Is it true?

…and the general ball-park of caution / responsibility is fine. But when memes start appearing on Twitter where the words “Don’t Buy Monero” feature heavily (without context) then there is the potential for a problem… and protagonists of those words (if intended positively) need to reflect very carefully whether it will be received in the manner in which it is delivered.

There’s a big difference between offering responsible speculative advice, and inadvertently creating a confused and auto-toxic meme that will only hinder the project later on.

Specifically: As Monero’s promotional dimension moves into the arena of television interviews, we don’t want the host’s last words to be: “You heard it hear folks… Don’t Buy Monero.”

It is still reasonable general audience advice. In one interview, I heard fluffypony add something to effect of "If you are an extreme speculator then sure go ahead and speculate". For anyone else, the advice is perfectly okay. This is not a proven asset, it isn't in a proven asset class. There can be bugs that completely destroy the currency.

As for "extreme speculators", I question how many people really are that. Extreme speculator to me, means that you know that your investment has a significant chance to lose all or most of its value and accept that when buying in. That takes significant financial and emotional preparation and resources. How many people here on the speculation thread raise a stink and declare XMR dead every time the price drops by 20-30% (still 70-80% less of a drop than the the full-loss scenario)? What happens when we see a 90% drop, as has happened to XMR before, and to BTC multiple times?

How about, "If you are going to be upset when your investment loses 20-30% of its value (not to mention 90% or more), then don't buy Monero"? In practice that's going to be the same thing for most of the audience.

Here’s Why "Don’t Buy Monero" Should Now Be Retired.

Anyone with even just a basic understanding of astrophysics knows that in order for a rocket to get to the moon it requires the passing of multiple stages: construction, ignition, liftoff and the dispensation of various different modules of the rocket before the final zero-gravitational stretch of just the moon-lander. (Or there abouts.)

The “Don’t Buy Monero” meme is one of those stages that has served us well as we continue our journey through the cosmos, but now has the potential to be a detriment and requires separation.

It was a wise-warning spawn out of responsible consideration for investors in an age where such investors might throw money at anything, with little consideration as to whether the technology was stable, secure, credible and of a moral foundation.

The basic understanding was: Look, this technology is experimental. You are not buying an iMac here. Anything, at any point in time could go seriously wrong and your “investment” would be genuinely at peril.

One only has to look at the recent CoinDash farce to appreciate how easily such calamities can arise, which is exactly the reason why Monero has consistently erred on the side of caution without the evangelical “Buy Me Buy Me” approach that typically tends to surround most projects in this space.

However, the counterpoint to this understanding is one of perceived confidence: “We don’t have the confidence in our project and neither should you so don’t invest.”

There is a point at which this projectable lack of confidence within a meme becomes detrimental to our long-term mission, particularly if combined with other memes that haven’t arisen from within, but elsewhere from nefarious actors, and wouldn’t be able to be detected as separate memes from the cursory glances of casual newcomers. (For example: “Don’t Buy Monero…. because MoneroLink” etc).

There is a point where we have to be able to say “Okay, we are now approaching a stage where we feel that the technological foundations of Monero are such that the usual common sense approaches to investing apply. We are confident that the Monero blockchain is reaching a stage where yes, you *can* trust this with your life as often cited as the example case-usage, and yes, in its capacity as a storage of wealth - a currency - it now has the supremacy over its competitors with a view for it being trusted as such.

I’m not necessarily advocating a complete U-turn and waving the “Buy Monero!” flag. But as the rocketship continues its mission and we can afford to make strategic dispensations with redundant novelty sound-bites, a progressive and intelligent rephrasing of our position could, and should, start to occur.

(In my opinion.)

It will bring us Mandatory RingCT and increasing the minimum ring size. I am not sure if this minimum ring size is set yet. Debate is there form February. Original idea was to be 4 from 2 years ago if I am not mistaken. Now will most likely be closer to 10.

Higher ring size you use more anonymous are your transactions but also bigger is transaction, so there needed to be found the perfect balance.

