Even if Mom can use it, she won't, because she can't actually get any XMR.

Sorry I'm kicking a dead horse here. I'm not saying promotion/advertising is useless, but without accessibility it seems like we're all just circle-jerking each other.

We need some brilliant ideas... how can we make it absurdly easy for a normal, non-regular person to acquire XMR? Can we give XMR away with the purchase of something else?

What useful service can we offer Mom or Grandma that would improve their lives with XMR?

I think it's time we start thinking bigger.

The miniscule market caps of these altcoins mean nothing to the mass of potential outside adopters looking for something useful, which I have yet to see from any crypto, including Bitcoin.

Saying that Monero has to win tiny market cap battles in order to achieve wider adoption is like saying you have to be the most popular kid in high school in order be successful in the real world.

You said "just existing" wasn't good enough. I made a point. Now you're changing the subject.

For the third time, I never it would be easy. But my point still stands that it's 100% necessary.

I don't know what these companies value has to do with anything. A more relevant consideration might be:

What was bitcoin's first ever fiat exchange, and what was btc's value when it opened?

Just existing is plenty good enough if the only purpose is to sell people xmr for fiat. Here, give me 10 bucks, and I'll give you some xmr. See? No massive adoption necessary.

How much use does xmr.to or shapeshift.io depend on? None. They buy coins from exchanges as needed to fulfill orders.

USDT isn't fiat, and polo isn't a dedicated exchange. Even if it was, try creating an account for your mom and see if she can buy some Monero with her USD.

I agree with you that easy fiat exchange would be extremely challenging, but we will never achieve real-world adoption/use without it. And I'd definitely try to create it myself if I had the time and legal help/knowledge.

Again, I'm not saying everyone has to flock to it. It just has to exist. We want adoption and we want merchants to accept xmr, but we have to have an easy option for new users to acquire it that doesn't depend on BTC.

Recently a close friend of mine asked me how she could acquire some xmr. I agreed to get some for her, but should I instead have replied, "oh, monero isn't popular enough among crypto geeks for you to be able to buy it with your dollars. Instead you have to buy this other much more popular crypto first, and then trade it on a complicated exchange that won't make sense to regular folks like yourself"?

You're still making assumptions. Show me a scenario where an alt had a dedicated fiat exchange that nobody used.

Oh, and which altcoin exchange was Bitcoin traded on before it got big enough for it's own exchange?

The point is: altcoin exchanges will never drive demand outsite of altcoin exchanges. Somewhere you must be independent of BTC. It doesn't have to be the most popular... but you need the option.

It sounds like you're making up rules that nobody really has to follow. You're saying we all have to dick around on btc-denominated exchanges until we reach some magical threshold where everyone all agrees we can become a "real crypto" with our own exchange.

I'm saying we don't need to be the biggest fish in the small pond before competing in the big one. We need to start thinking of (and building) third party solutions for real-world use that will attract outsiders. We don't need the approval of altcoin speculators to do that.

We already have mymonero.com, which functions just fine as an easy safe storage option for the average joe. But that's only useful after he acquires his XMR in the first place. Hence the need for super easy fiat trade.

xmr.to, as cool as it is, is somewhat ahead of itself because it only caters to current monero supporters or savvy btc users. This is fine, but it still doesn't free us from the bitcoin dependency bubble.


You have to admit the above sounds rather silly.

Monero will never be a contender until it loses its dependency on BTC.

If consumers can't easily acquire XMR, then merchant adoption is out of the question. Fluffypony is right that a GUI means nothing. The core team builds the protocol. It's the responsibility of third parties to develop the necessary tools for consumers.

But we will never have the consumer demand to drive such third party development without a dedicated and easy fiat exchange. Notice I said "dedicated." It's not enough to be included on some BTC-fiat platform with other alts. There needs to be a stupidly easy way to purchase XMR with fiat money. And yes, I realize that achieving this (legally) is an extremely challenging problem.

Could simply be anticipation for Monday's news (because it's always on a Monday).

HYPOTHESIS ACCEPTED.

Exactly. It's not even the first coin in this niche with "Moneta" in the name... not to mention "Moneta Verde" conveniently appeared during Monero's early success. Go figure.

I don't see XMR's price to BTC having much relevance, as BTC is hardly an established currency itself and has no stable purchasing power. The sooner we let go of the bitcoin dependency/correlation, the better.

More direct Fiat/XMR exchange would help move XMR out of the whole "altcoin" space into that of a more "independent" currency.

Agreed. As much as it pissed me off that thankful_for_today rushed bitMonero out the door, it may have been the best decision he made, as BBR could very well have captured the market if it was released first.

However, if I remember correctly, BBR still wasn't launched at the time TFT was ousted.

He was most likely a part of the original cryptonote scam. He figured he could maintain control by relaunching bytecoin and capturing those who were against the 80% premine. Merge mining was another thing that nobody wanted but he moved forward with. It was all to support bytecoin.

What's amusing is that a big argument for not relaunching bitMonero after taking it over was that it already had a certain level of momentum, even though only a few of us were mining it. I'm not being critical... it just seems so insignificant in retrospect.

Are you talking about the original bitMonero fork from bytecoin?

Most of us didn't like the fact that bytecoin had already been 80% mined. An unknown individual named thankful_for_today announced he was working on a fair relaunch of bytecoin that would have a distribution closer to that of bitcoin, with shorter block times. A number of us showed interest and even attempted to collaborate with him.

We actually wanted a shallower distribution.
We were pretty unanimous that 1 minute block times were a bad idea.
We were unanimous that some type of perpetual inflation was necessary on the tail end of distribution.

At the same time, crypto_zoidberg announced his fork, HoneyPenny (eventually to become BBR). This project had some interesting things going on, but wasn't planned for release for another 6 weeks or so.

When thankful_for_today launched bitMonero two weeks later (he was in a huge rush to be the first fork out the door, and might be the reason Monero always had the lead on BBR), he had pretty much ignored everything that was discussed and just did what he wanted. The block reward was considerably steeper than what everyone was expecting. He also moved forward with 1 minute block times despite everyone's concerns about the increase of orphan blocks. He also didn't address the tail emission concern that should've (in my opinion) been in the code at launch time. Basically, he fucked everything up. Then, he disappeared.

I, and others, started working on new forks that were closer to what everyone else was hoping for. David Latapie (IIRC) started PMing people and trying to get them to consolidate projects to not divide the community. I personally thought the best course of action was to fix bitMonero and relaunch it (I still think that would've been best). but instead it was decided that the bitMonero project should just be taken over. There were like 9 or 10 interested parties at the time if my memory is correct. We voted on irc to drop the "bit" from bitMonero and move forward with the project.

Thankful_for_today suddenly resurfaced, and wasn't happy to learn the community had assumed control of the coin. He attempted to maintain his own fork (still calling it "bitMonero") for a while, but that quickly fell into obscurity. The rest is history.

Okay, let's be reasonable.

I admit I can't personally unravel darkcoin transactions. Does that mean your ISP can't either? What about the NSA?

Do you expect the NSA to join the discussion and truthfully comment on the matter?

Assuming you're a reasonable person, what criticism would you see as valid, short of the NSA showing up and graciously giving you a demonstration?