Uh-oh.  Running out of XMR again. 

In USDJPY, it is.

This certainly occurs, but in general, today, XMR sees first-order use as a speculation (store of value), second-order use as a transmission channel (medium of exchange), and only third-order use in denominating commerce (unit of account). Due to being the most fungible of all currencies, many proponents deem, and I among them, that it is better suited to many commercial uses than any other candidate currency - specifically, those use-cases in which deviations from perfect fungibility impose cost or risk.


I would, and would be quite pleased.  Certainly I would be more inclined to do business with you on that basis than otherwise.

All unbound currencies (informational commodities) have a value bootstrapping challenge.  Fiat currencies derive value from taxation, but free-market currencies gain utility from being valued, and gain value from their utility.  Inevitably, this is a cycle: when the technology is apt, a virtuous one; otherwise, a vicious one.

Given the hard fork heart beat, it is not difficult to conceive of a fork which, when universally mined, burned all the XMR with mixin 0, and resurrected them on a pheonix chain, tabula rasa.  Thus, I don't think there is even a theoretical possibility of XMR dead-ending on scalability due to blockchain size, so long as the heart keeps beating.

That last point is certainly true, but I am not sure the inference is sound.  For example, if the price is lagging the value eggregiously, then the correction may be eggregious as well.  Of course, overshoot is typical, and then, yes, the greater fool is rearing its belled tassels.

Anyhow, I think it will be the width of the money pipe that drives the next serious BTC bubble, from one or two new ETFs - have thought so for years, now - continue to do so.  Throw that fiat on the fire, baby.

Gold being so hot right now, while USDJPY is tanking, has got to be good for all crypto.  Notice that SPX is locally correlated with Gold (and soon oil?).  What with the overheated job market, that screams inflation.  With CB balance sheets over the moon, and negative rates everywhere, ugh.  The apocalypse is good for crypto.  When those excess reserves get knocked loose -- c'est l'deluge.

Of course the most meaningful BTC prediction in this vanishing volatility environment is dreary sameness.  I haven't had a good timing win on BTC since the happy happy joy joy of Brexit past.

Feeling pretty good about oil here, I may say.  Gold too during the coming week.

I could make a technical argument that SPX shorts won't capitulate for another 5-6 months.  The drop then would be awesome, around February.  The next U.S. president would then be the Hoover of the 21st century -- and Yellen, the Rudolf Havenstein.

Perhaps it means the audience is sufficiently mature to refrain from mockery until time disproves me.  Otherwise, ever the contrarian,  I would tilt towards "less".

The audience for the painting is basically XMR enthusiasts with the right color scheme in their man-cave and a high tolerance for abstract expressionism.  (Merciless gender stereotyping intended.)  It's not a huge market, and I've already filled a wall, so...  best of luck to "start the art".

I can attest that the material and workmanship quality on my own selection was as expected, and shipping was very reasonable. +5 vendor.

My outlook for XBTUSD is up intraday for a while, then down through the weekend, to a new low for the week, probably below 640, where my order ladder lies.  The implication for XMRBTC is favorable over the weekend, as XMR tends to USD stability during BTC fluctuations.  I'm anticipating a daily high in XMRBTC on Sunday or Monday, and may sell into it with some fraction of my very small trading position -- too small to make a significant price impact, so don't bother trying: Almost all of my XMR was lost in a boating accident in 2014, and is unavailable to the market barring some heroic recovery.

Feel free to mock my predictions after they are proven false.  Any sufficiently precise prediction is invariably false, so I won't feel bad about the occasional public whipping; as long as my long-term average privately demonstrates an edge which is scaled correctly to my trading risk, I will find some way to console myself.

There are many varieties of religious experience.  Cases where a person is well-schooled in scientific method and in various sciences later comes to embrace views contradictory to reductionist materialism are by no means unknown.  As the default ontology of physics shifts to one of reduction to quantum information, the embrace of theism or other transcendental models is likely to become more common, rather than less: A world of pure information is much more credibly the product of transcendent mind than one made of the 19th century's Newtonian deterministic atoms.

Back to economics, I ran some numbers on the U.S. CPI.  Nominally 1.51% since QE, if I reweight food, fuel, housing and medical to align with medium household income shares, it comes to 3.32%.

Therefore, if anyone tells you the SPX has reached a new high, relative to May 2015, keep in mind that 15 months later a real new high would be over 2223, which has not happened yet.

I have a bid at 580, just in case, but consider it dead money, hopeless. We are going up, not down, over the next few days, weeks.

For now:

Draw a straight line from the May 31 low through the July 20 low.  Below that rising line, I will buy.

Draw a straight line from the May 18 high through the July 10 high.  Above that rising line, I will sell.

I will guess that this rule will hold for at least a week if neither line is crossed in that time, maybe longer. The ramp is too steep to hold through August, though.  Past 340k the likelihood of a >10% correction rises quadratically as we approach 440k, and goes exponential, with increasing expected magnitude, thereafter.

All these numbers are intended to be very fuzzy.

I get the impression that, at this hash rate, miners on average tend to withhold their stock below $2.  Just a vague impression, mind you, and over the short term real-time miner sales are not very significant to price nowadays, since the total reward is only about 1% of exchange volume, and declining, but in the past, over weeks and months, the then-prevailing miner preference level has been a pretty significant price-attractor.

If I had a clever way to raise hash rates, I certainly would.  Obviously, I don't.

So far, higher highs and higher lows since May 31.

Yeah, liquidity tends to dry up before a big move.  Liquidity impedes motion, like running in deep surf

BTC seems oversold now.

How much XMR will be lost to dust and misplaced keys each year?

SR took BTC to $100.  Keeping your freedom has significant value.

Explain to me again how people buying BTC to trade for ETH brings BTC down?

Very doubtful.  XMRUSD is too cheap in that scenario.

Proposal to fix major bitcoin protocol flaw http://elaineou.com/2016/07/20/bitcoin-improvement-proposal-hard-fork-to-return-stolen-silk-road-bitcoin-to-ross-ulbricht/

If you find the consequences of the quoted definition to be absurd, perhaps you should clarify and/or adapt the definition, lest the dissonance overwhelm.

Rational thinking can be irrational, if it is applied outside of its domain.  More importantly, arational and irrational are distinct concepts.  An irrational line of thought is inconsistent with a valid rational line of thought.  In contrast, an arational line of thought is orthogonal to the variational dimensions of reason.  

For that matter, without clarification regarding the criteria of rationality, there will inevitably be possible inconsistent models of rationality.  The postivist cum formalist paradigm is typically treated as the ideal and asymptote of rationality, but there are uncountably many logics, and what is rational in one model may be irrational or arational in another.