That 5555 ask looks suspiciously...defensive.

Red is reserved for moderation in this thread, recall.

Good news for those who bid in kelvins:  http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.01482

Nioc: 15m. 

Looks to me like equilibrium will be around room temperature Kelvin for a while, if the fireworks are over now.

Notice the tails on those bars.  It's like hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer...

Or 3 hours, as the case may be.  Someone took the short money, at last.

That's not how logic works.   It's a short position.  I estimate 3 days to squeeze.

It does make sense to have an infinite horizon, if you anticipate benefit from the pillar traits of monero on an ongoing basis, i.e. if you value your personal freedom very highly. It doesn't make much sense to keep operating capital in XMR right now, because of the volatility, but as a fraction of savings, I think the rational share (Kelly) is no less than 10%, if your goal is pure optimization of expected savings value - rational self-interest. (But keep in mind that my estimation of distribution of outcomes may be very different from yours.)

I am certainly not the largest XMR hoarder, so my intentions are not a dominating factor for other investors.  But, for them, a disclosure: I do not have an infinite horizon, simply because my freedom, my life even, is less important to me than other goals - over 12 ounces Au per XMR, certain of those goals may become feasible, and I will sell ruthlessly, if so.  Until then, not so much.

In fact, if it seems useful, I might buy a lot more.  (And that 12 oz number would fall proportionately.) But never to manipulate price in a way that increases volatility.  (I might "manipulate" with a view to decrease volatility however -- that is called market making, and is a respectable profession.)

And never increasing to the point where it seems likely to harm the value of XMR due to excessive concentration.  Although, given the divisibility of crypto, I am convinced that stable reserve use can never actually harm the economy due to money supply issues, yet the optics could be damaging during early phases.  Unfairly so, however, as XMR distribution seems quite good, considering the stage of development.

I think you misspelled "appall".  

He used to be right.  That's different.

I think it is a very cheap hedge on the looming risk of a "global reset" event.  If global economics and politics have stabilized in 5 years without a massive ramp-up of financial repression or a global pandemic of hyperinflation, other investments might outperform, but if not, I know of nothing else which I consider more likely to appreciate by several orders of magnitude (with the exception of Andrea Rossi's patent portfolio, in which neither of us have the opportunity to invest).  So yeah.  Plan on keeping at least a portion for 3-7 years.

Add up the volume bars.  I expect that with 4 days time any outstanding shorts will see at least one squeeze.

That can only happen if and when capital controls or other regulatory/enforcement measures are applied to bitcoin transactions sufficiently to make the use of bitcoin undesirable.  That in turn can only happen if the volume of subject moneyflows in Bitcoin rises to a level which forces regulatory/ enforcement action.  That in turn can only happen in conjunction with a substantial rise in the market clearing price of BTC.  Therefore, as an XMR bull, I expect the fiat price of BTC to rise substantially before the BTC price of XMR sees it's most notable increases.

This factor relates to the model term Rm, which I mentioned previously: The proportion of global "white" label moneyflows which XMR denominates.  In my simplest rule of thumb for XMR valuation, I make the pessimistic assumption that it is nigh zero, negligible, on the theory that bootstrapping the market cap to liquidity levels sufficient for white flows to dominate price will first require a dark market uptake phase, in which price is dominated by Rn.  If Bitcoin is taken up, and subsequently rejected, as a means of evading financial repression, a dark market dominates phase will not be required, however:  Bitcoin will achieve the bootstrapping on our behalf.

These bullish scenarios are not mutually exclusive.  If they occur simultaneously, the appreciation rate will be a real head-turner, and bubble spike will be truly amazing.

On the other hand, Cyprus spiked Bitcoin, but Greece not so much.  (Perhaps because of the grey Russian money in Cyprus being more attuned to crypto.) Which specific cataclysms in the fiat world prompt large flows may prove surprising.  Some disappointing failures of XMR or BTC reactions may cause investor defections.   (If a large subsequent price response occurs, that is likely to be a very intense run as well, as defectors rush back.)

