Moreover, full sync time is pretty much irrelevant to usability.  Hardly anyone runs a BTC full node, and with each new feature set the motivation to run a Monero full node will decline as well - e.g., Kovri.  If you do, the full sync is unnecessary because you can download a signed image.  If you don't want to trust any signed image, a full sync is a one-time event, which is negligible when amortized over running 24/7/365.

Full sync time is not a serious scalability issue.  Storage is a very temporary issue because storage tech is racing ahead even while Moore's law is peering out.  My phone has plenty of NAND flash already for several years to come. The most serious issue is bandwidth, and there are several technological solutions specific to XMR under review which can compress bandwidth requirements very nicely.  There is no obvious order-of-magnitude technological advance pipeline for general purpose bandwidth, not such as there is for storage, but network tech won't stand still either - not as long as fundamental physical limitations remain far away.  And again, thus is only significant for those few of us who are well-motivated to run full nodes.

In short, scalability issues won't impinge on Monero usability for a long time, if ever.


Facepalm.  Looking at that comment I realize now that those figures are obsolete, made stale by new data.  Those central estimates were made in March.  When facts change, estimates need to be made afresh.  I apologize for reporting obsolete estimates.  I will stop doing that now, until I can provide newer estimates on the basis of statistically valid, or at least plausible, methology - and on modelling best practices.


Not going to happen in the U.S., where the Supreme Court has determined that there is a fundamental and inalienable right to privacy, protected by constitutional guarantees.  Not as long as the court lets Roe v. Wade stand, at least.  I can't tell you anything about the EU with confidence, but I suspect they protect privacy rights with equal vigor.  Between them, the EU and US provide the bulk of the economical uses of Monero. Penetration into Asia is embryonic - despite Chinese  capital flight being an obvious, and massive, use case.


I think the short term depends mostly on FOMO during attempts to front-run the deployment of multisig, which is too predictable not to game, and consequent increases in DNM adoption, which is less accurately predictable, unless you are an insider.  I suspect multisig will be a sell-the-news event, due this, but sellers are likely to feel much regret when actual DNM adoption and organic growth in the DNM sectors force a rise on fundamentals.  Oh well - their loss is our gain. And of course all of us in the peanut gallery may be quite surprised by sudden developments in, e.g. Globee.  I just can't justify reducing my portfolio share of cold storage Monero for some time to come, because I would almost certainly miss these jumps on catalysts.

It was not an upper bound or stable endpoint which I was indicating, but rather my estimate of the range in which the clearing price of XMR would exceed the clearing price of BTC.

I can hope but I cannot predict.  If I were opening a new position, I would start in the present with a small amount, and buy small amounts all the way down if it were to go down.  If it appears to bottom and trend up, I would then go all-in..  if on the other hand, it never goes down materially, I would just buy at a moderate but largely price-insensitive rate, perhaps selling small amounts on apparent spikes, to be recovered on any retracement.

Everything for which you can use physical cash, or paypal, or Western Union is a target application for moreero.  After the DNM growth phase, I expect a corporate use phase, for confidential business-critical transfers.  After the corporate growth phase, I expect volatility to be relatively low, and the the HNWI store of wealth use should really take off then.  Whenever privacy is important, Monero is your best choice.  It is digital gold, compared to bitcoin's decentralized SWIFT network.

Firstly, dark net markets include all manner of free market activities.  DNM does not imply illegal or unethical.

Secondly, BTC had vanishingly small value until it was adopted on DNMs.  It required a "killer app" to give the platform enough utility to overcome the anti-monetary volatility which comes from microcap status.

I challenge you to name one "bad guy" using Monero.  John McAfee and Fluffypony don't count.

DNMs are adopting Monero in a monotonically increasing manner.  DNMs are a growing economy, and the global black market is now in excess of 20 trillion USD p.a..  If just 1% of that market is denominated in XMR at a money velocity of 10 (almost insanely pessimistic round numbers) and assuming NO reserve demand, the XMR market cap will inevitably rise to 20 billion USD, and 1 XMR will clear for 1 ounce of gold.  In reality I expect it to surpass the value of Bitcoin, somewhere around 10 to 20 thousand dollars.

Anyone who doesn't hold XMR because it is sometimes associated with dark markets is an cutting off their nose to spite their face, and their non-participation will have exactly no impact on the inevitable rise of XMR, which has nothing to do with public opinion, and everything to do with inexorable, overwhelming economic forces.

But hey, if your conscience tells you not to hold Monero, I hope you follow it.

For blood pressure there are drugs.  For everything else, there's Monero.  If it drops below 100, you back up the truck, and buy.

Not to mention that Matthew Green and Zooko Wilcox both assert that it can be backdoored, that a number of the implementors are SIGINT operatives, that users pay a 20% tax to the corporation, that it is centrally controlled...ad nauseam.  The stuff is poison.  I suspect it killed Alexandre Cazes.

That is why  J P Morgan likes it.  They are not interested in protecting your privacy from the oligarchs.  They are the oligarchs.


Too short-term for the kind of factors I understand well to make themselves strongly felt.  I would estimate this most easily by estimating the DNM usage growth rate, and the growth rate of reserve hoarding, to get a base demand curve, then adding a volatility factor and it's corresponding mean stopping time, but for such a nearby number the stochastic stopping time would dominate, surely, so the first order estimate is determined strictly by the Levy process.

Still no globee, multisig, trezor, or ledger.  Therefore, bigger gains to come.  Same old same old.  I think we are gaining from Asian pump rotation, but also from rebalance of BTC/BCH gains. Whatever caused that Google trends spike on "monero" I would like more of it!

I would have no real beef with dash if it were not a centralized surveillance vehicle.  I still wouldn't hold it because of the instamine, and would warn against the Ponzi masternode scheme if asked, but bogus claims of privacy can get people killed, and that is just evil.  I have the same problem with zcash, q.v. Alexandre Cazes.

