Everything that enables use of XMR is beneficial to the economy and utility of XMR.  If anything it adds selling pressure, in the near-term.  But growing the economy and utility of XMR is much more important in the long-run than any near-term variations.

The volatility of XMR is an artifact of being under-priced.  When the price is more closely aligned to the fundamentals, at a market cap at least an order of magnitude higher, then volatility will be much closer to BTC.

Volatility is more of a problem for the unit of account use-case than it is for the store of value use-case.  It is unavoidable in any instrument which appreciates by a factor of 200x over 30 months.  When volatility is so heavily biased to the up-side, it not harmful to the store of value use-case.

https://news.bitcoin.com/japanese-pay-utility-bills-bitcoin/

Reminder:  You can use XMR anywhere you can use BTC, via xmr.to or shapeshift.io

The Japanese company offering utility bill payment via BTC is coincheck.com, which recently introduced XMR in their exchange platform, which offers JPY-XMR.

Fortunately the risks are presently low, but given increasing value on the chain and enough time, the $5 wrench attack ( if all else fails ) becomes inevitable.  This is a purely speculative potential risk we're talking about, but one which bears constant attention.  Secret canaries, exchanged amongst the core on a p2p basis would defend against many cases, but be annoying to maintain ( e.g. dead man canaries ).

Bitcoin is much easier to control.  And make no mistake, "regulators" do not want to regulate; they want control.  CN or US can establish BTC control if they choose, but I doubt that any other nation can establish control - although RU or IL or a few others could destroy it if they were motivated to do so. So far, they have not overtly asserted control. I don't know of a reason to expect that to change soon.

Monero is small enough yet to be easy to destroy for most developed nations, but also too small to bother.  By the time it is a target, it will be much more difficult to destroy because of the fullnode jurisdictional diversity, and Kovri tech.  More difficult to destroy than bitcoin, but effectively impossible to control, unless the core team is co-opted - in which case, the community will fork it.

A 23% gain, bottom to present, in less than 9 days is "painfully slow”?  wtfbbq!

Liquidity, liquidity, liquidity.  The market will use the cash which is liquid, and not the cash which is illiquid.  When XMR liquidity approaches that of BTC, then we can talk about replacement.  Until then, no.   But it does seem inevitable that a fungible currency will displace a non-fungible currency in a majority of use-cases.

That is interesting.  It doesn't eliminate the risks inherent in zcash, but it does eliminate most of the smell, so it could see some up-take.  The implied risk to XMR price (not to the utility, project, security, community or economy) is that capital will be attracted from XMR to community-zcash, which I will call snarkero, or XZK.

Here's how I see it:  We know what value XMR had before DNM adoption was mooted, and it was about mcap $10mm.  In the current initial stage of adoption, the value is about 10x.  Thus, without adoption, the leading crypto in the fungible monetary domain is only worth a small fraction of the value of XMR today, and can only draw a small fraction of the capital away from XMR.  The implied price risk amounts to about $1 per XMR, in the long run, as XZK gets the level of adoption seen by XMR before June (when AB insiders started accumulating in earnest).

On the other hand, there may be synergies which increase the value of both coins.  Mcap may be mostly linear  zero-sum, but building a monetary economy certainly is not.  XZK may attract new money into anonymity, which, seeing the living economy and leading liquidity of XMR, then diversifies into XMR.  In fact, I tend to think that until and unless XZK is adopted at similar scale, its introduction is likely to help XMR to grow.

The credibility of the team would largely determine the success or failure of XZK.  Barring crypto vulnerabilities emerging in the moon math, if the fundamental trust issues could be managed to the satisfaction of the market, I could definitely see DNMs adding snarkero, once it reached a certainly liquidity.  If so, they should be early buyers, attempting to front-run the possibility.  If they use BTC they can be traced, and subjected to extortion.  Therefore, they will need to use XMR to buy their XZK.  Bullish.

Indeed I think the ideal outcome might be a zksnark branch in the XMR network.  If the two were made transparently interoperable, it would provide immediate boostrap liquidity to the XZK, and mean XZK was already DNM-accepted.

Yes, XMR is the ultimate in anti-fragile (pace Taleb).  Chaos and pain only makes counterparty-free and seizure-immune more attractive.  Truly Nietzschean, Monero is.

It may be boring, but the bouncing is nice for my favored style. And we're chewing up all the loosely held coins during this base-building, so it is a bullish mode.

Highers/lowers is how you can easily and unequivocally recognize that momentum is forming.  Momentum always fails eventually.  

