Oh there are absolutely big smart money players who were very disappointed in the NYC event, as well as some middling holders who, while I might not call them true believers, have been stalwart and steadfast holders, advocates, and in some degree contributors who were sufficiently off-put to change their allocations.  I know this with top-tier probability rather than with observational certainty.  

The real loss is that if the event has been better planned, more suitably advertised, and the content better curated, it could have been a watershed event in the development of Monero, as a software project, as a currency, as a protection of human rights, and as  community.  I hope that the next NYC Monero event will be better planned, further in advance, with better venue stability, a wider range of speakers, more dialogue, more topics, better food, and a 2013 Barolo (which, according to advance reports, is going to be an absolutely legendary vintage). Such an event has the potential, through Monero, of changing the world significantly for the better. A bigger after party would be nice too.

I think it would be good to organize Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sao Paolo, Frankfurt, Paris, London events as well, focusing on centers of fintech, broadly distributed.

Hmm.  Barolo futures may be a correlated asset.

I give it a 38% chance of holding 100 for 5 minutes or more before 2018, reasoning backward from current pricing, assuming the market discounts information efficiently, and applying uninformative priors.

I have pretty much given up on btc at this point.  My last xn with "priority" fee designation in mycelium took over 48 hours to confirm, and from all I hear I was a lucky one.

Conclusion: miners are making book on small blocks, and are disincentivized to either segwit/lightning or unlimited until it comes to the brink of collapse.  How long are they willing to play chicken? I don't know.  It may not end until everyone has gone off the cliff, for all I know.

Well...gee...okaaaay, I guess. But is it technically really murder?

I believe so. In fact it may require the foreign partner to be resident in a nation playing counterparty to the u.k. in a tax treaty.  I am so totally not qualified to give remotely sound u.k. tax advice.  But everybody should at least be aware of this interesting feature, so I recklessly spam it about.

So that they can unjustly enrich themselves at your expense without an excessive fear of civil penalties.  I am frankly surprised that I haven't heard of any actual scammer deaths by mob vigilantism, in crypto, lo these many years.  Wassup with that?  

I think it is pretty annoying that they would imply one thing but rely upon its opposite, yeah, but as long as it is fit for purpose I will use it as necessary.

However, it isn't actually necessary.  Elsewhere it was drawn to my attention that bitfinex xmrusd is actually doing a good tick these days.

Yes, they are effectively non-recourse.  So is BTC.  They are as good or bad as the tether market makes them, and it does make them pretty much on par with USD.  The low was due to a lack of confidence in bitfinex, which is a related party to the tether corp, but I personally think that confidence plunge was by an erroneous analogy to mtgox history, when bfx lost its usd banking relationship with WFC. I think the rebound was pretty predictable, therefore.  Of course tethers should be created whenever they trade above dollars.  Doing otherwise would be proof of incompetence.  Tether supply should be just as unlimited as dollar supply.  Heck, tether corp is practically acting as an instrument of fed policy.

Folks seem to worship BTC a bit much.  It's only as good as it's technology, and it's technology is simply failing.  Failing graduallly, yes, but I have yet to learn of an adequate plan actually being implemented to decisively avert persistent existenstial threats due to scaling problems.  Failing also by being persistently traceable, linkable, for which, again, I know of no adequate plan actually being implemented.

Liquidity is king, this I do understand.  It is tragicomic that ETH, the centralized app coin with tarpit-complete scripting and an attack surface so baroque it would make Rubens blush, is rapidly becoming more reliably and promptly liquid than BTC.  To me this proves that there is a vacuum at the top, and a crying need for XMR to fill it.  Folks talk about how XMR really belongs in the #3 slot, but on fundamentals I find it hard not to conclude that #1 is very much up for grabs. Monero is much more akin to digital gold than either BTC or ETH. It actually does the job that BTC and ETH both fail to do.

But, there I go again.  Always early to every war.  So un-American of me.

I do wish we lived in a world where people cared more about truth and less about group-think, hype, thoughtless habit, and sucking up to the alpha dog.  For one thing, rational actor models would work so much better!

At least not for long.  But there sure are a lot of folks who underweight it.

BTC is getting truly awful lately - mempool backlogs and fees, yo. Some bad BTC press could knock it about quite easily, and that would mean some correlated volatility in XMR, so another visit to the 017s is still quite possible (and so I am hoping, as I am still a bit low on XMR after the last two spikes drained my trading stock).  Market making should be fairly good business here.  

