He wants all the moneroj.  Cheap.  I am guessing he spikes it to 03, loans himself monero cheap, and shorts it down to 0188, holds it down a few hours so the ask fill in, then sweeps the book again.  Its what I would do if I had about 30mm to play with and didn't care who got hurt.  (But of course saying it in public reduces the likelihood quite substantially.)

Why?  I imagine: He anticipates $100 moneroj in 12 months.  But I think he's optimistic.  $25 average, maybe with a spike to $40-50.

If he has $120mm to play with, the game changes.  Then he plans to run the mcap up to 1bn, and start selling to HNW savers escaping DM tax/into policies.  Freeport customers, that sort.  That's a 5 year game that nets him about $1 bn and puts XMRBTC at parity 3-5 years ahead of the organic schedule, his final notional exit point.  No reason to add big (40-60% swing)  vol in that case, just ramp it until you run dry, short it 20-30% down, rinse, repeat.  My 12 month estimate would be $125, were that the case.  (Low probability due to capital outlay size.)

Anyhow, he's not doing it to make us wealthy, that's a certainty.  It's just a happy side-effect.  One way to help is to make market, but rather small and fast - with bots, really, using very little capital, except on wide spreads, biased upwards.  You might lose a wee on the inside every time he makes it rip or dip, but hopefully your deep-book orders more than make up for it during vol spikes - and the visible liquidity attracts both currency uses and reserve clients for the whale.

Cool story?

Anyhow it's getting close to the hour when he tends to get twitchy.

IIRC someone did a calc to the effect that $1 inflow moved cap by ~$10 during one or another of the btc bubbles.  Anyhow, what moves btc cap by 600 could move XMR cap by 600.   I'd find that amusing.


The whole market (both sides) must be like 95% our whale accumulator friend.  He's got the price on a very tight collar.  Any time now I guess he'll decide to whip his hair back and forth.  Dude knows his bidnis.

Everything you said made sense except the decline in btc market cap.  Surely the influx of fiat into btc is raising btc's market clearing price and hence market cap.

Fiat flows into btc. BTCUSD goes up.  Btc flows into XMR.  XMRBTC goes up.  End of story until new flows occur. Btc wins, and monero wins².  Only fiat loses.

It is almost logically impossible to prove the destruction of the secret seed.  And if it is destroyed, then it is infeasible to verify its entropy.  It's a magic number, and as such can be chosen to create vulnerability.

We passed that milestone once already then slipped back.

Anyhow, I know the walrus was Paul, but who is the vulture?

TA is very apt for a speculation thread.  I find it comforting when many are predicting correction.  It implies money on the sidelines.

Who is the "vulture" guy?

Because folks mark in USD. They don't just market buy at funding time. They fund, and then trade on moves.

You got that precisely backwards. The BTC rally may be fiat currency flowing into Monero via BTC

So you're saying "Monero is a bubble"?


Not always.  Some markets only go up.  Mongolia was straight up for years.  It is what happens to mispriced assets.

Calling a spade a spade I would say "premine scam".


Different.  The anonymity set is larger (under ceteris paribus assumptions, which may not actually hold).  But it has decades less peer review.  Not superior.


Please worry me a wall.

This one doesn't exist. It is a project with minimal progress, long since stalled.

I think 2024.  Around 5 oz Au.  (Not sure USD exist in 2024.)  Total WAG, no science.

I believe it is the third Monero-branded abs.ex. sold by start the art.  I bought the first.  I think the 5-panel was the best of them, though.

Probably, he should be selling them on AlphaBay.

If we don't have an overshoot and crash at some point, then folks will begin to question whether they can use early bitcoin as a precedent for reasoning about price.  My guess is that will only increase FOMO, due to lack of a cheap entry.  

I have been uber-bullish for more than two years.  Call it "book talk" if you like.  I call it "putting your money where your mouth is".  If I face a massive draw-down at some point, so be it.  I already paid for that in my domestic life, so I am going to exploit my greatest investment power to the maximum, namely, the power of patience.  I have seen too many people miss out on the exponential moves by out-smarting themselves - and even done it myself a bit - so I refuse to make that mistake.  "Be right and sit tight" is the classic street wisdom.

It is entirely possible, albeit highly unlikely, that Monero will prove to be much more of a one-way asset than bitcoin ever was.  Every miner who sold XMR for 17 cents should be slapping themselves silly right now.   A few lucky ones may have eked out a few pennies of profit by shorting XMR from time to time, but I am pretty sure that none of the shorts have seen the multiples that long-term holders have seen.  In fact, almost everyone who has ever shorted XMR is probably very stung, and stuck with a huge loss.  Who is left to sell, if both miners and speculators are punished so harshly for it?  Our whale accumulator may dump again  - if it worked before for him ... but I don't know that it has, and I am quite sure that his carry cost is far less than his amortized gain, so he has little or no reason to dump if it didn't work.

It may be the reserve demand on XMR will significantly outpace that of bitcoin.  If so, we will not experience bitcoin's historical levels of volatility, but rather something more like its recent (2015  - 2016) relative stability and steady appreciation.  I am just describing a possible scenario, not making a prediction.

The demographics we can count on to provide liquidity are merchants and market-makers.  So trading bots are good.  But I would still prefer a humans-only exchange for my personal, very human, trades.

It is ludicrous.  I am also buying here, but not very much.

No.  The math is not patentable, and no ASIC would use Intel IP for AES.  It would implement AES differently.

The larger transactions are a constant factor.  Constant factors disappear with hardware tech generations. The real scalability bottleneck in bitcoin is political.  Monero doesn't have that problem yet.

Bitcoin absolutely has a huge lead in social capital, and it remains to be seen that Monero can match it.  I think, however, that financial value and the promise of growth motivated the development of that capital.  Monero seems to have more upside potential now, which may cause a hyper-speed catch-up in social capital.  Time will tell.  I certainly can't put intervals around my guesses on that point right now, so they seem pretty worthless, predictively.

Another point: Old school bitcoin enthusiasts have been easy to sell on Monero from the start, and it is not so easy to ignore among the scamcoin hordes any longer, so I expect a lot of them to get on the bandwagon in the coming 6 months or so. They will bring their network and social capital with them.

Many AMD CPUs have AES-NI now, often faster than comparable Intel CPUs.

The main thing that makes it hard to do with an ASIC is irregularly accessing a relatively large amount of memory.  A large enough die at a fine enough process will eventually make it feasible to produce an ASIC with a scratchpad large enough for cryptonight.

By that time, quantum will be the bigger issue, methinks.

Yes, transfer fees are quite ridiculous right now but that will be resolved with the next scheduled fork, I am confident.

In fact, I say that purely on the basis of the core team's history of good judgement.  They don't always do what I think is optimal, but they always do something very reasonable, and usually I would be inclined to trust their judgement, as a group, to be better than my own, by default.  I can't think of any other crypto for which that is true, remarkably.

Just keep doubling.