Not hard fork, but "development heartbeat".

Actually I don't recall anything done by the Monero devs to encourage anyone to buy Monero.  Risto maybe.  Me maybe.  Just trying to help my friends and family achieve financial Independence and security, yo.  Working pretty well too. 50x-100x upside remaining before I dredge the lake looking for my lost USB key.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win." - Mohandas K. Gandhi

We're somewhere in the valley between the Agnostic Alps and the foothills of the Risible Mountains.

And if you look a the history you will see that each hard fork (which brings enhanced privacy, lower xn fees, and many other improvements each time) the price rises on a sustained basis (neglecting the occasional short-lived dump downspike).

I am not privy to private dealings between the players.  I am only looking at the exoteric game.  I can't see any way in which miners can be incentivized to stay with core, in the current political environment.  They will vote to maximize their utility under discounting, and that seems clearly to mean BTU.  The fact that ETC + ETH was profitable is a strong reinforcer.  I am inclined to buy BTU futures below 200USD.  And yes, that's a very binary bet, but at 5:1 it is pretty compelling, I think.

Unless the neckline is descending, H & S is indistinguishable from consolidation before an up-leg.

BTC mempool size has crashed since February.  Smoothed xns/day is trending down.  It seems clear that the tight hold on BTC is increasing.  Come the fork, you may have a hard time finding anyone willing to spend BTC for a couple of weeks at least.

I am increasingly convinced that this will spike XMR.  How else can you buy fentanyl on alphabay?  Opiates are the quintessence of an inelastic demand driver - just ask Stringer Bell.  Methinks I should go all-in again.

Speculation:. When BTC forks everyone will be holding  their coins tightly, and transaction traffic will approach nil.  Consequently the only way to actually buy anything on, e.g., alphabay will be using XMR.   XMR valuation may double, triple, quadruple overnight.

I am not privy to any privileged information pertaining to the likelihood of avoiding a fork.  From what public information I do know, it seems inevitable. 

You can think of it as a stock split or spinoff, in which case you should be bullish BTC, and expect outflows from alts due to other bulls, at least until the split has occurred and a stabilizing reversion begins; or, you can see it as precipitating a crisis of confidence among BTC holders, causing a rush into fiat, and significant inflows to alts.  As both views are plausibly supportable and I don't know the breakdown among crypto owners, I can't estimate how much or in what direction the market is misplacing it's estimation of scenario distributions.

As I can't front-run the market, I am not trading that turn.  Instead, I base my current positioning on considerations of volatility, which does seem very likely to rise substantially, and structural risk, which also seems to favor XMR over BTC.  My guess is that, as before, when BTC is in crisis, XMR will benefit more than most other alts.

I like hard, productive assets over financial instruments, for long holding.  For most people farmland in South America or .au/.nz is piainful and inconvenient to own.  That's a significant part of the reason why it is relatively cheap.  It's probably not good for someone in retirement for whom liquidity is a paramount factor, unless they think to actually use it directly, or have ready arrangements for reliable rental income from it, in excess of what they could buy in an annuity.

I do think your proposed allocation is rather heavy in PM exposure.  I think streaming is probably better than miners, and the risk exposures are so correlated that I can't see much diversification benefit from holding significantly in both categories.  Physical metal is the systemic tail risk hedge.  Streamers are a levered inflation play with nice asymmetry, so I would trim the miners.

As for energy, that's a complex topic which I can't address right now.

In response to other questions: I don't hold significant amounts of cold reserve bitcoin, although I do have about 2% in a liquidity wallet at the moment.  My inclination is to trade it and use it rather than to hoard it.  People with less intense commitment to the peculiar merits of XMR than I should  definitely hold cold BTC as a significant part of long-term crypto.

Thank you for that.  It is usefully informative.  It would be even (and much) better with scale alignment.

To me it seems folly to analyze XMR denominated in BTC, although I was myself subject to this folly until recently.  The fundamentals are much more easily recognized using gold or any major fiat currency - I tend to use USD - as numeraire.

XMRUSD is pretty stable at $20, so in my (1% of XMR holdings) trading position, at present, I buy below 19 and sell above 21.  

You might recall that I anticipated recent levels on this approximate time scale last summer, by using Fisher's quantity theory, as calibrated by Alphabay volume estimators.  I have not done any further analysis yet, so I can't presently make any principled quantitative predictions.  As time permits and data allows I may do so soon.  My intuition is that $25 will become strong support by June.  The upside asymmetry is growing rapidly due to exogenous risk factors, but support levels should continue to be determined by economic use in dark net markets during the near future.  As they grow, so will XMR's utility value.