I could wish the USDT market was bigger, as I would rather avoid holding BTC during this period of relative BTC weakness and volatility.  Alas, the turnover is just too low there to usefully trade the vol by hand.  (Also, once my XMR levels are back, I need to book in BTC to fund my constantly losing NQ bear spreads, so USDT is just one more layer of conversion friction.)

Off-topic, yes, but a good read about persistent pathologies in macro:  
http://www.alhambrapartners.com/2017/05/30/the-real-signs-that-matter/
Never lose the big picture - even if it is as warped as a house of mirrors on an acid trip.

Yes, yes, and yes.  I suggest that you decide how much of your income you can afford to waste on lottery tickets in a given week, then spend that much on Monero each week, regardless of price.  Then you get more when price is lower, so your average buy price in a sideways market is lower.  However since price has more upside than downside potential, it would be good to front-load that.  I.e. spend a year's worth of lottery tickets over the next 2 weeks, then sit tight (and remember not to buy more lottery tickets unless your budget goes up).

I am not a qualified financial advisor. It's just the best advice I know how to give to a random human regarding Monero.

I have to agree with this as well.  FP stuck with Monero through the hardest times, and has been a consummate open source manager, AFAICT.  In that role his work has been a great boon. 

But I do wish Smooth had remained more engaged as the voice of team consensus.  I just think his PR sense is better.  Right now it's more like everyone speaking for themselves (or more likely, not speaking at all), with FP's voice naturally dominating since he has been willing to hit the road and make appearances, and tweet like a boss.

I have to agree on this point.  As performance art goes, it was quite a notable piece.  I do not like it one bit, but I do appreciate that aspect. It has...stimulated discussion.

I mostly dislike it because the winning scenario for our species is the diligent preservation of the last remaining fragments of human privacy, dignity and freedom. I don't think the performance helped.  Hopefully, I am wrong.

I was at the NYC event.  The most blatant market manipulation I have observed was the smear campaign which followed.  I have been quiet because I don't like to encourage people to sell, because they will probably harm themselves if they do so, yet I anticipated that the reaction cycle would be adverse to price, once I saw the event, so I have been lying low.  I have now begun to buy again, and so I feel my influence is now less likely to harm anyone.

I am still very saddened by the intense negative emotion that has been expressed here. Surely you must see that such effusions are harmful to yourself.  While you cannot undo the damage you caused to yourself, at least learn from this, and do not let facile emotions dictate words and deeds so incautiously in future.  

As for fluffyponyza's tweets, I think they were very ill-considered.  It seems particularly poor taste to say that pre-announcements would be unethical, after having made a pre-announcement.  The fact that it was intended as a deceit does not make it more ethical.  The logic of that is so bizarrely twisted that it saddens me.

I think the marvelous progress made by endogenic on iOS and Android support is the truly newsworthy part of the presentation.  Surae's discussion of the process of cryptographic review was also of greater importance than fluffyponyza's troll.  Unfortunately these are being overlooked, because they can not be exploited to make you puke up cheap coins.

A note to everyone jumping onboard for a pump and dump: Monero doesn't do that.  If you dump, you will probably find yourself coming back later, only to find your next buy to be half the size of your last buy.  Okay I admit there have been two spikes which retraced,  but since then Bitcoin has doubled.  How many people who sold at 2016’s ATH would be twice as wealthy today if only they had simply held through thick and thin, fair and stormy alike?  I daresay the overwhelming majority.  Don't be distracted by shiny Dunning-Krugerrands.  Stack your Monero gradually, persistently and you may end up like Warren Buffett (but younger prettier and more righteous).   Throw your chips on red, and you will end up like all the other nameless bums on the park benches who gambled away baby's milk money.

There may be several more 100% gains to come, so don't feel like you lost your opportunity.  I recommend spending a fixed dollar/euro/yen amount every week, ignoring price. This works well for most people, if they persist.

The main thing to learn from your case is that you don't benefit from xmr you don't hold.  All the many hours I have spent trading were of insignificant  value compared to just being there, bags full, when the moves come.

We try to keep price talk in the speculation thread: bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=753252.new#new
That way, this thread is more useful to inform about the project and software.  I shall reply there.

True.  More like "embrace and extend"

We are now at the top of the trading band since may 14.  If it breaks 227, then a spike up is likely, with the old resistance acting as support.  In that scenario we might see a lot of long-term capital come in, diversification flows from other speculative winners especially.  If it rejects this level, it is likely to try a fib level retrace.

"Buy the rumor, sell the news" is the venerable market truism.  I hope to catch some falling knives tomorrow evening.

I would go further and say that added features actually detract from the suitability of a cryptographic tokens to serve a monetary role.  Liquidity abhors friction.  For that reason, the upside tail on xmr is much longer and fatter.