How about a cash teleporter?  As a side benefit, you get teleportation technology!  (Speaking of which, wasn't that part of SuperNET?)  

Anyhow, most banks allow you to deposit a check with a photograph.  You can do "remoteMoneros" via email today.  It just needs one person willing to offer the service at a reasonable fee.

Heck, I would do it, if it didn't involve revealing my IRL ID on a platter to random and sundry.

Oh, also, it really requires escrow until the check clears.  So either multisig or a monkey-in-the-middle game.

I absolutely do NOT want to discourage your creative thinking.  

However, I think the problem you describe carries the seeds of its own solution.  Kinda like the Comex running out of gold...price fixes everything: When banks are banning it is because they are threatened.

Its a tail risk hedge, with incredibly asymmetric return profile.  They understand that.  FX derivative people especially understand it.  The employees will buy it for their own book first.  Then they will offer it to customers if they see a personal benefit in doing so -- that won't be until customers are asking about it though.

You have to be able to game the boards of the regional banks to predict this with any accuracy.  

Big picture:  Failure to hike will be utterly devastating to fed credibility.  OTOH, hiking means market chaos now, and in the long run destroys the US Treasury with debt service.

My *guess*:  They move to preserve credibility sooner rather than later, after seeing what happened to Kuroda.  I'd give it P(hike) ~= .6.  

Gold to fall.  In fact, short-term, I see no scenario which raises gold, short of a war.  It needs to reach oversold levels before the next ramp can occur.  There are fat new buyers coming in, and they want it cheap.  
Short term: Sell XAUUSD.  
Medium term, white metals to outperform:  Short XAUXPT, XAUXPD, XAUXAG.  
Long term, incredibly bullish: Diagonal call spread, short GCM6 1300 call, long GC7Z 1250 call, selling a new OTM call in June, rolling the GC7Z down to 1200, and then holding until overbought for 9 weeks.

EDIT: Suggested a delayed roll-down.

Bitcoin similarly spiked after the first exchange.  

I observe that, if you disinclude the listing spike, in USD terms, the recent highs were in fact all-time highs.  (Mentioned since the ATH is so fetishized.)

Okay, I am starting to think 1.114 USD is the new botnet clearing price.  The USD stability support is back. 

Everyone is half-fearful and half-hopeful that U.S. global hegemony is nearing its end, but it would be folly to bet the farm on a deadline for that end.  You just have to live with it.  Even if it ended tomorrow, the vacuum would just be filled with an even more eggregious hegemon, which, regardless of its current underdog rhetoric, would quickly apply any extraterritorial extrajudicial extreme prejudice which suited its interest.  

For that reason, I heartily report that jurisdiction-shopping in meat-space is a folly.  To escape the rule-by-wet-jobs you need an antifragile governance structure, hardened behind impenetrable walls of math.  As long as you appear un-threatening, or controllable by means of the overtly structured norms, you can get away with just about anything, if clever, but once you become a threat, you face a trilemma:  Get a bigger gun; grow too many necks to cut off; or, go quietly into the dark night.

That's the grown-up world, children.  You don't have to like it, but neither do you (yet) have the option to leave it.

Since it was mentioned:

Zcash is going to have profound scalability problems.  It is a premine scam owned by a corporation, attempting to sell tokens to a very sophisticated market sector, which will not brook such nonsense.  The cryptography is the principal thing going for it, and even that has big "moon math" question marks around it (as well as a built-in scalability time-bomb).  Zcash will fail on governance, fail on compliance, fail on marketing, fail on plumbing, and fail to deliver.  

The net positive I can see is that because it is centralized, it can swap-in quantum crypto as needed. (Also because it is centralized, I am sure a certain TLA will have a ready-made solution prepared, delivered and installed in good time.) Believe me, I am watching eagerly for breakthrough anonymity in a viable digital cash, because I want desperately to buy it, and to use it.  Zcash ain't it.  I will not bet with human lives on the security and governance of Zcash.

I am still stuck with XMR, which is flawed in every way - yet fatally flawed in no way, which makes it just about perfect.  As it matures, the stochastic guarantees it offers continue to improve, rather than degrade.  There, as in Bitcoin, my main concern is the chance of corruption and/or co-option of the core team. (However I have much more confidence in collective competence than I do for Bitcoin.  At least they do not appear to be doubling down on dysfunction.)

Unless it is Mexican jumping rice.

Always stresses me the frack out.