Got a link? I am surprised it took him this long. Andreas knows, and I listened to quite a few of his early talks, that Bitcoin and now Etherreum have an Achilles heel: fungibility / privacy. And Andreas is very keen on his (digital) privacy. As a computer nerd you simply can't not like Monero's core features, and there is nothing like it..

What about the September fork?

Supply consists of dishoarding, transaction churn, and mining.  Mining means almost nothing, relative to daily volume.  Dishoarding seems to have come to its end, at this price, leaving market makers and transactional flips to dominate the exchanges.  The flip rate appears to be, therefore, about 3mm USD per diem.  Using pq=mv and assuming the pessimal velocity of 365 / escrow time (21d) = 17.4, we can estimate the transactional float as 3mm*365 / 17.4 = m = 63mm USD = 1.3mm XMR. (The global velocity is then about 1.6, which is rather low for a healthy economy but pretty good compared to major global currencies ATM).

Assuming reserve demand to be stable (again, a pessimistic assumption), doubling the transaction rate while holding velocity steady should double the clearing price.  Pessimistically, then, the clearing price should be directly proportional to transaction flow rate.

There are thus three ways to increase the clearing price: Add reserve demand (reducing the effective float), add transaction demand (increasing the size of the economy) or decrease the velocity (reducing transactional supply).

In fact, I would expect velocity of the effective float to rise rather than fall, so hope of future appreciation is either speculation (on the madness of crowds), or else it is dependent on the fundamental assumption of rising reserve and/or transactional demand.  In practice these two demand factors are highly correlated:  observing a rising transactional demand motivates an increased reserve demand, while a rising price motivates dishoarding, which is subject to re-hoarding in a process of saver churn, known as "stronger hands".  

Notionally, the reserve market is discounting the future transactional market as well as its own dishoarding rate.  R_now = R_eq  + r * Dt * (dM/dt + dR/dP) , where Dt is the equilibrium horizon, P is the clearing price, dR/dP is a negative value, - dR/dP << dM/dt, and r is a discounting ratio per unit of t (time).  For fixed velocity, then, knowing the growth rate of the transactional market, dM/dt, would allow one to estimate the mean discounting rate and the dishoarding rate by observing a sequence of equilibrium prices, and hence provide a prediction of the price over time as a functor parameterized by the equilibrium horizon.  (I made one particularly egregious simplification, of the kind that motivates the moniker "dismal science", in order to keep this post short).

I am slowly buying below 45$ these days, and my daily return on market making capital is now less than 50bp.  I have returned to booking gains as XMR until the next time XMR exceeds $60, whereupon I intend to return to booking gains in BTC.

Except Coinbase is totally fucked right now.
I would advise anyone to not use their service. If you have any issue with your account you will be waiting weeks or months for a response from support.
They are too busy spending money on facebook ads to hire personnel or make improvements to the website/ backend.
(Website was down several times yesterday.)
Maybe things will improve in the coming months but for now Monero doesn't need them to be successful. Its way undervalued and if you don't own some of these coins in a few years you are going to regret it. I would be very surprised if XMR wasn't $100 by this time next year.
Monero is the GNU Linux of the Crypto world. It doesn't need ads or corporate sponsors. Hard work and good code will prevail over time. This is a long-term project.

Not synced wallet? You think they did not synced their wallet and then they just turn it off?  Can you read again what you wrote loud and listen what you posted
 and think it ower.
Poloniex is updating their wallets. They do this periodically with every single coin. There is not a moment when one of coins is not under this maintenance.

Today is the fourth day that Monero withdrawals have been disabled on Poloniex.

Monero is already overtaken by waves in price considering that waves has too much big volume compared to monero. XMR need to do something.

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 really don’t think that will happen any time soon (although I could be wrong). First, the cryptocurrency market is international, meaning your “scammer” could be halfway around the world making it very hard for you to try to get revenge. Second, I really don’t see somebody who wants to get revenge over a failed cryptocurrency having the resources to pack up and track somebody down. Third, is the actual killing part. It’s very hard to kill somebody and get away with it, at least in a 1st world country, not to mention you never know what condition your victim is in (for all you know he could have a gun in his back pocket or a black belt).