Yes, it's starting to look cheap to me, but not by a lot.  I am hoping for another mad dumper, which would almost certainly flip the trend.  Short of that, the best we can hope for is a wall of worry to at least slow things down for a while.

It's nice to get notified, but only if you...get notified.  Anyhoe, my issue was, once more for emphasis, not Poloniex' problem.

My polo problems were actually due to my mail transfer agent.  Maintaining an MTA is too much drag, but I definitely need a new one.  Any good mail hosts that take XMR?

Protonmail.com does domains now, I see.  Now all I need is an xmr funded card on the visa network...

I would be interested to know of anyone who has been able to withdraw any crypto from poloniex in the past 8 hours or so.

You can take the flyer on usdt.

Madisontrust.com is the web site of the custodian of record for Broad Financial.  I used them.  Constructing an operating agreement for the LLC is a bit...levered.  it is probably worth paying for advice on that, if you can.

If your crypto is in a Roth you can't use it, but you can borrow cash from the account, and pay yourself back with interest, potentially on a rather long-term plan. Again, the subtlet is suggest legal advice is warranted.  After age 59.5 there are no limits on withdrawals.  Inheritance can be complicated, so consult a professional about that, too.  (Or at least give seed words to your inheritors or executors, so they can dominate any arguments.)

If someone dumps enough of anything it can go to zero, but only very briefly.  At 7-8$ I would be filling my bags w ith both hands, and telling all my friends.  But so would thousands (in future, millions) of others.

When you have pricing power, requiring XMR payment is one way of using that power for the common good, the benefit of your counterparty(s), and your self-interest all in one go.

I would buy some. (Adverts belong in the marketplace thread.)

I strongly advise owning your crypto in an after-tax retirement account, so that gains are tax-free.

Loosing 95% of its value in that time is almost indistinguishable from non-survival.  The residual is noise.

The less free the society, the more need and value in privacy.  Convenience can rule only until fear kicks in.  Anyhow, Monero will only become more convenient over time. Besides which, popular use doesn't really impact the price nearly so much as *large* use.  Especially large *reserve* use.  People don't get to vote on this question - dollars do (or eur, gbp, rmb, jpy etc.).

Until it isn't.  That particular niche is a peculiarly viral one, under the right conditions - conditions such as financial repression, bail-ins, quantitative easing, negative interest rates, confiscatory taxation, capital controls, counterparty chain failures, trade globalization, commodity deflation, sovereign instability, overregulation of trade, graft and extortion, kidnappings, class war, Owellian surveillance, corporate secrecy.  Oh, and then there is scalability...

If the world were becoming a safer, more congenial place, in which human dignity and self-determination was in the ascendance, the importance of privacy might erode over time.  If instead it becomes more dangerous, less stable, if the power of the rapacious rises, and confidence in the social, political, legal and economic paradigm declines, then the appeal of privacy, and it's market value, will rise, or even explode.

My view is that the probability mass is firmly on the latter side, culminating in a failure of old paradigms, and their replacement with new ones which are more robust to the causes of recent instability, and better adapted to the new opportunities which arise in the meantime.

We can calibrate from the mid-2013 precedent what marketcap is suppored by DNMs alone (accounting for their growth, and scaling by present market share).  It is enough to make it feasible to transact in a freely floating crypto at most practical sizes.  Securing wealth will drive the big gains after some such threshold is passed.  Confidential corporate transactions would suffice to take it "mainstream" soon thereafter.

How is that theory working out for you?

Given the 20% tax on ZEC paid to the corporation that controls it, I think it will be a scam regardless of adoption levels -- and that adoption levels will be vanishingly small.

This is probably better suited to the Monero Speculation thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=753252.0

I have some evidence that my financial opinions have been overwhelmingly, but not uniformly, beneficial to those who considered them.  My concern and apology was focused more on the issues of character which I am still working through: Excessive interest in financial gain, a self-aggrandizing posture rooted in deep-seated shame - probably due to abandonment in childhood - and a willingness to bully the opposition.  I will post ever more cautiously, as a result.  I don't want to be the guy I see in my posting history, who is an arrogant egotistical greedy fool, no matter how superficially clever he might be on occasion.


Precisely this, but I would not say 'temporarily'.  We saw the inflation of btcusd when mt.gox was allowing btc but not fiat withdrawals, although that case ended very differently because of the Potemkin trading and ultimately the insolvency of mt.gox - neither of which appear to apply to bfx. Here only the first of those events was played out, and it ended well, in arbitrage.  At first, I think bfx was holding xmr down, as xmr holders on bfx moved their funds to plx, and liquidated some fraction.  Later, the rising btcusd clearing was positive for xmrusd, negative for xmrbtc.  More recently, as btc upward pressure was reduced by the arbitrage coming into play, xmr enjoyed a bit of the slingshot effect associated with a btc trend rolling over.  The compelling question then becomes: what is the natural fourth act in such a drama?  Ordinarily I would say a profit-taking sell off should occur, but xmr seems far too closely held for that right now, going by the exchange numbers.


I don't credit the arbitrageurs with that much intelligence and foresight.  Usually arbitrageurs are on the risk-averse end, and tend not to hold speculatively - albeit in this case we are talking about crypto-involved arbitrageurs, who are thus more likely to be aware of the merits of Monero, so it is not entirely out of the question - yet I would assume they are more inclined to stock btc if anything crypto.

Edit: corrected "potempkin" to "Potemkin"

So my 25usd June estimate was pessimistic.  Probably I should have accounted for the arbitrage of the bitfinex gap.  Strangely, all of my evidence-based estimators of XMR f.m.v. indicate that even the current unexpectedly high clearing price is undervaluing XMR.  My newly calibrated f.m.v. estimate is 32usd.  Probably it will take a while to catch up to that, however, since some sort of profit-taking cycle should usually occur after a run-up.

Perhaps the strongest pessimistic counter-argument in my head at the moment is "sell in May": In a broad asset deflation, everything gets sold, and given current ratios in U.S. equities (valuation and leverage), any summer slump could easily become a contagious rout.  But if crypto really is becoming a diversification asset (even in a very small but still meaningful relative to BTC market cap way) that pessimistic argument will fail dramatically.

Anyhow, I am not comfortable reducing exposure here, despite the recent run-up.  Usually, after a run-up, I would just shut up (to avoid my loose lips harming people who might sell too much, and miss out on longer-term gains), and would go more into btc with my trading stock, but this time I think it is probably best to stay at the high end of my exposure range.  Not only market conditions, but also technical developments seem biased bullish in xmr, while btc seems to be enjoying undue complacency regarding scaling and governance problems.

Saying "alts" is like saying "Europe".  There is a vast difference between Paris and Pristina, between Aalborg and Athens.  While swaths may crash, swards may take flight.  But then (without checking) you are probably a maximalist, in which case this won't make any sense to you.

Yes.  But I wouldn't bet on that any time soon.