I would suggest taking a stop back and looking at the volume levels in the weekly chart. https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/poloniex/xmrbtc both in terms of XMR and the XBT. The volume numbers since February 2016 are consistently way higher by approximately a factor of 4 than the historical levels going back to 2014. This is indicative of a fundamental change in over the last two months.

Dash reached a high of 0.028 XBT in May 2014 and a lower high of 0.025 XBT in March 2015 so Dash reaching 0.02 is not that big a deal. The real question is will Dash break 0.025 XBT? https://poloniex.com/exchange#btc_dash. For those that wish to compare Dash with Monero the DASH/XMR chart is relevant. https://poloniex.com/exchange#xmr_dash The historical trading range for Dash has been between 4 and 6.5 XMR with a couple of tops up to 17.215 XMR and 15.2 XMR. As in the case with Bitcoin the second top is the lower of the two.

On the upside I would watch 0.025 XBT for Dash. On the downside I would watch 4 XMR for Dash.

Edit: Added Dash/XMR chart.

There is also the risk that the short seller's equity does not cover the closed position is a fast rising market. Take a look at DASH/XMR currently the most liquid of the XMR markets to see what I mean. https://poloniex.com/exchange#xmr_dash

Edit: A Monero short that uses Dash as collateral could get really scary very fast. By the way the reverse, a Dash short that uses Monero as collateral, can also get really scary very fast.

It is also the same in Canada. Another example is let us say one sells Bitcoin for Monero, then this would trigger a capital gain or loss on the Bitcoin based on the fair market value of the Bitcoin in Canadian Dollars at the time of the sale.

That is due to them not fully updating the hashrate calculation to account for the change in block time. They also show the Effective txs median, bytes as 20000 the pre fork value when it should be 60000.

The recent v0.9.3.0-release has provided tagged support for Win32 on x86/AMD64 processors. This is significant because there are still many Win32 computers out there. They have have a 64bit processor in many cases but if they were originally sold with 4GM or less of RAM chances are they are running 32bit Windows. It is one of the results of the behind the scene database work over the last year. Other important features of this release is the support for GNU/Linux on ARM 7 processors and also support for GNU/Linux on 32bit x86/AMD64 processors.

https://getmonero.org/downloads/

Development of the Monero GUI has been fully funded and is proceeding as we speak. There is of course no guarantee that one may be able to purchase Monero at the current prices after it is released.

It depends on the alt-coin, and the jurisdiction. The poll with two options is flawed.

There can be many central ledger providers so this is not an issue. Once one makes it easy to fund and return funds it is easy for there to be many different providers who could specialize in publishers in different jurisdictions. This means that an aggregator can choose to only deal with a limited number of jurisdictions. We must keep in mind that Google has been doing this with adsense advertising for well over a decade. The typical market value of a page view with decent content is well under 0.01 USD. Facebook by the way does far worse than the market average under 0.001 USD per page view.  
 

The aggregator not the merchants could be an MSB and would be a "Seller of Prepaid Access" so the following applies: https://www.fincen.gov/news_room/nr/html/20111102.html It would likely fall into the closed loop exception if the merchants / publishers are vetted as legit. The limit is this case is 2000 USD in loads per day and I am talking of 10 USD per load.



Yes but as I mentioned above this can be addressed by having many centralized ledgers.
 


The  due diligence is done on the payment end. If someone tries to use this to launder money it would be easily apparent by looking at the click patterns on the front website much like click fraud is currently detected. So if there is something clearly amiss the aggregator can detect this, and file one rather than millions of suspicious activity reports.

By the way I have been involved with web based advertising as a publisher for well over twelve years so I am familiar with this business. What I am suggesting simply replaces the advertising component with a pay per page view component for a comparable yield  to the publisher.

Edit: Closed loop prepaid access can also work well for in person transactions since it only has to deal with one jurisdiction making compliance very simple even if registration is required. This is the critical advantage of separating this from the actual coin protocol. A very good example why this kind of separation works very well is Bitcoin ATMs since the operator only has to deal with one regulator namely that where the Bitcoin ATM is located.

Interesting. This creates an additional exchange risk that could impact those that do not lend for margin trading.

... my question here is who covers the part of the loss that is not covered by the traders equity? This can happen in a fast moving market where a margin call results in a loss in excess of the traders equity.