Meanwhile, some qualitative logic guides me, none of it new, and all of it supported by the evidence of the past few months, since my previous prediction:

1. Masternode (dash, pivx, crown) anonymity is (1) honeypot technology, and (2) a scheme for bleeding the economy to death by rents.  No such system can form a stable economy.  Any price runs are bubbles.  While shorting is supremely risky, and requires a strong and steady hand, I find it emotionally gratifying and financially lucrative.  I actually had a masternode for a while, but soon repented and sold it because I could not stomach making gains by deceit and oppression.  (I have made charitable donations in excess of those gains as a sop to my bruised conscience.)

2. Transparent blockchains expose their users to extortion and robbery.  Consequently they involve unwarranted risk, and can not persist in their moneyness.

3. App coins are generally a deceitful way to fund an Enterprise.  "Turing completeness" is ludicrous snake oil and there is still no compelling use for "gas", after years of waiting.  It is all dot-com hopium smoke.

4. I have long predicted the beginnings of the demise of the debt-based fiat currency system to become perceptible in 2017q4.  I will soon be proven either correct or incorrect, in the sense of being early, but even if my point-estimate proves over-eager, the underlying demographic deflationary implosion, resource exhaustion, systematic energy bleed, and exponential inflationary debt- (and inevitable supply-) explosion will reach a climax when the Boomer retirement peak arrives around 2024.  USD lost most of its value since 1971 (when Nixon broke the tie to gold).  It will lose an even larger proportion, and likely in fact ALL of it's value in excess of hard reserves times some yet-unmeasurable confidence*utility multiplier, on the 2024 time scale.  Crypto and hard assets are the place to be, and money is only beginning to realize this.  Those ahead of this curve will enjoy the fruits of their foresight during the next 7-10 years - if they can stay alive that long.

By a process of elimination I recommend to my friends and family an allocation of 20% xmr, 30% precious metals and/or cultural artifacts, 20% agricultural real estate (Chile being the top of my list), 10% long equities, 10% East Asia/Pacific bonds, and 10% strategic shorts (sovereign bonds, financial equities esp.) for long term money.  

The BTC fork will imply substantial volatility, yes, but that will end soon enough.  Underlying global systemic instabilities, however, will persist, compound, indeed explode, with much greater impact, albeit on a longer time-scale.  I think speculation time is rapidly coming to a close.  It is time for young and old, rich and poor alike to batten down the hatches and shelter from the coming multi-generational storm.  Given the extreme dislocations of financial metrics from the norms of millennia past which now prevail, this one may be the single greatest world-historical financial event since the Industrial Revolution, or the Black Death. There will be winners and losers.

Busy lately. 

Nice price ramp.  Lagging dash and zec right now, but that can't last forever.  Just wish we had better software.  I won't have time to put into it until late April, realistically.

BTC fork fears should create some good btc accumulation opportunities.  Whether they can offer a levered entry into XMR, is hard to predict, however.

Ethereum always had two big problems: Governance and Turing-completeness.  I would put my money on XCP instead.

If you own a CPU with the AES-NI instruction set, it is quite certainly profitable to mine XMR right now.  Again, this belongs in the mining thread.

It absolutely increases the anonymity factor, in a material fashion. Since the anonymity factor is the primary, if not exclusive, relative advantage of Monero, it logically must increase the fundamental value of XMR by some monotonic factor.

I observe that the 15 and 30 minute accumulation cycles are now more persistent than the distribution cycles.  This suggests the possibility that we are forming a base, intraday, at present.

Absolutely possible.  The ATM interface is the GUI for ATM users.  If you do any diligence on the kiosk hardware options, please share.

Regarding the first point, the dominant counter-argument is that liquidity is a natural monopoly, because liquidity abhors frictions.  There is only one coin which presently offers a usable level of liquidity with fungibility.  In order to seize that crown will require an order-of-magnitude improvement (and definitely not an ambiguous corporate unfair Mossad-coin).

Regarding the second point, hedges are not all alike.  Some cost more than they are worth.  Buying things that cost more than they are worth is not a good strategy.  (Personally I would like to see ZK anon support folded into XMR.  I'm not sure how yet.  I am beginning to work on a draft, but it is very incomplete.)

I do agree that apples and oranges are different things.  Ethereum does fulfill a very different function.  But it has severe flaws, two of which suffice to spoil it for me:  Firstly, there is the governance risk implied by the cult of Vitalik.  We saw how disastrous this could be in the DAO fork.  Secondly, the very notion of "Turing-complete" platform is fundamentally broken and mistaken: All contracts must be decidable.  I consider these reasons sufficient to believe that some other platform will be the dominant smart-contract platform.  

Oppressors hate privacy, and the oppressed require it.  As long as there are oppressed people, Monero will see demand.

Regardless of anyone's opinion, Monero has displaced bitcoin from a significant proportion of the DNM txns already, simply and obviously because it provides privacy which BTC can not.  I suspect RingCT will accelerate this trend of increasing displacement.