Just saying.  

Looks like we might be seeing some of Febo's short squeeze right now.

Is there live data on that? I cant remember that site with the short interest.  I hope a lot more gets squeezed,and I hope the shorters lose their asses.  Seriously, I am a chill fellow that generally does not wish harm on others... but there are shenanigans being done on Monero, and I want BLOOD out of the perps.  I hope they get hurt bad.  Bankrupt ... lost all their bitcoin collateral -- consider jumping level bad.  I *almost* feel guilty... but nah.

-edit-
Here it is... May their pain be strong.

https://datamish.com/xmrusd/14d

Lord no.  All I am saying is we have gone parabolic and the daily RSI is entering overbought territory.  Not only am I not selling, but I also think (as I sort of said) it could go further still before correcting. 

But from a technical standpoint we are getting a little overbought.  I don't know what happens to RSI when you keep going.  Does it correct down, or just get slammed into the top?  I am not a technical wiz, nor am I a trader, but I have noticed that RSI over 70 frequently precedes a correction.

If you are talking about Chartbuddy coming back then I feel like just about no one would object.  Well before I ever posted on this particular thread I used to drop in just to see CB's latest 3D graph.

As to what has changed since then?  Man there are LOTS of new metrics...  new parts of the protocol.  I am certain there could be some "upgrades".

A cAPSLOCK Saturday Long Post brought to you by COFFEE, "the liquid that keeps me going".

According to Scott Adams our brains are "Pattern Recognition Machines".  I think he's on to something.  But like him, I also believe we are not really very good ones.  AI and the like will end up running circles around us in the end.  People get stuck in some of those patterns.  We process our world using allegories.  It's why memes work.  We have a top-40 station playing our patterns to us in our heads all day long.  The ones we have learned.  The ones that benefit us and give us mental handles to manage what we do, and how we think.  And the ones that trap us. The old patterns we all fight to overcome.  And I do not think it's obvious how deep these patterns go.  

For example... take driving.  If you are old enough to remember the days before maps on your smart phone, you remember using a paper map, or just knowing your way around town.  When I have to go to the airport there is a set path I follow.  It's worked great for all the years I have used it, and I have never missed a flight on account of being late.  It is a GREAT route!  It has worked for YEARS. Perfectly! IT IS THE ROUTE I USE. IT IS PERFECT.

Well...  Then one day I decided to let Google tell me which way to go since it can help route around traffic.  That's helpful tech right there.  And it turns out it was a slow traffic day.  Nothing to route around.  But Google suggested a route that was one of the most ass-backwards things I have ever seen.  It was taking me way further south, and then west than my more sensible PERFECT route that I have been using forever.  Why on Earth would it do this?  Why have me wind through all those intersections, and take a highway that is literally going the wrong direction for a while?  Why on Earth?

Turns out the answer is simple.  That route takes 10 minutes less time than the one I have used for so many years. For 30 years I have been adding 10 minutes to my trip to the airport without knowing it.  It has added up to hours in the car I could have otherwise spent doing something better like making another pot of coffee.

Wow!  Thanks Google.  Actually one small way you guys stuck to "Don't be evil"!  But then this deeper thought hit me like an avalanche.  Driving is one thing... I mean, who really cares if I have been going the long way.  It's no big deal.  But how many other ways do I have of processing the world that are sub-optimal?  How many "routes" does my brain take that are really not the best choice?  How many patterns have I deeply burned into my mind and muscle memory that I actually think are the best possible way to do or understand something, when in fact they are trapping me?  Limiting me?  Holding me back?  Time to put some whisky in the coffee.  Damn.

Well understanding money is a fundamental aspect of living in the world that we have all gotten really good at.  Or bad, depending how you look at it.  And understanding Bitcoin is one level more abstracted since it is mostly novel.  

We all know from trying to explain Bitcoin to a friend or relative how it's kind of hard to understand, even though it's not an overly complex concept.

We use patterns to try to figure it out.  Allegories to communicate what it is, and how it might be different than what we are used to. "It's like the 'email of money'".  "It's like PayPal, but without a trusted third party".  It is "Peer to peer electronic cash" (The book of Satoshi 1:1).  NO!  It's "digital gold!". NO!!! PEER TO PEER DIGITAL CASH!  Nuh uh!  GOLD!