TA is the intersection of three factor categories: Aggregate agent statistics, pattern recognition (aka feature engineering), and structural constraints.  Structural constraints may be categorized as a priori, deterministic, and stochastic.  Market structure factors cross-cut these categories.

But TA is not a value-neutral, purely observational discipline, it is goal-oriented, so optimal control theory plays a role in determining the analytic style, and one of the most useful decision-theoretical frameworks is the partially-ordered Markov decision process, POMDP.

The easiest way to make a nearly optimal bot is to parameterize a POMDP.  The state-of-the-art outcomes, however derive from use of structured variational autoencoders for feature engineering in a deep LSTM network, because these open up a much larger dynamical model space, and can extract much more subtle signals.

I keep meaning to make a bot, but the day job, and my manual trading, and my family life have conspired against it.  Also: loss aversion.

That's a reasonable scenario, but I think there is a problem:  I don't want anyone to know how much gold I have.  Or even to know that I own gold.  It does me no good to use the transparent chain, only harm.  The larger my net worth, the more harm it does. 

I see bitcoin as the currency of kickstarters, charities, governments, and maybe public companies in certain transparent public operations.  I see Monero as the currency of, well, everyone else.

No.  And others who read this know some of them.  Some are well-known persons.  I don't think the majority of finance professionals with an interest in crypto prefer Monero over Bitcoin, but I do know that some of them do.  I don't know of any for whom Monero is currently a significant holding.  I.e. almost all of the upside in that market remains untested.  I do know that some of those who took small personal positions on my suggestion, and made large m-t-m gains, are increasing their positions, gradually.  If XMR persistently surpasses LTC, I may pitch it on a more formal basis to acquaintances in cases where I was previously reluctant to raise the topic, because of the small market cap.  Once it surpasses ETH, I doubt my intervention will be meaningful anymore, as anyone with any investment interest in crypto should know about it by then.

It is fair to call me a "permabull" in the sense that even when I have bearish short term views, I have persistent bullish longer term views.  In fact any short term views I may have, are very loosely held, because I don't generally have better information than the market, so I should in the main defer to the market on short-term discounting.  I think I have a better ability to grasp the bigger picture than the market has demonstrated, so I have stronger long-term bullish views.  So far experience has borne out my estimates regarding the longer term arc of Monero developments, but that is no guarantee of future performance.  I am perfectly capable of imagining extreme scenarios of upside which are highly unlikely to occur.  Yet I consider their possibility to be non-negligible, in general.

I don't think I have ever recommended anyone to buy Monero at a time when it would have taken them more than a year to double their money, if they did as I suggested, and DCA'd.  I was recommending BTC at very bad times, and it has taken years for those recommendations to come out from under water.  I felt bad about that, so I am more cautious now, when making recommendations.  I definitely do recommend buying Monero, here, now.  Anything under 0188 is cheap, IMHO.  Under $10, a steal.  If you are underweight, buy it.  In general, people with lower risk tolerance should expect to DCA over a year or more to minimize average draw-downs.

That's what everyone said when BTC went to 32.

I can tell you this: Every single person from Goldman (and every other bank or prop shop or family desk or money manager) that I have spoken with mono-á-mono in the past 2½ years has bought some XMR for their personal.  Never more than a few thousand.  And I don't think any are selling yet.  If they were, I would mock them viciously: DNMs are step 1.  And we haven’t even made it half way through step 1 yet.  This thing has its best years ahead of it.  We can actually afford software now.

There's actually a thread dedicated to that topic, and hence no need to raise it here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1125666.new

Fortunately, no one has reported any loss of funds, and it would require some special effort for most people to actually expose themselves to such exploitation.

"Live free or die."

Any large margined shorts in NH would cause some entertainment, I think.

I suggest code review, as a productive indoor activity.

Looks to me like 0180 is a new support level.  Buyable here.  Anyhow, my cheap XMR line remains 0188 until I recompute.

Nice chart porn.  I like.  Is the script on github?

15k XMR asking 01860 should keep a lid on it for a bit.  If the wall disappears when nibbled, it will suggest many bullish possibilities, such as imminent short liquidation.

Once liquidity is established, it is a superior transmission mechanism, as compared to any and all less liquid upstarts.  That's called a moat, and it requires some long-term sustainable strategic advantage to overcome it.  Features will not overcome it.

Today, if you want to move 100k discretely, XMR works.  That is a huge advantage over all pretenders to the anonymity crown.