual item? A game account? Something in-game related? BTC is the way... Same for game companies... they can have users use BTC for paying for their premium stuff or reward players with BTC for winning something, like a tournament or in-game achievements.

Actually it was the wall that moved up from 57 to 63...otherwise the 20k buyer would still be waiting