We have been going back and forth for the last 7 years or so on that last one.  And it has driven the narratives to this day.  And we have pitted those two concepts against each other like roosters in a cockfight.  "Since the community has chosen the 'digital gold narrative', small transactions will be too expensive. BUT ALL HAIL NGU TECHNIOLOGY!".  Saint Saylor has sworn upon a stack of White Papers that Bitcoin cannot threaten the dollar because it is just "digital gold", not transactional.  Roger has frothed and almost popped his eyes out of his head insisting that 'Bitcoin Core' is broken and if we do not use it as cash (BCH Please!) then Africa will burn and babies will die!!!  I'm sorry if I get worked up.. I JUST REALLY CARE ABOUT THE BABIES! OR:  "The banks have infiltrated Blockstream and set us on the path to the new world order which is just the same old one in disguise."

But here's the thing... are we really taking the best route to the airport?  Or are we stuck in our same old patterns?  Are we arguing about what Bitcoin really, really fundamentally IS?  Or are we really just letting two memes fight to the death in the land of narratives designed to help us understand a NEW thing using our OLD concepts?

We can't count on layer 2 to solve the problems!  We are stealing revenue from the miners and giving it to Blockstream!  Lightning is kludgy.  We will never be able to open enough channels to make it work.  Liquid is TRUSTED!  They just use the word "federated". PayPal and Square are evil and if you let them hold your coins you will likely never see them again! If we don't scale on chain we are going against the Holy Scriptures.

This tech will never work.  Things we already know how to use are better.  It does not fit into the tried and true systems we already use.  These damn horseless carriages are going to spook all the horses on the road.  It will never work.  There are too many problems to solve.


In my lifetime I have seen many technologies emerge.  The Internet.  Pocket super computers.  Digital music.  And the old guard fought it, tried to capture it, and eventually learned to live in harmony with it in each case.  The smart ones have even started to make money again in spite of it.  One thing I have seen over and over is technology will find a way.

In the early days of the internet there were arguments about how the network should scale that will seem very familiar to us today.  The original TCP protocol contained both datagram transmission and routing, but some early tech folks, who could see a little further than their peers, began to realize it would be important to move the different parts of the protocol into separate layers for it to work well. Jon Postel, an early internet pioneer, was extremely prescient to point out:


And TCP evolved into TCP/IP.  It was sort of the "Segwit" of 1973.  And now not only can we send rudimentary text messages back and forth to people around the world, but we can watch a HD video documentary about the birth of the internet using protocols LAYERED on top of that very network itself!  Nifty!  Oh and thanks, Jon.

Water finds the easiest path from the mountain to the sea, and technology finds a way to scale.  All our mental pictures we try to use to explain it all will not make one WHIT of difference to Bitcoin in the end.  Is it digital Gold?  Yes.  Peer to Peer Electronic Cash? Yes.  Expensive to transact in?  Yes.  Almost free to transact in?  Yes.  Something powerful organizations will try to control?  Yes.  Will it help the babies?  I bet so, yes.

Here is a little tool that just begins to pull the hood back on the future:  https://coinos.io


That's just another web wallet cAPS.  True.  It's also custodial!  Yuck! True.  What's so special about it?  Glad you asked!

You can send and receive Bitcoin to and from this wallet.  Nothing new there.

You can send to a bitcoin address like:
Or you can send to a Liquid address like:
Or you can even use a lightning invoice (or lnurl!) like:
(feel free to load those up... I promise it will go to a good cause (beer/coffee/whiskey))

And then you can send value OUT of it using any of those three systems as well.  It does not have to do any calculations... it's all just Bitcoin.  Send it 0.0013 BTC (~$75 today) and you can send that out on any of the three layers.  Base/LN/Liquid.  Does not matter... Same/same.  1BTC = 1BTC.  Only the fees and security model will change.  Coffee?  Let's use the lightning network!  Groceries?  Maybe Liquid.  Lambo?  Let's use the base chain.  Oh and while we are at it, I don't suppose we will want to buy our new Lambo with a web wallet.

But you get the point, right?

It blows up all our models.  Digital gold cannot be transactional?  I beg your pardon?  People can stop saying things like:  "Since the Bitcoin community has chosen the path of Digital Gold, Bitcoin will never be able to ______" because Bitcoin is not limited by the models we use to describe it!  Bitcoin is NOT digital gold.  Or even peer to peer electronic cash (may Satoshi shine his wisdom upon us).  At least not all the time.  It can change form at the touch of a finger.  (I was going to say "click of a mouse" but even that 'idea pattern' is starting to get a little old).

Things change.  Money is changing.  And the patterns we used yesterday to understand how it works are breaking down. And new ones are emerging faster than we poor pattern recognition machines can really understand.

Honey Badger don't care.  And tech will find a way.  A better way than we had before.  Better in ways we can only begin to imagine.

CCMF!

You know what?

