I wouldn't touch the DAO or ETH. All the hype-promises will be broken. Things should drop a lot from here. Just a matter of when. Could be a shitcoin by next year ...
Hope polo enables shorting DAO soon so i can make some gains on this before it goes up in flames.
It certainly will be an epic show with that much money involved.

I see the DAO as a game of who can compromise it first and cash out the funds to themselves.

Added Dogecoin to OP. It's merged with LTC, right?

because multiple chains for a merge mined coins are multiple sources of failure. If you merge with 5 coins your merge mined coin blows up when any one of these blows up while when only merging with one chain the fate of the merge mined coin is tied to only one other chain instead of more. Along that line it makes most sense to merge with Bitcoin or Litecoin imo and merging with more chains simultaneously would make more trouble than have benefit but maybe i'm wrong. It's just educated guessing.

edit: also merge mined coins turn out to be not parasitic in nature as they don't cause damage to anything. They are actually an aditional source of income for miners. Btc-miners like merge mined coin because it's a little extra money for them with no additional costs. 

Speaking as a trader and investor, merge mined coins seem to be undervalued to me.
They generally don't have shiny brands and lots of short-term hype. And they are mostly old coins.
Most technical developements in crypto have been going nowhere and most ideas never were finished. Not so merge mining. It is working like a charm and seems to be reliable.

Why are merge mined coins of interest?
For a whole set of reasons:

1st) MM with bitcoin makes a coin very secure if/when it is adopted by enough btc-pools.

2nd) They somewhat defy logic and gravity because normally running a network costs huge bucks. These costs mostly are hidden in the inflation of the coin. This translates to: The user of a coin who is not mining the coin does pay an invisible tax to the miners (the inflation) for their work of keeping the network running. These costs can sometimes be very high. For Bitcoin currently the costs per transaction are 10$. (https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction)
These pretty high 10$ are calculated this way: "global earning of miners devided by number of transactions"

That being said, an altcoin network running on its own does also produce costs in relation to its marketcap. More often than not an altcoin shows an initial pump and an endless slow decline afterwards. These long slow declines you see in the charts of almost every altcoin are primarily caused by the oversupply the inflation causes constantly. So what inflation does is pushing down your price very little but all the time.

Merge mined coins now in comparison can be run much cheaper because the bitcoin miner is mining bitcoins anyways. For him a merge mined coin is a matter of setting it up once and getting a small aditional income from his btc mining activities. It's a win-win situation. The miner gets more for the same hashpower and no aditional cost while the coin gets exposure to bitcoin hashpower for only small costs. Basically merge mined coins do carry hashpower which is enormous and could never be paid for by those coin communities if it was running on its own.

I hear people often say "a coin looses its personality when merged with btc because now it's only a byproduct from btc mining" . I hear this line very often and i think it is utterly irrational. Because merge mined coins are cheaper, more secure, have less inflation and live much, much longer. MUCH longer.
Now your "feeling" towards the process of creation doesn't match with the facts. Oh, wait, people saying that are likely miners who want to mine shitcoins and dump and move on. Right, merge mined coins don't accomodate the parasitic miner that's why he doesn't like them. Most people making arguments against merged mining are of that sort. They shouldn't hold it down, though. Also their interest is opposite of investors interests. In a merged mined coin investors interests and miners interests are similar and both are happy about each other.

Basically all these alts that are mined on their own have some initial hype, people buy it, interest peaks and after that point inflation pushes the price over the next 6 to 12 months to near zero. This pattern repeats over and over in coins. Not in merge mined coins with low inflation. They can be kept afloat even with low interest.
This means MM-coins are basically a group of altcoins that aren't suffering from the very fast dying off or being completely abandoned like you see it with most of these fad-coins that pop up this week and are forgotten 2 weeks later and drop to zero

So from the standpoint of an longterm investor in altcoins merge mined coins are first choice because they normally don't depreciate to zero the way the stand-alone-coins do and they are better store of value due to very low inflation. Stand-alone-alts aren't a place to park your money longterm, merge mined coins are.
A solid merge mined coin is a real alternative for money-storage to Bitcoin and Litecoin.

And last but not least: Bitcoin blocks are full now and fees should rise. People could look for alternative chains to make txs on. Merge mined chains are just perfect to take on parts of the bitcoin load. So with this background they could possibly even turn out real good investement in case people would wake up to them. Currently these coins seem a little bit forgotten and aren't hyped a little bit so the entry they offer isn't so bad at all.


Merge mined coins with btc on the market include:

-IXcoin (no more blockreward TX fee only)
-i0coin (no more blockreward TX fee only)
-Unobtanium (active community and good things happening here, blockrewards for 300 years planned out, micro-inflation)
-Devcoin
-Namecoin
-SyS (just forked to AuxPow 256)
-HunterCoin? (vague recollection it is MM but also heard rumor it code is faulty)
-Myraid (fairly sure it is MM on the Sha256 vein)
[also XCP and Omni platforms use the bitcoin hash, slightly different than AuxPow 256 tech]

Merged with Litecoin:
-Doge
-Via
-eCanada
-Peseta
-Umbrella
-Taco


Personally i do think every longterm crypto-portofolio should have a portion in merge mined coins. But that's just my 2 cents.

Disclaimer: the author is holding merge mined coins (of course)

A catfight  


But back to topic.
@Fed moneyprinting.

It's a fine line between a deflationary collapse and a crack up boom hyperinflation scenario.
Schiff said "only an intelectual could worry about deflation" and i think he's right.
The thing with those arbitrary 2% inflation the white-haired grandma mumbles about all the time is: she does not control it directly. She can print money, yes. But she does not control if people hoard cash or not. And people are stupid and hoard cash, in particular USD.