Anyone considering BCN should take a look at the following thread: Blowing the lid off the CryptoNote/Bytecoin scam (with the exception of Monero)

Micro transactions is one thing that can be easily provided by a traditional centralized ledger provider that is funded by Monero. The first thing to understand here is that micro transactions by their very nature fall way below any AML/KNC regulatory requirements. Someone funding an account with say 10 USD, in order to pay for say 10,000 page views at 0.001 USD per page view is not the concern of financial regulators. This issue with micro transactions with the current fiat payment systems is not the actual micro transactions themselves but how do you fund the account in the first place, especially if anonymity is desired and this is done across international boundaries? As for the micro transaction provider themselves there is no reasonable reason for them to keep track of who sent 0.001 USD to whom. If they do not have a strict privacy policy then the market can find another provider. Filing millions of suspicious transaction reports for amounts under 0.01 USD each is not a valid reason and could easily land the provider who does this into serious legal trouble with the agency that was the target of such a denial of service attack.

I am actually more interested in how FinCEN will deal with the Ethereum premine given what happened with Ripple.

One thing venture capital demands is the possibility of growth. Take that away and venture capital will flee. The fundamental problem Bitcoin faces here is that stagnation is hard coded into the consensus code of the protocol in the form of the fixed blocksize limit. The venture capitalists are starting to realize this hence the interest in Ethereum, where the perception at this time is that Ethereum does not have this limitation. Contrary to the efficient market theory there can be a significant temporary divergence between market perception and the basic fundamentals. The market does over time align with the fundamentals; however during that time an investor who has bought based on the fundamentals must be prepared to hold onto a position that according to the market shows a very significant paper loss.

Now as for Litecoin it has a very similar stagnation is hard coded into the consensus code of the protocol in the form of the fixed blocksize limit. The only difference is that because of the difference in block time it has effectively 4x the limit. My take is that if venture capital feels burned  with BItcoin over this issue it is not going to move to another coin with that very same issue.

You mean CAD. For someone in Canada I would argue that holding CAD can make sense over USD, especially if the idea is to hedge a significant XMR position. My take is that the over the medium to long term the fundamentals of the Canadian economy are stronger than those of the US economy, the Canadian banking system has historically been safer than the US banking system and last but not least CAD does not have the loss of reserve currency status risks associated with USD. When holding gold was made illegal in the United States in the 1930's many Americans kept their gold in Canada. The social and political risks can also be lower in Canada that in the United States.

As for XBT when it takes a day to get one confirmation from the Bitcoin network, as has recently been the case, the legacy fiat banking system actually becomes competitive,

Ultimately this is about one's comfort level. My comfort level is stronger with the smaller currencies, XMR and CAD than with the larger currencies XBT and USD.  

Edit: I am not interested in day trading here but rather in holding over the medium to long term.

As a long term holder my feeling is yes. First as has been pointed out before 100 XBT will get one well over 30,000 XMR at market. So 30,000 rather than 10,000 is the more relevant number.

The problem I have with Bitcoin is that the reality is very different from the original idea of a fungible digital currency that anyone can use to pay anyone without the need of an intermediary or "bank". This is primarily due to the fixed blocksize limit which currently restricts the number of transactions to about three transaction per second. There is simply no opportunity for growth in Bitcoin since stagnation is hard coded into the protocol via the consensus code . This has led the a bear market in Bitcoin now over 27 months old. I see the downside in Bitcoin to be very real with little or no upside.

Monero on the other hand has an adaptive blocksize limit. This means that there is no three transactions per second limit hard coded in the consensus code and consequently Moenro has a very good upside potential. Yes there is downside to Monero also; however I would consider it comparable or somewhat less than that of Bitcoin.

The risk to reward ratio becomes an upside many orders of magnitude higher combined with a comparable or somewhat less downside. My current position is a mix of Monero and Canadian Dollars with very small Bitcoin and Namecoin positions. The Canadian Dollars provide the necessary liquidity.

Appropriate disclaimers are needed here. This should not be considered investment advice. Investing in crypto currencies involves extreme high risk and the possibility of loosing the entire amount invested. It should only be undertaken after doing one's own independent research and obtaining appropriate independent professional advice.

The profit opportunity could just as well in be people cashing out. There is a deja vu here if Ethereum is close to or at a top.

Here is the Cryptsy Dash chart. https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/cryptsy/drkbtc take a look at the three day chart and pay close attention to the all time high. of 0.0274 XBT.  Cryptsy was the main market for Dash at the time. One possible theory is that a whale offers to be a market maker on BitFinex and uses that opportunity to unload a large amount of coin.

It also provides a direct path to fiat making it attractive for those who want out after a big run. Again Dash had a big run just before the BitFinex listing, very much like Ethereum.

Edit: Dash crashed all the way down to 0.00215 or over 92% on Cryptsy after the Bitfinex listing. Just saying there is the possibility that there is some blood mixed in with the ether here.

Where is the conflict between FinCEN and SEC guidance?