Heh.  I suppose those are teeny pictures.  But my thought is the monero chart looks a lot like the first part of the Wyckoff examples I always see...

If you are still interested look for the header "Accumulation: Wyckoff Events" In this article and you will see what looks a lot like the current XMR chart with all the Wyckoff anatomy.

This happened much faster than I thought it would... and it looks like the top end was closer to 135.  I guess the question now is do we spend some time in the 115-135 range or bust through that in a week or two?

The Zcash is still definitely a viable scam, and part of it was it was started by a cryptography OG who I have even heard praise about from Nick Szabo who having known him from the mailing list days probably saw him as family, so to speak, and the fact he was using cutting edge exotic cryptography to achieve privacy was exciting for many people.  And I think Zooko (who blocked me on Twitter, lol) even fooled himself with his sweet little boy "How nice it is not to have to worry about groceries anymore" style.  As you said they had an effective marketing budget to dump on the Gemini twins and the Cue Ball.

Oh and Dash, even scammer still has SO MUCH momentum, and I suspect it large transaction volume is most likely real.  Goes to show what network effect does... amazing really.  Our CLI wallet and odd codebase really hurt us in that regard, but I think we still catch up and pass Dash eventually.

Another thing often glossed aver about Monero is that as far as shitcoins go it has just about the best possible track record aside from the crippled miner, and the fact we made a change at the social contract level early on (tail emmision, which although possibly justified is, in my opinion almost a "guys can you stop trading now" moment of centralization).  But past those things Monero is one of the most immaculate projects out there.  And will continue to overcome those blips just as BTC overcame it's own inflation bug, and concentrated early mining.  Although in BTC unlike Monero that last bit is still a specter hanging over the entire project like some giant guillotine.  Let's just hope Satoshi hasn't developed a coke habit since 2011.  And if he has hopefully he is using Monero, or XMR.TO and coins much later in his hoard.

DaRude is right though... sort of.

I also work for a hospital system.  Part of my job is specifically analyzing admission data, and for the last several months I have been particularly involved with analyzing the COVID admissions.

FACT: It is killing people
FACT: It is extraordinarily contagious
FACT: We now know that it has a very high survival rate in almost all populations.

The trick with Covid is it is so contagious that just about all of us are going to get it.  And that means that <1% who it kills?  There are a lot of them.

The original idea was to "flatten the curve".  And we did that all over the world.

I also believe it is now being used as a political tool, and to control the masses.  So that is why I say "sort of" up there.

But between people who call it a hoax, and people who overact to it a little?  The first set are the idiots.

Who knows about Wycoff stuff?  I know nothing about it... but all the shapes look like things I have seen in wycoff example charts...

Completely off topic...

The new "Feather Wallet" for Monero is an EXCELLENT implementation.  Especially if you like Electrum as it really is a strong, well done imitation of that interface, but with a lot of interesting built in features, like xmr.to for one thing.  It is non-proprietary and creates .keys files that are CLI compatible and uses the new 14 word seed scheme by default and yet is compatible with 13/25 word seeds as well.

Really for me my default desktop wallet now probably.

THAT is the kind of head fake bull markets are made of!

BTCBTCBTCBTCBTC

(also, seriously who said Bitmex could be back up and running? )

So, I think the different landscape when looking at XMRBTC vs XMRUSD is currently very interesting, and brings some things into perspective...  If Bitcoin is going to be rising to even a small extent it means it will be MUCH easier to reach a new USD ATH, and Febo's above prophesy actually starts to look kind of conservative.

If we can at least hold XMR/USD as bitcoin rises then we will easily be just pulled up by bitcoin as it rises...

If XMRBTC continues to rise?  It could get a little FOMOey, in my opinion.

$


BTC


 

How did I miss this before?

This definitely supports my "somebody big wants the whole cake" theory.

It's very bullish and potentially terrible at the same time...

But who would be hiding this way:

1.  Some rich unknown(s)?  - Probably not.
2.  A cabal of existing companies - slightly more likely. Jaime Dimon does not want us to know that he's going all in
3.  THE Cabal? - Most likely... the big dogs themselves.... dressed up as a Puerto Rican street person.  Kaiser Soze basically, but the TPTB version.

If it is #3, and yes I am losing my mind, what does that mean? 

