You may not have clicked the link, given your interpretation of the boat meme.  It's worth a look.  BTC lusted after easier integration with the legacy financial system for years.  You can fund a visa card with Monero, make SEPA payments from Monero. I find that very empowering.  Why save in a depreciating currency at negative interest rates when you can save in the most rapidly appreciating asset on the planet, with convenient liquidity?!

More on-ramps will be required. 

That's the nature of the animal.  Wishing won't change that.  Price was too low, so it had to go up.  There were 2.5 years to bid it up, but no one could be bothered.  

It will happen again and again.  As with bitcoin, so with Monero, only faster.  Much faster.

Now I can: http://about.bitwa.la/bitwala-is-now-accepting-monero/

Since polo is so bot-infested, it's hard to compete for maker rate.

Who would move to a new exchange that did not offer an API - humans only?

Maybe I should make a poll...

I was objectively wrong.

I was just running with the theory that if it happens 4 times, it's liable to happen  5.  6, 8, 18, 48, whatever, as long as it happens eventually (by 2017) I'll be content.

I am in dubitation.

Maybe you could arrange for a mutability bug, or find evidence of fractional Reserve on the polo blockchain

1.5 bm USD?  That's a stretch, on speculation.  Not hyped enough, like ETH was.

Anyhow, unless you are specifically speculating in another price series, efficient markets imply that the current price is the best uninformed estimate of the future price (or NPV thereof, in the presence of beneficiary cash flows).

You quoted one proposed resolution.  It may be that there are problems with it, due to bit mixing, but if everyone could destroy *part* of the key, it might be feasible to trust the set-up.  I have not worked through the math, so I am commenting from ignorance, but also from generally applicable principles.  Once the number and diversity of the required conspirators becomes large enough, a practically useful number of non-participants will deem the result trustworthy.

It's not my only reservation, or I might consider it resolvable.  The number of serious reservations makes resolution of all of them seem unlikely.

Personally I think support for Monero in bitwa.la is huge news, and will have a substantial long-term impact of the growth of the above-ground economy, as well as on the utility of the currency to all users.

I addressed this same comment in another thread.  In a competitive environment, FCT will race to the bottom of near zero profit margins.  In contrast, Monero has a natural monopoly as the reference currency of a growing economy.  I don't think the U.S. government is so easily corrupted as to prefer the interests of factom holders to those of the tax-payers.  Certainly fintech startups will reach for anything in their desperation.  It's not like "Wall street" is referring to a bank consortium or something.  In fact the FX majors have their own settlement chain in development.  Players small enough to resort to factom are too small to have a significant value-add, unless they come up with some proprietary innovation.  I am not seeing it.

Monero derives its utility from fungibility and scarcity.  Factom derives its utility from uniqueness.  The two are radically different, and serve radically different markets.  Comparing them on mcap is a category error.

I think it's counter-productive to own so much that it threatens the value of the currency you do hold.  

My original reasoning was invalid, but I used it for lack of a valid alternative:  There are working local currencies in villages as small as ca.  1000 households.  Thus the greatest lower bound on the number of nodes in a viable economy is, to first approximation on evidence, ~1000.  Therefore, No one should own more than 0.1% of emission in the long-run, or there may not be enough nodes.

Not only is this reasoning invalid, it is also obsolete:  There is now a much broader distribution than there was when I formulated the invalid conclusion.  Due to divisibility, it doesn't matter what share of the float the nodes have, so long as the share is distributed appropriately amongst the nodes of the (sub-)economy.

There remain two considerations which I now deem relevant:

I exercise some restraint simply because I don't think it's healthy for adoption if there is a single person who you can point at and say:  He will benefit disproportionately, if I use this currency.  Why should I act to enrich him?  (Although, in my own case, I think I could make a pretty good argument that you should.  Otherwise I wouldn't bother.)  As long as I am among 50 instead of 5, I think I am not doing much positive harm to the economy.  The farther up the Gini curve you go, the more self-defeating it becomes. Maybe you can predate upon a well-developed economy, and continuously improve yourself by impoverishing others, but in a nascent start-up economy, I doubt it can be done, practically speaking.  You have to contribute as best you can, and help insure a constructive, utile distribution, at least until it bootstraps.  My ability to contribute is constrained by available time, so I can't accumulate too much -- otherwise, my harm to distribution will not be adequately offset by my positive contributions in other areas.  How do you calibrate this?  I haven't tried very hard, but I don't really know how, so I just wing it.  Which makes the constraint perhaps a bit too ... flexible ... for perfect, clear (self-interested OR altruistic) rationality.

A separate fuzzy factor which I weigh together with this:  If I were to have owned too much Monero when it was declining, my courage might have failed, or my wife might have ditched me.  Neither would be an acceptable outcome:  I abhor personal cowardice, and I cherish and respect my wife.  But those are personal factors, and highly subjective, although you can work with them rationally, within some limited domains.

Serious lag problems in Polo interfaces today.  Pretty bad yesterday too.

Ag may be lower, but it won't be that low.  Late spring?  Maybe.

my model: my central estimate for 2017 is $25.  my estimate of current value is $5.80.  after the initial rise, there will be a retracement.  after the retracement, the central tendency is to hyperbolically converge to the central estimate for 2017.  using the endpoints of 1 Oct 2016 and 1 July 2017, i interpolated to estimate $13.68 for 1 Jan 2017, almost precisely an LTC mcap, taking uniform priors for BTC and LTC.

I am inclined to buy below 013, in increasing size all the way down.  012--013 was the last moderately stable intraday level, and represents a 50% retracement of the impulsive weekend move.  But I won't buy much.  Unless it gets crazy, like under .01.  Then I will abandon restraint.

Well, if they get cheap enough, I won't be able to resist.  Forgive me, Vilfredo Pareto.

One of my favorites, reposted:  https://bitcoinism.liberty.me/only-the-black-market-matters/

Your commentary doesn't seem to be strongly related to my post.  I'm not even trading anymore.  I've gone into deep-roving HODL mode. (I am trading in a couple of hundred every once in a while to help friends and family, or as a place-marker to remind me to test an idea, but its not intended to increase my XMR, which is as large as I can comfortably hold at this level in the development of the economy.)  

I am, objectively speaking, an uber-bull on XMR:  I think it has marvelous asymmetry of risk, and vast upside potential.  Everyone who deserves wealth should own as much as they can comfortably hold, immediately, at any price.  Please notice that some of the wealthiest and most experienced participants in this thread are also uber-bulls.

I am also an advocate, an activist, ideologically supportive, and I consider it a moral duty to do what I feasibly can to improve the development of XMR.  I recognize the price-discovery value of a short market.  I am not opposed to intelligent market-making, or even long/short speculations.  But slamming the book, that peeves me.  Any form of manipulative behaviour peeves me.  In particular, the trollish variety of shorts tick me off grandly.  But, it's an impotent sort of rage, so I try not to indulge it. I will, however, seize upon shadenfreude and run with it, if I see a badly behaving short player get their fingers burned.  I think the kids say 'rekt'.  I see it as karmic justice, as a brutal punishment the universe meets out on the foolish.  Justice is one of my highest values (truth, beauty, and love being the others).

In other news, a reminder of a golden oldie:

https://bitcoinism.liberty.me/only-the-black-market-matters/