So when finally inflation is felt and the Dollar would depreciate suddenly all the dollar-hoarders want to sell their dollars. That's when there could be some sort of an inflationary landslight. If that happens gold goes up a lot and bitcoin should too. By extention Uno should get some love too. Maybe it can be a rockstar too because it's the exact opposite of FED confetti-money.  

updates help for soggy sandwitches i was told 

How would you know how this will look after the next few updates?

xcp bringing smart contracts to the btc network

http://coinjournal.net/counterparty-ethereum-virtual-machine-smart-contracts-bitcoin-blockchain/


In case you make huge profit don't forget to channel some back as buysupport for Uno

Well, in the meantime i just got myself some xcp, so the disclaimer isn't valid anymore  

Coming on nicely and less risk than all that ipo-crap. Now let's see how rational this market really is. XCP should upgrade a lot and ETH should downgrade slowly at first and then faster and faster to shitcoin levels in no time. XCP could come out a top 10 coin in this. Good times.  

Given the entry xcp offers to us there's a multitude of eth-profits possible here if everyone is on the train. Could go up 100 times (6 to 600 million) ... maybe ... if xcp-team does it right. We can dream

To the moon!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1504601.0

OP has a point, but then there is a hand ful of exceptions to that description. I ccertainly also support longterm coins not one-week-vapourshit. People should do that more; support legit projects instead of pyramid  schemes but as it stands people don't understand what they trade and keep buying the ponzis because they have faster return.

Then also the real progress is made in alts, nowhere else. This is where new tech pops up first and also often dies right at the spot.
Great things can come from alts aswell as huge scams. Better make your due diligence and have some reservations on all this.
It'd probably already help the markets a lot if people could turn away from these scammy presales.
Because you buy scams they'll supply you with scams. Because YOU don't demand a good product you aren't getting one.
That's the state of affairs. When people stopped buying crap in 2015 suddenly better coins poped up. #truestory

You get what you demand and what you deserve. Nothing to complain about. If there is sufficient demand for garbage then there is no incentive to not produce garbage. As long as people at large buy garbage you get nothing else. End of story.

This cattle-style-behaviour of the mob rushing in and out with irrational fads makes me sick too, lol.
Markets still have to grow up.

You can comment if you want: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1504601.0

found this online:
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/counterparty-brings-ethereum-smart-contracts-to-the-bitcoin-blockchain/

When counterparty enables running smart contracts from your btc-adress then it defeats the whole purpose of the Ethereum network because:

-running xcp will be more convenient in particular for btc-users than actually running eth
-xcp and btc are likely better distributed than eth
-xcp provides higher security thanks to pow-hash in btc
-these contracts not only more convient to run, they are also cheaper to run AND hold because of much lower inflation and in xcp you don't have to pay that useless hash in eth that's actually just producing heat currently. So in xcp no additional hash needs to be payed.

XCP is significantly cheaper to run and more convenient to the bitcoin-user than ETH is.

Now can someone tell me again why anyone should use ETH instead of XCP? ETH lost its usecase and bullish outlook entirely thanks to this news.

All comments and opinions welcome but please keep it civil.

Disclaimer: i am not holding any ETH or XCP at the moment.

Just been reading the comment from knife on last page. If it wasn't Vern buying that 6k but someone else and our theories about Vern are wrong, then this guy had unfortunate timing with the cryptsy-wallet causing FUD in the market and lots of shorting. I'd recommend to such a larger buyer to buy in more slowly next time. Can't push the market up 5 times in a day and expect it to stick. People who wanting in for several tons need to take the slow train in such a small marketcap imo. Also Uno is pretty cleared from btc-lovers after all the years. Rising btc does not automatically cause heavy selling in Uno like it may be with other coins. At least that would be my estimate. Better luck next time, if it wasn't Vern.

edit: remember, guys? 2014/2015 bulllmarket in Uno was 11 months duration. That has never been seen in crypto anywhere else. Also this time there isn't a hardfork scheduled. I think it's looking good, now that the stealing Vermin is hiding in some china-ghettos without any Uno left. Best case scenario we can even buy the 15k off market so it desn't make waves. I think it's looking pretty good for 2016. I'm optimistic.

The FED will do their best to shake the tree but ultimately it goes to new ATH imo.
Holding some for the longterm won't hurt, i think. Just my 2 cents.

Vern has sold. He was the only reason we went down. I understand the 15k-wallet is locked up. Otherwise i can't see anyone on the blockchain reducing their size. I think the only direction is up from this price.  
But don't take my word for it. I know as good as you do.

edit: just hoping the 2k wallet isn't Vern anymore...

Silver just hit 17.70$ today, up from 14$ this year. In case you didn't have it on the radar. 

This is my perception. Does that look about right? 

It's definately a situation like in the WW1 trenches ...  

Whales make splashes, such is life ... we'll make the best of it.



also have this picture of me trading like batman   :





there is also still the remote possibility this could be a shakeout before some bigger move, but i honestly doubt it. We'll possibly have to wait him out. He can trade with himself in the meantime ...

Hurry up Vern, we're sick of you! Nobody is buying your sellwalls. We have all the time in the world; other than you do. It'll just be waiting-game for you. YOU can't sell for over 2$. Hiding your walls won't help you, moving your tons on the chain to another account won't help you. Nothing will help you. May aswell just dump the lot. We're waiting for  the 4tons to dump into the market. Take all your time.  

 


 


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Longterm-style. BN right at the money.