Fu&k.  This is going to ruin my Sunday nap.

Next spot...  Previous support, as well as a psychological barrier.  Would not be surprised to bounce off this one considering the lowish volume... but man someone really did press the fast forward button:

Who on Earth is BMA LLC?

Another small but interesting data point:  (The dotted line is tweets, the solid line is Google)

Monero is moving up in Tweets while it's Google Trends are at close to an all time low (high?) for divergence.  In other words, recently people on twitter are talking about Monero more, but google searches have been trending down since the ATH and have shown NO corresponding spike with what we see very recently on twitter.

To me this implies that the people "in the know" are tweeting, but the public is still fast asleep.

Put yet another way: All the fire we see so far is just kindling.  If crypto interested/aware Joe Sixpack notices the recent price action then we might see the Google trends start rising as well and LOGS put on the fire.

Another wonderful bit of data is other well known projects have google trends data much more in line with tweet action.  But XMR is DEAD on google.  I think this is potentially very good news for speculation in XMR.  But also belies the fact that it really is not a very well known project...  It really is a tool used by the techno-elite, and well... drug users.

Just some thoughts...  

So, fellow travelers...  What exactly do we think is happening?  If you don't like long posts... well sorry bout that.  But Monero is at an interesting crossroads, and I want to examine it a little.

Some points I keep noticing:

-After some DNM closures WHM is now the largest market, and is (sort of) Monero only.
-Monero transaction count is rising organically and firmly for well over a year.
-Hashrate is up >20% in the recent short term.
-Twitter chatter among the more Bitcoin Centric chartists seems to be up quite a bit in the last few weeks
-The privacy/fungibility topic in the BTC Maxi space is at an ATH.
-The Samuria/Wasabi war is indicative of the above
-The IRS.  Damn if that does not legitimize XMR?

As to the DNMs... It seems that "industry" may be finally coming to terms with the issue that using the coin with first mover advantage gets people put in jail, and funds seized over and over.  I think the fact that BTC has remained the dominant money for DNMs is a strong testament to the gigantic power of network effect.  The fact that people have made that mistake over and over is very interesting.  But it seems to me that we are *possibly* seeing a shift here now.  The use of Monero on DNMs has steadily (but slowly) increased, and as of today the dominant market is "Monero only" at least in their marketing. Last time I looked at it, they also allowed BTC which I still find astonishing.  I can only assume the reason for this is there are large vendors who are still asking for that payment method.  But the OpSec risk is becoming clearer and clearer.  As a side note, this use case for Monero is such a multifaceted thing.  I mean this is actually Bitcoin's first use case as well!  And it is the ultimate test of a decentralized currency.  But it also has a huge negative PR side. Bitcoin still suffers from the "Money used by drug dealers" narrative. And as it shrugs off that early title Monero seems to be taking the crown pretty solidly.  This is proof that Monero may just be the king of the "shitcoins".  And is cementing it's place as Bitcoin's dark little brother.

The transaction counts are supporting the above.  It looks to me like Monero is one of the few projects from the last cycle that is not currently flat or dropping in use.  Something crazy is going on with LTC, and ETH
 transaction volume is just ending a gigantic increase, but also has effectively proven it's broken model over the last year via DeFi. But most of the other coins (ETC, BCH, DOGE, DASH etc) are either flat or dropping in use. Even the project that prides itself on transaction volume and block size has remained fairly flat as they pack their blockchain with weather data and Daniel Kravitz's cartoons.

Hashrate is another interesting topic. Not only because it is rising, but that it seems to suggest RandomX has not yet be "cracked" by ASIC makers.  We have seen the expected Cloud/Botnet spikes, but otherwise Monero seems to have captured a hashing hardware sector, which is FAR MORE IMPORTANT than I feel is recognized.  Monero is not competing with other projects for hashrate hardware.  It fairly well owns the CPU hashrate base.  In my opinion this makes it's security better than the popular comparisons you see in those "how long till a transaction is safe from double spend" charts.  Coins that share hash algs risk being undone by an attack from farms of Asics. But Monero is running on commoditized hardware.  This advantage seems to be missed by just about everyone aside from Howard Chu (Well, and the rest of us).  This is another one of those weird Monero secret sauce things (like the blocksize strategy, and possibly the tail emission) that is either just missed by the masses or is even looked down on erroneously (think tail emission).

