A whale in Monero would be one with at least 50k XMR, we have about 7-10 such players. Monero differs from some coins in that for the big holders Monero is still a portfolio investment, they have not gotten "rich" via Monero. They were wealthy, and put the required BTC200 and now own Monero. If you are dev-rich, you don't have other wealth and are not a "whale".

Bitcoin is bigger than the players. Monero, at least now, is smaller than many people who are playing it. That makes it interesting.

If "you" was singular, I'd like to know many variables first, to start to analyze it:

- number of tx per day
- distribution of the sizes of tx, how much user can affect it
- does mixing factor affect it
- is there any reason to compete for space in 1 block as with Bitcoin
- is there any way the user could/should be able to affect the fee
- how did the recent 20x increase of fee affect tx
- what is the realistic upper limit of blockchain size now, in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc years so that it is still usable
- blockchain prunable to what extent, when?

After these, I proceed to calculate if there is any need to limit the blockchain usage or if the antispam is the only reason for fees. If the limiting is required, then it takes some time to try to develop a "lifespan" for the coin by probably subsidising the fee now so that later Monero is so big that we can face the problem with larger resources. But I won't go into specifics without getting the information first.

ADD: Before even seeing the facts, I would say that there exists the following usage:

- Transfers. These are quite large and not much affected by the fees.
- Payments. These may be small but can be reconfigured such that they happen less often, which would reduce the usage given higher fee.
- Micropayments. These proliferate is the fees are small, and become uneconomic if they are raised. I don't believe there are many micropayment innovations functioning in Monero, and by keeping the fees high there will not be, either. It is a new thing that has not existed before, but seems that Monero blockchain is not the right place for it.
- Spam/Attacks.

If fee is set so high that people are grudging when making a transfer, it is a problem because they sell out of a coin that is too expensive to transact with. If fee is too high for payments, the coin loses economy/services. There were never any micropayments to begin with.

It is quite certain he did, after one week at the helm anyone with a brain knew that he was a planted mole, here in Finland where Nokia used to be a big company. But is it really the biggest such trick? Whoaa, Finland makes records

Just please make the fees high enough that the blockchain is not sold out too cheaply. It is possible to lower them when the price rises. The recent decision to up them by 20x did not lead to price crashing.

Monero is not a big coin and the devs have made a decision to stay here instead of moving to own forums. Now we the "whales" are slowly starting our own forum as well as a result of the Workgroup.

Maybe we need to redefine the terms. In my parlance, "dev" is somebody who knows how to code but that's it. Whales are the wealthy and well-connected businessmen that make things happen. With this definition, the more whales, the better.

The devs need to do their job, they don't have time for the economy, and they are not competent in it (also whales often suck at coding, like me).

If too large % of coins are in dev hands, the whales never get interested. This is the situation with most coins, they have no investors that have outside-crypto assets worth $1M or more. If a coin totally lacks such people, its economy lacks an essential component.

When talking about Monero, it has quite a handful of such "whales" and therefore the possibility for a very vibrant economy. Whales are in a unique position to drive projects because of their business acumen, connections, and financial backbone (a typical whale does not need to change the brand even after losing an entire altcoin stake).

Monero is starting a new workgroup for "whales" under this definition. It will rock 

Well I don't have monero as even 10% of my holdings, and devteam has never given me any mandate to represent Monero.

It is true I own it and support it but everyone should take everyone else's opinions with a grain of salt. With the intrigue surrounding Monero, it is very possible that there are established forum accounts masquerading as Monero supporters, yet acting so stupidly that they cause more damage to the reputation of the coin than benefit it.

It is been suggested that I am one, and currently I'm thinking what do about it. How about you?

Especially if it gets removed via unleashing it to the almost nonexisting sell side 

(In reality if "ex traders know" something, it follows that "more exp traders know that exp traders know" etc. and in the end it does not matter, I have much data on XMR markets and the correlations are so small that not even worth publishing)

Well it's like a one big country deciding in 1994 that Internet may only be text-based. Other countries don't likely follow, and anyone who personally follows the guidance is just shooting himself in the foot by putting himself in such a crippled position. If there was an anonymous way of accessing the graphic Internet, I am sure its popularity would skyrocket.

I already said that Monero devs defend the coin to the best of their ability, but if there is something to negotiate about, I am all ears.

There's never been so much bid support near the price. Imagine: in the range of 0...-10% of the current price, and in one exchange alone, there is BTC388 waiting for the seller of 108,000 XMR (3.3% of all XMR). Now is the time to dump if anyone likes, next week the price will be quite much higher if no one dumps now

Why this needs to be discussed? According to numbers, cryptocurrency has about a million or absolute maximum 5 million people who have ever had any.

In 1995, Internet was a staple in half of the computers sold in retail, 1997 in all of them. The 1-5 million in the world number must have happened in 1994 or earlier.

So 1993/4 = 2014

New accounts have warned quite much about it. The Monero devs do their best to prevent attacks, and C_Z is helping also. The community has also shown that even a technically successful attack (fork did happen) does not cause the loss of trust (price trend did not change).

In the long term, we are open to pursue a diplomatic solution to this conflict and I can be a diplomatic middleman if so desired.

Good point. I am about to continue explaining that tenet next, or perhaps you can since you started already.

My great idea is to define the market cap of a liquid monetary commodity, to be the sum total of the trust towards it.