I can feel it again.  Can you guys feel it?  It's strong at the moment.  It's getting REALLY strong.

I am like an animal that knows an earthquake is coming... I am starting to get that feeling again.  And yeah, I am sober. But I think Monero is about to fulfill what we have been sitting here knowing would eventually happen for 6 years.  And yeah.  I am talking about price.  But price is just the symptom.  People are starting to wake up.

Bitcoin is 12 years old now?  Something like that.  And when it was new, those who saw it, began to understand it.  Just began.  And they started playing with it, and hoarding it, and reading about it and thinking about it, and over time understanding it.  It took a while.  And then some of us saw something interesting.  One of the tradeoffs bitcoin made created a ledger that was completely transparent. Uh oh.  Silk road came, and then went.  Ross went to jail.  And Bitcoin, which had cut it's teeth on the dark net began to be understood further.  It was not safe to use it for that... only a few got it at first.  More darknets came and went as law enforcement figured out how to trace Bitcoin... 

And along came Cryptonote, Bytecoin and Monero.  Yeah we all know the story.  Some of us were HERE for it.  Risto (RIP?), and his castle, and his God complex.  A coin with no GUI wallet forever.  Little by little the code was cleaned up, improved.  Quietly the foundation was built... stronger and stronger.  But it was still hard to use.  And the same folks that could not figure out a CLI wallet didn't really understand the WHY for monero in the first place.  They were more interested in a "World computer", Cryptokitties, or the newest acronym the herd was chanting as the makers of those scam dumped their bags on the masses.  But Monero just kept going.  Step by step adding more and more iron clad privacy.  Some saw it early on as a compliment to Bitcoin.  The private ledger.  A different trade off.  Doing one of the few things Bitcoin just could not do.  Some saw it as what bitcoin was supposed to have been in the first place.

But still.  99.99xxx% of the world did not REALLY understand Bitcoin, much less the nuanced difference that Monero brought.

Yet more darknet markets popped up primarily using Bitcoin.  And they kept getting busted over and over...  some began to use Monero... but it was a minority player.  And would end up in the reports of the takedowns.  Somethng like:


Here in this thread we all danced that day... We knew what that meant.  "an unknown amount of Monero".

It was working.  It was doing exactly what it was made for.  NO.  Not being used to buy and sell drugs.  Being used as private, fungible cash. 

Fast forward to today.  The biggest DNM is now Monero only.  And it's still trucking.  Because Monero works.  It works as money, and it works in the absolutely most dangerous and hostile environment possible.

And now we are *JUST* on the dawn of the beginnings of the Bitcoin revolution. "In hindsight it was inevitable".  Remember when you first understood that?  Well before 2021.  But still it took you a little while.  You had to digest what Bitcoin was.  AND what it was not.  But NOW the WORLD is waking up to Bitcoin.  It is understanding that it offers something completely new at exactly the right time.  And just like a few of us began to see back in 2014.  There are some things it does not do.  There NEEDS to be a private bitcoin.  These people will come to that understanding much more quickly.  Take a bow gents. It's your shoulders they are standing on.    You were the ones that ran Monero up the first bull market.

And you get to watch as the new blood starts to trickle... then pour... then flood into Monero like a torrent.  Because people are going to realize it offers something they need.  Not only should they buy a little because it might get more valuable... but they NEED it.  Not to buy weed, but to protect their financial privacy.

Monero has been undervalued for a LONG LONG time.  It cannot remain so.

They are coming.  And the team behind this project has made the protocol and the software as ready as they possibly could have.

I can feel it, my friends.  It's really strong.  And this is still the calm before the storm.

Can you feel it?

I think you are right.

Daily RSI getting a little overheated.



But I would love to see us keep going.  And I think the fundamentals are starting to gather like storm clouds.   

The more I think American Pegasus' prediction about gvmt folks hiding value here the more it seems extremely likely.  Latest "Rabbit Hole Recap" has Matt and Marty talking about Ukrainian gvmt officials holding 5 digits of corn.  How do you think a public figure there feels with the world knowing they are bitcoin billionaires?  They are at least starting to dip their toes into this... why wouldn't they?  Even if you lost some value to volatility, where do you want your holdings? Where all the shady criminal types can see it and come up with a plan to kidnap your daughter?  Or hidden?

In that part of the world (and really everywhere) either your finances end up "at the bottom of the sea" after a boating accident, or *YOU* do.

It is becoming OBVIOUS that Monero is the most undervalued crypto project in the whole damn bunch.  We have always known it, of course.  We are the choir.  But the congregants are starting to wake up.

Hold tight brothers.