Anyhow, understanding surprising successes is quite germaine to the fate of "rivals".  In legacy finance a study of "comparables" is well tested and proven to be fruitful for the speculator.

Safest time to buy is when a new ATH becomes a confirmed breakout, but a fairly tight stop is advisable - one wide enough to test support at the old ATH, but tight enough to keep the downside manageable, recoverable.

So in Rangedriver's parlance, I guess Zcash is bullshit with an algebraic geometry coating, and a crunchy cyanide pill center.  Funny thing: I have seen supposedly clever fund managers beguiled by the moon math, completely ignoring the gaping flaws in governance.  Oh well, it is nice when the competition is incompetent.

I cannot understand why dash has any traction.  Can someone ELI5 for me?  It makes me concerned that I may be fundamentally misunderstanding, well, everything.

My guess is that btc and kraken essentially are the Omni foundation.  They pooled some USD, EUR, JPY and issued corresponding tether. But they reserve the right to disregard your redemption request.  AFAICT, the only way to redeem it for USD at retail is to sell for USD on kraken, or buy crypto with it, and sell that wherever you like.  As far as bfx is concerned, there is simply no difference between USDT and USD.  It is entirely fungible.  On kraken, where the exchange is explicit, there is often a small delta to NAV, but rarely enough to make a retail arbitrage, and never for long.

I think all the FUD is unfruitful.  No one with a lot of crypto should have it on any exchange, regardless of the state of USDT.  The mean stopping time for an exchange (typically an exit scam) seems to be about 2 years.  We can hope but cannot assume that this average will only increase over time. We can fear but cannot assume that this event is a "false flag" inside job.  Given that they are reversing the effects, it seems much more likely that this was a third-party action, and will be resolved in a fair and orderly manner by the tether wallet updates forthcoming.

As a resident of Canada, were USDT to slip materially from it's peg, I would certainly buy it, send it to bfx, and buy discounted XMR. After all, the risk exposure would be time-boxed to a matter of seconds (not counting the ~10 minute lag to withdraw from bfx with automated approval). Probably any difference in the btc vwap between kraken and bfx is accounted for by this trade.

Thanks for that. Happily, it seems they are effectively protecting the interests of legitimate tether holders.  Sadly, there is no real arb on the fade.

You can sell futures without borrowing BTC.  If you sell enough, the spot market will follow the futures down as arbitrageurs buy the futures and sell at spot.  If you want to accumulate a lot of BTC step 1 is to push the price down as far as possible. And keep pushing until you are full.  Indeed you might simultaneously go short on the margin markets, and cover both at your preferred bottom. Futures have been used to suppress hard money pricing for decades.

The one which matters most now is Dream.  When Dream adds XMR the fundamentals will get a boost, which will only gradually be priced in - over, say, 9-12 months, over which time dnm volumes will have increased 30-50%.  Unless, of course, Dream devs front-run the fundamentals and hoard a lot of XMR in advance, which is rational to do. In that case the actual news could even be a short-term sell signal.

Fixed that.

Not to mention the vasty deep losses in boating accidents.

When you say "just like happened to bitcoin" I assume that "under the hypothetical scenario of vanishing exchange costs" is implied. I won't quibble over the relation between information and utility; your abstract suffices.

There won't be a vanishing cost XMR exchange unless XMR is modified specifically to allow it, with suitable scripting or some hard-coded facility, e.g. for lightning.  The technical fundamentals need to change in order to magnify the hazard you describe to the point where it is material to valuation. (That is a dead-reckoning estimate of a quantitative factor, and certainly would benefit from additional facts or logic.)



That is why the (centralized) governance risk of ZEC is so much higher than the (decentralized) governance risk of XMR.  The market prices that in, I think.  Much of the money in BTC is well aware of this factor.  However, prices are set at the margin, and it is also most of the reason for the 20% development tax on ZEC.  I don't think that factor is properly priced in to the marginal clearing price.  Eventually long-term holders will feel the pain of realizing that buying ZEC is effectively giving away 1/5 of their wealth, and reserve demand will suffer as a result.  If ZEC had trustworthy governance, I would have bought some as a  diversifier, but I just can't suffer a scam lightly.

It remains no less useful as a transaction medium, if you don't care about TLA surveillance, and don't hold it too long, but then the same could be said of Doge.

I have personally used it directly to pay for art, software, medicine, professional services, and charitable contributions.

You can back a debit card with Monero and spend almost anywhere (uquid, or loaddebitcard.com). You can spend it anywhere any shapeshift.io supported coin is accepted.  You can use it at particularly low fees anywhere BTC is accepted using XMR.to (AFAIK - haven't used any of these myself.)

If you are motivated enough to do the advance research and pay the fees, take the counterparty risks, for any required exchange services, you can do pretty much anything with it.  It is not practical for microtransactions at present, and in some scenarios the fees may be an impediment.  Direct merchant acceptance is the ideal, but that will not become prevalent any time soon at, for example, brick-and-mortar retail.  A very nice first step (for valuation impact) would be Amazon acceptance.  As a prime subscriber, I complain about it to Amazon on a regular basis.

Congrats on your happiness, in that case.

If we are still listening to elevator music while BTC approaches 12kUSD, they shall be filled.

I think next year is possible but not probable.  My central estimate is q1 2019. What you do in your trousers is of no interest to me.

I am no expert on dash, but consider it conceivable, if unlikely, that it may be 4000 in the same quarter; however, it is at least equally likely that a reflexive cascade of masternode liquidations, or instamine dishoarding, or a high-visibility compromise - take your pick; surely compromise would lead to a torrent of liquidation - will take dash down to double digits, even single, at that time.