And then tell why the attacks towards Monero might have unintended consequences because not only they affect the trust people feel towards Monero, but also how they feel about other coins, whose "fanboiz" may be behind the attacks. In the hypothetical case that Bitcoin Foundation and BCT devteam were behind the attack, this would cause significant damage to Bitcoin. Why? The 10-15k holders of XMR collectively trust it only $6 million. But the same guys trust Bitcoin up to $100s of millions. If they decide to sell this stash out of fear or retaliation, the price would be destroyed.

Well, not quite what I was thinking. But the actual thought is difficult to express...

Let's say that the market cap of a coin is the measure of the trust that people collectively have towards the coin. If coin X costs $1, and people A, B, C, and D own it 4, 3, 2, and 1 units respectively, the market cap equals $10. This much money the people are willing to trust to be held in this coin.

If someone, let's say A, decided that his trust towards the coin has increased, and instead of $4, he wants to allocate $5 of his portfolio to the coin, he can go to market and buy more until his position is valued $5.

If the action happens without significant new emission (mining) happening meanwhile, A must buy from either B, C, or D. If one of them (eg. B) has listed a coin for sale at the previous price for whatever reason, A can express his increased trust with no change in market price (it was offset by the actualization of the latent decreased trust of B).

But if no one directly wants to sell their coins, A must bid higher to obtain them. If the others are strict with their decision to trust only $3, $2 and $1, respectively, worth of value to the coin, they sell when their coins exceed that value. In a case where they did just that, the following would happen as a result of one person deciding to trust the coin a little bit more:

- coin market value would increase by 10%
- A would hold 4.55 coins valued at $5
- B would hold 2.73 coins valued at $3
- C would hold 1.82 coins valued at $2
- D would hold 0.91 coins valued at $1
- a total of 0.55 coins have been sold to A for $0.60.

A paid only $0.6 to have his stack valued up $1, and others got free money + their stack is worth the same. Not bad!

In reality people often have more rigid price flexibility in this kind of situations, which means that they don't sell so eagerly. This means that price goes up even quicker, and the pursuit to trust $5 becomes easier.

OK - but the same works both ways. Let everything else be the same (ceteris paribus), but this time A has lost some, 25% to be exact, trust towards the coin, and wants to reflect his lessened trust so that his investment is no more worth $4 but $3. What happens?

Without a coincidence of someone wanting to simultaneously increase trust, A has to push the price down to meet the neutral reaction by the others ("X has come down, so it's good to buy low" - this reflects their willingness to trust the equal amount of $ in the coin regardless of fluctuations).

To reduce A's exposure in the coin to $3, the following happens:

- coin market value would decrease by 10%
- A would hold 3.33 coins valued at $3
- B would hold 3.33 coins valued at $3
- C would hold 2.22 coins valued at $2
- D would hold 1.11 coins valued at $1
- a total of 0.67 coins have been sold by A for $0.60.

I will continue soon, this is messy to explain...

Exactly. There never was a perior where you could have created value out of nothing. In private placements (pre-IPO) we do it all the time. Company is owned by its directors who typically paid not much for their own shares. Then investors come and it's marked up +10000%. This is fine and pretty much the only way to do things in that world. But coins are not stocks, and doing it with a coin hurts the coin.

The devs have had the same chances to buy it as anyone else. The devs' average buyins are in the same BTC0.004 range. The devs own a lot compared to their total stash, but none of them is even listed in the TOP-5 holders. This is rare. This is precious. This bodes well for the economy because it creates the possibility for those interested in economy to take the leadership, which is lacking in nerd-controlled coins.

In my understanding all coins in the world were either gold, silver, mixture or debased thereof, or tokens exchangeable or redeemable in gold/silver.

That is 2 valuable things. Auxiliary monies have been salt, cattle, and fringe cases.

Yes, I have written a book about it. Happens to be that the only book I have ever written is about monetary history and silver in particular 

What was your point again?

It IS an obsession that you come to constantly (like: weekly - this forum has 100000s of accounts, how many do you involve weekly??) harass me, despite that I have said I don't want anything to do with you.

Your problem why I have banned you is that you have offended my family. That is something you need to apologize. Without it, there is no way to reconciliation. It is very simple. Apologize, or go away. I have nothing to say to you. This will not change, you are wasting your time and making a greater fool about yourself. Some things cannot be bought.

It is not necessary to prove that a random person in the world is a scammer, in order to be suspicious, and to avoid possibly getting scammed.

I don't get paid for it, but there are people in the world who do, they evaluate other people's creditworthiness. I know something about the process and James fails glaringly. Just stating what I know (that he is not creditworthy due to sky-high risk) is not that I hate him, or that I have lost my mind, or credibility, or anything. Actually I am quite tired having to write this. This is eating the publicity that should be in the real, factual, big issue of this month in Altcoinworld - the MEW (temporary name).

An important attribute for money is limited and knowable supply. I also support cooperation between coins but at the same time there needs to be some limit to what are legitimate coins and what are not. Otherwise you could just expand money supply at will.

In my books, BTC is legitimate due to being the first.

XMR is the legitimate one among cryptonote coins (and by extension - of all anon tech).

There are no other market niches that would support a coin.


2.0 tech such as NXT, XCP maybe good but they should be clearly branded to be something else than coins.