I don't know why that whole thing just feel so meh to me.  If I did not think the current BTC fundamentals were so strong I'd say it's marking the top.

cryptomanaranadingdong most certainly ranks up near the top of contrarian signals.

THIS is the guy who is joining the "Crypto whatever Initiative" as well as sending his  CRYPTO company public next week.

*sigh* that Thiel quote is grossly misrepresented.  But whatevs...  There is no stopping the FUD train.

When called out by fluffy, one of the devs claimed it had nothing to do with Monero (even though it inherited just about all of Moneros code on top of CN) and dissed the Monero codebase.

They did not attribute Monero at all.

The premined the ENTIRE THING and sold it for 80c a coin, launching themselves into instant shitcoin glory to be seen on CMC?  And making it a security for sure.

They are using RIPPLE's consensus mechanism (lol).

The thing is smelly as hell... which means it will probably take over the world. :/

I think we DO agree mostly.  And I agree that BTC as a store of value is use case #1.  It's just that the digital, ephemeral nature of BTC lends itself to technological solutions with few boundaries which will happen quickly and take it into the realm of a transactional asset as well.  I also think use case #1 is really the only one we should be focusing on now... at least in certain contexts.

I have to weigh in on this 1 millionth Big/Small block detour.

People still see this as entirely black and white.  Bitcoin chose small therefore it = digital gold.  Period.

This completely ignores the fact that more and more folks are working on the tech behind doing transactions on layers.  Spending bitcoin quickly (and even in a trust minimized way) is already working somewhat, and will only work better and better with MANY choices and tradeoffs.  Just like you can spend the USD with credit cards, checks, cash, payal etc, and see that settle in your account daily, and have those banks settle via FEDwire Bitcoin is starting to work the same way.

With ONE importnt difference.  WE are fedwire.  You do not have to be a bank to use the BTC blockchain.

"But it will be too expensive to transact on the base chain!"  Says who?  You can still do it.  Anyone can do it.  Having small transactions priced out is compitition and we have chosen that path to secure the best distributed/decentralized ffuture possible for the base layer.

Someone fleeing their oppressive country cannot use Fedwire to take their savings with them.  But they can bitcoin. (Or lightning, or liquid, etc)

Bitcoin WILL be used transactionally.  Folks (ex Saylor) are knowingly downplaying this right now EXACTLY because the longer we can keep the "digital gold only" narrative going the longer the reserve banks will drag their asses.

But we should know better gents...

Little... but still good!

This is an interesting write up.  Also interesting it got tagged as an "unreliable source".  (edit- Looks like a bot did this because there was a cointelegraph link in it)

Someone is spending tens of millions of dollars to suppress Monero

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/mkj20r/someone_is_spending_tens_of_millions_of_dollars/

I know it's OT, but I always enjoy non US folks seeing him in a balanced light.  He was lots of theater and entertainment, for sure.  It is frustrating living here in this polarized hellscape with a broken and manipulative media force feeding a single narrative into the culture 24/7.  I think he was terribly misunderstood.  And it was mostly his own fault.  But I really believe he was an outsider, and I think TPTB made sure to FIX that this time around.  I was not fond of him in many ways and are somewhat glad he's faded into the background, lol, but I wish he had more chance to "shake up the government".  I certainly liked that part, though it has destabilized the whole world somewhat.  It also pulled the masks off just about ALL the institutions.  No one sees the media, the FBI/CIA/NSA, the government, the tech giants etc. the same way, and that is a net good.

Oh well...

A problem with being much smarter than others is you can operate more levels deep than the rest.  I think he was clearly saying that bitcoin, like gold, or the euro can be used by China to try to displace the dollar.

A combination of 1 level thinking along with the bias against a worldview that can ACCEPT bitcoin is making the news outlets report it in this anti-bitcoin fashion.

I think Thiel's IMPLICATION is China is getting out ahead of the west on it, and therefore can begin to take advantage of it to help dethrone the dollar.  The obvious solution is not "OUTLAW BITCOIN" unless you just want to speed that process up.  It is "GET IN THE GAME ASAP".

If I am right, then Thiel should have thought to be more clear in that regard. 

Damn JJG you like to wag both your finger and your tongue.

Thinking if there is some kind of bet that can be made for whether or not NYA 2.0 attempts to make changes to the protocol...  It would need to be specific.

Interesting show.  The host (Doug?  Does he post here?  Dunno) is sort of the super Monero fanboy confirmation bias guy... and Todd is the ultimate adversarial thinker.  So it's like putting baking soda with vinegar.

In the end the both did well and made it interesting.