*ba dum tum*tsssch*

BTC hedging flows -> 95% ETH, 1% XMR.  ETH profit flows -> 10-15% XMR (note XMR serious ramp began when ETH profit-taking began, 3/3).  Profit taking + short selling -> XMR price down now, up later, volatility up overall.  Traders happy, investors frequently annoyed, sometimes overjoyed.

Probably Friday.

I am not sure that BTC denominated TA is better than USD denominated, in terms of forecasting.  The first compounds the already substantial inherent uncertainties, and exogenous impulse factors.

I read that as making the point that the success of VHS (lower-cost, non-proprietary) relative to BetaMax did not undermine the VCR market, or confidence in the ability of videotape to record your child's first stage performance.  No more should a Bitcoin fee market undermine confidence in the utility of XMR for its purpose, although it may well drive cost-sensitive traffic from BTC to XMR (maximalist complaints notwithstanding).

"every other coin here can say the same thing"  is playing with investors emotions.  Let's break it down, in points of increasing importance, starting with the factitious and culminating in the devastating:

1) Coins do not actually speak, in the literal sense.

Once you resort to metaphor, you have already left the domain of full logical rigor.

2) If an entity speaks (taking it that an actual coin, in this hypothetical, or a human spokesperson on behalf of a coin, does in fact speak), that does not imply the truth of the utterance.

Inferring that it does is simply false.  Since the statement is obviously either logically meaningless or intrinsically false in its implications, it cannot convey factual information without delusion.

3) More importantly, if a coin makes this claim, the validity of the claim is not independent of the facts on the ground.

If the claim is less valid, it is, in your terms, playing on investors emotions.  If the claim is more valid, it is providing important information.

4) The analogy between early XMR and early BTC is not yet subject to a unitary provable metric, but it is subject to metrics.

It is the clearly expressed opinion of a large number of objectively superior authorities that, in the metrics they apply, the positioning of XMR is much more closely analogous to the early positioning of BTC than is the positioning of most, if not all, other cryptographic tokens.  This is known as expert testimony, and is admissible in court.  It has probabilistic evidentiary value.

As to the specific features of the analogy, I am not going to spoon-feed you that.  Do your own diligence.  I just didn't want a smear (intentional or unintentional) to stand unchallenged on logical and factual grounds.  Let it suffice that the majority of coins here are copies, rip-offs, scams, fakes, while neither BTC nor XMR are designed to take your money by deceit and slight-of-hand.  That is a complex claim, and breaking it down in a logical fashion is a huge task, but it is also pretty obviously true, to anyone with experience in this space, and if they tell you otherwise, they are almost certainly either trying to take your money, or to justify their own gullibility and loss.

mcap has surpassed the venerable peercoin.  

Love that word. 

"What's so special about Monero?" 

"It's supervenient."

It is only exploratory so far, but a major East Coast U.S. V.C. has asked me to brief them on XMR. (Please do not speculate on this basis.).  What are the best collateral materials for this purpose?  Software engineers with some bitcoin exposure will be there, and I should like to satisfy their questions from script, where possible.

There is clearly a market for a transparent blockchain in currency applications, which BTC fulfills as an incumbent.

There is clearly a market for an opaque blockchain in currency applications, for which XMR is the leading contender.

Whether there is a viable market for any given appcoin, I consider unclear.  It may be a fruitful area of speculation.  Frankly I think the best-proven exemplar to date is NMC.  Call me old school.

Whether XMR will retain leadership in its niche long enough to be considered incumbent remains to be proven, and hence the current price.  I consider the prospects very good.

Thus in some ways XMR is more comparable to BTC than any other crypto.  In other ways it is very different.  Certainly their best use cases are different.

I consider XMR to have more currency utility than BTC for well-known reasons.  Thus I should expect that retaining leadership in its niche will result in comparable or superior future market cap.

Each step in this chain of reasoning is subject to criticism, some more or less valid, but it is a very reasonable and supportable inference.

I don't think you can bootstrap to adequate market cap and liquidity to have the kind of low downside volatility required in such a currency market, unless you first have a grass-roots transactional economy (preferrably at low velocity).

I would be very pleased to be proven wrong, however.

If I were to lever in crypto, I would do it by borrowing fiat offline.  Rates are nigh zero, and you won't get stopped out, except by your own fear or greed.

Anyhow, there is plenty of short interest in XMR yet, if I am not mistaken, which is nicely bullish.  Active traders should definitely keep some largish tail bets on both sides, just in case of a repeat of this morning's battle, because we haven't seen the end of this drama.  It might be anticlimactic in the end, but it is still on-going.