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/encryptionbusting-quantum-computer-practices-factoring-in-scalable-fiveatom-experiment

Not to early to plan for post-qc crypto world.  Not too early at all.

Mobile is where it counts the most.  I know I failed on the Mycelium fork.  Sorry about that.  Got too busy, and my code monkey alternate bailed on me.  Maybe later, if it is still relevant.

Monkey thinks first week of April.  Meanwhile, he expects 370 to hold.

Annoying thing is, they will not accept any of my credit cards.  They say the addresses do not match (but I know otherwise).  So it takes 4-5 days for a purchase to clear.  Circle gives me a 3k USD limit, and only allows instant if I use a card and eat the fees.

They are fixed exchange rate, 1:1 with USD (subject to counterparty blah blah blah) https://tether.to/
In short, you have to sell them to get bankable USD.

Personally I think they are the sensible reserve basis to use if you want to lever a crypto position, but I don't know how to use them IRL at all.

XMR/USDT pair on poloniex is about as close as you get right now, if you are looking for an exchange.  But if you are looking for reserves, not rapid liquidity, then OTC is less circuitous.  As long as you can locate a suitable escrow agent, it's good.   Many XMR holders should be more than happy to help you get in with fiat.  http://webchat.freenode.net?randomnick=1&channels=%23monero-otc&prompt=1

Otherwise, pester kraken.com.

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/poloniex/xmrbtc

I think XMR is well situated to be a major proportion of the opaque blockchain market, and the long term valuation which you place on that depends on estimating several probability distributions.  It is almost certainly much, much higher than the current price.  

In the simplest long-term pricing model, you need to estimate (1) the value of global money flows which will be on opaque crypto in the future (G), (2) the velocity of those flows (V), (3) the fraction of that market which will be denominated in XMR (R), and (4) the reserve demand for XMR as a fraction of the supply (X).  Then the expected long-term eqilibrium market clearing price of G*R / V = (1 - X) * S, where S is the number of XMR which have been mined and have not been lost.  

Global GDP (m) is roughly 75 trillion at a velocity near 4 (v) and XMR will denominate a fraction (Rm), and global black market is roughly 2.5 trillion (n), velocity unknown (w), and XMR will denomination a fraction (Rn), values in 2016 USD.  G=m+n, V = (v*m+w*n) / (m+n).  

You can put narrow error bars around S at 18 million XMR, and perhaps with research you can put narrow error bars around w -- but I think w is a function of Rn, and that the ratio w/Rn is monotone decreasing with rising Rn.  X, Rm and Rn are not easy to estimate with any accuracy, so fill in your own scenarios.  The overwhelming sensitivity of the estimate will be to the difficult-to-estimate factors Rm and Rn.  You can do a graphical model and run periodic Bayesian updates from measured data pretty easily, but the outcome will be strongly dependent on model assumptions about the distributions of the priors and error terms.  I have done this, but I won't share the results because they are (1) absurdly bullish, and (2) very low precision.  Maybe someday I will work on refining the model, to reduce the sources of uncertainty.  Suggestions for this are solicited.

Put another way, for the simplest conceivable rule of thumb, let's call the portion of global black market moneyflows denominated in XMR, ïn basis points (units of 1/10000 of the total), "z".  Then the value of one XMR should be on the order of z * 20 USD, at the bottom end.

All of which is predicated on purely monetary use.  If there are dapps on an XMR platform in future, this can only decrease the float usable for monetary purposes.  I don't see XMR dapps as a down-side threat, long-term, although they would certainly muddy the waters on the monetary value proposition.

I am not particularly good at estimating short-term levels in XMR, so I leave that to others, when I am trying to be serious.  (I often am trying not to be serious, however.)

I would be pleasantly surprised if there was a speculative ramp on that issue.  I think it is more of a fundamental factor, as it opens up the currency to a new audience.  But keep in mind that it is a gating factor, not an impulse.  It enables but does not beckon.  As long as there is no PR or viral burst, any impact will be felt only slowly.