This is anecdotal, and personal, but I have seen a LOT of Twiiter crypto OG types talking about Monero recently.  Including the more maxi-ish ones.  This combined with the sudden focus on privacy, and alarms being sounded by the Bitcoin "influencers" around the ideas of attacks from nation states, rumors of laws against self custody etc combined with the almost ridiculous Samurai/Wasabi spat could not be more perfectly cuing up the question: "What about Monero?"   I really enjoy listening to Matt O'dell as he champions a level of self custody responsibility that he has not figured out is virtually impossible.  His standard practices are hard for anyone, and the masses are not going to be able to even begin to keep up.  Calling someone a "cuck" for not keeping abreast on the latest coinjoin practices is not going to improve their privacy.  The DNM situation just proves this.  The answer is not in some pseudo religious level of best practices for Bitcoin privacy.  This is fun to theorize about as you run (larp around with, really) Graphene and Tails when the answer to the question has really practically just been "SHUM" all along.  I always get a kick out of the fact he often mentions Monero among his privacy rituals... I find it strange that it has not dawned on him yet that this is really the only one he needs.  Let Bitcoin be the transparent chain it is.  You want privacy?  Well...  It's much easier than you want it to be because you cannot admit there is at least one other legitimate crypto project in the world.

Finally a bit on the IRS.  First of all this is a huge hat tip.  Monero has their attention to the tune of throwing over a million dollars into a bug bounty for it.  And this is also where the most risk is.   I think the three letter agency's successes with breaking TOR and BTC chainanalysis has them thinking they might be able to do the same thing with Monero.  And they might?  We will see.  But if they can't, well then what comes next?  I think we have to be prepared for some fairly tough possibilities here.  Monero might be the target of fairly draconian moves by governments.  We have always known that could be in the cards... but from my perspective we are not many moves away from that eventuality if it is to come.  My prediction is the chain analysis folks will eventually announce that they have successfully de-anonymized Monero (cue trumpet fanfare and outdated whitepapers!).  Then we will have to determine if that is really true or more marketing or claims based on a previous version etc.  And the IRS et al will do the same.  If they are not satisfied then we might face the biggest boss fight so far.  That will be worth it's own long post someday.

Happy Sunday heretics.

Indeed so...

This was an expected speedbump I guess:



_edit_  Maybe we keep going up parabolic style?  I kind of think that is the more likely path forward... bounce around in this orbit mix in some healthy pullbacks.  But if we have an extended (like till the end of the year?) pullback we would be drawing a pretty epic cup and handle.  It's hard to paint a bad picture on this.

Crystal, man.  Get it right!

Certainly the asteroid is almost here now?

DeFi as an actual useful technology is certainly interesting.  But the initial build was all nonsense.  And like everything else being built to spam the ETH blockchain it is a mistake, and building a sidechain or drivechain pegged to BTC and rooted in it's security is what is going to happen. Maybe this Atomic Finance group is in that category... seems so.

Also, there has to be an actual reason for a product aside from NUMBER GO UP pump and dumps.

We are standing on the precipice of a many month to 2 year BTC bull where BTC dominance rises significantly.  Nothing really exciting will be happening in the DeFi space aside from actual companies quietly building actual products with the hope they will be ready after the spotlight is off the Bitcoin moon that will have the whole world stunned.  Ironically to some extent this fuse is being lit by the money coming back to BTC from the DeFi casino madness.

For a little while that's all people are going to see, IMHO...  And all this is dependent on there NOT being a huge multi-state attack on crypto led by the CBs which is a fairly real possibility.

I do also think the "not broken yet" alts with real world purpose will move north alongside BTC during this move either holding their XXX/BTC value or even rising in some cases.  But I doubt that will be very many projects at all.  I will not be surprised if ETH performs less well in this regard having just taken a huge hit with the end of the DeFi Casino era.

Oops!  I just noticed my crystal ball has a huge crack in it... hmm...  Nevermind.  All that is probably wrong, I guess.

Bingo.  Truer words never spoken.

I have learned so much here, and am glad to know now about the "inverse bearish spike indicator".  Thanks Proudhon.  I have also made this my personal text.  I believe it will bring me luck!