A lot of people (rightly) complain about the lack of marketing for Monero. There are two reasons for that. The first is that marketing an alpha software is a surefire way to disappoint a lot of people who won’t give it a second chance later on. The second is that it is not the job of the core team, which takes care of the technical development. This is the job of MEW (what is MEW?).

Last weeks, I've been working with a restricted team (namely, ArticMine and lyth0s) on a website for MEW. Contrary to the monero.cc website which is, in both its current and future iterations, a website devoted to the technology and everything the core team is working on, this new website will be devoted to the non technical aspects: improving visibility and fostering economy (this will include crypto-kingdom). As a reminder, I am a member of both the core team and the MEW.

My philosophy (most of it is from The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Wikipedia):

DONE - release early, release often;
       done is better than perfect;
       JFDI, Just Fuckin Do It (© jaybeeuk).
KISS - keep it simple, it'll get complex by itself soon enough;
       when something is done, check how to achieve the same thing, but simpler;
       perfection is when there is nothing more to take away.
PLAN - have some vision, know where you're going;
       this may mean doing "nothing" for days - it's fine.
NICE - assume good faith.
HELP - learn to delegate and to do it well;
       doing everything yourself is a fail, not a success;
       avoid the Not-Invented-Here™ syndrome.
QUIT - You’ll eventually quit so look in advance for competent successor.

So here it is, a Drupal-powered website which is multilingual, mobile-ready, multi-user and has a static part, a forum, a wiki, one blog per user, a CRM and probably more as time goes on. My job now (I am a plant) is much less to add more stuff and much more to allow empowerment: seize this website as yours. I'll be here to help you, but I'd like this website to be driven by the community - irrespective of whether or not you are MEW members - although MEW will ultimately have some advantages, of course.

No milestone, no roadmap, no bullshit:

But I also know that Cryptonite wont succeed unless I can build a market around it and give people something to spend their XCN on.

The political and practical obstacles are enormous, and not clearly more challenging our task of building out Monero and layering transparency on top of it.

It is up to any user to decide if anonymous currency will be off any use to him or not.  Monero holders now speculate that there will be small part of crypocoin users that will prefer their wealth and their transactions to stay anonymous. I see that as a fact, speculation is how big will this niche be.

None alt coin that bringing something new will ever be redundant.

Is this what you are looking for?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=721045.0

I've spent probably 40+ hours obsessively reading hundreds of pages regarding XMR here on [Suspicious link removed] forum, the CryptoNote white paper, nearly all of fluffypony, Risto Pietila, and others' posts. I've compiled and ran Monero. I am not an XMR or cryptocurrency expert, but my conclusions about XMR are as follows:

Strengths:

- Fair distribution. XMR's emission schedule and lack of pre-mine/instamine means that newcomers do not need to worry about buying into a coin where early adopters are solely interested in pumping and dumping, leaving the newcomers as bagholders. Someone acquiring XMR today and in the near future will get them at a cost within the same order of magnitude as early adopters.
- XMR, due to its fair distribution and good liquidity, is a strong candidate to occupy the #1 or #2 position in the privacy niche of the cryptocurrency market.
- XMR, due to its completely new codebase, different hashing algorithm, and good liquidity  is also a strong candidate to occupy the #1 or #2 position in what I call the "catastrophic hedge niche" of the crypto currency market. (If you would like to read more about my thoughts on XMR as a hedge, you can ready my post here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=624223.msg9679903#msg9679903 )
- A small proportion of funds in XMR will occupy these two important niches at once (neither of which can be adequately addressed by bitcoin). If we assume that these two niches together should account for 5% of the total cryptocurrency market cap, XMR seems to be an incredible expected value (EV) play at this level (1.5 mBTC:1 XMR)
- XMR devs, due to their small stakes in the coin and honest behavior thus far do not seem to be interested in pumping and dumping XMR. They are genuinely interested in the technology.
- XMR has drawn positive attention from many respected members of the bitcoin community, including Gregory Maxwell and many hero members.
- XMR has at least one (and probably several) wealthy backers, such as Mr. Pietila who will support the coin over the long haul.

Weaknesses:
Most of these are soft factors. Please do not take offense to any of this. I am not attacking anyone's lifestyle choices or means. These are simply the facts that I've gathered.

- No one involved is working on XMR full-time. (All devs are working part-time as they cannot make a living purely off XMR.) Essentially, XMR is a multi-million dollar project with no one working full-time. At least one dev is working on a coin other than XMR at the same time.
- Due to XMR's fair distribution (which is a major strength), the devs do not own a significant amount of XMR (perhaps fewer than 50,000 XMR collectively) which means that they are inadequately funded. Even if a significant increase in value occurs and they earn 10x their investment, they will still lack the means to work on XMR full-time.
- XMR seems to be funded by mainly one person, Risto Pietila, who spends the plurality of his waking hours developing the game Crypto Kingdom. Though Crypto Kingdom uses XMR to buy in-game currency, Crypto Kingdom lacks the mass appeal for it to ever be a driving force for XMR adoption.
- Devs were not part of the original CrypoNote team and are admittedly not as familiar with the codebase as the devs of other CryptoNote coins. They therefore experience challenges improving the codebase and making it maintainable.
- Blockchain Bloat. XMR's Ring-signatures are data intensive, and the XMR blockchain will be somewhere between 5-10 times the size of bitcoin's for an equivalent number of transactions. I don't consider this to be a significant weakness. Monero's blockchain will likely be much smaller than bitcoin's anyway.

I will correct and update this list as necessary. Thank you for reading.

Oddly though, a lot of other alts are up.

I think we are seeing a realignment of demand for Monero. Most people who already want it at this point have it, so there is limited new demand to absorb the mined coins, until a new equilibrium is reached at a lower price.

Expanding the economy and brining in new users is what is needed. We now at least have one building and role playing game (Crypto Kingdom) that has gotten off to a great start. We need more of this.

Why do you think there are ghost cities? They are dumping their money into all kinds of investments, not just Bitcoin.


For what reason? Taxes are low in China. Remittance is fast, cheap, and ubiquitous. Why avoid transacting in Yuan?

There is one reason. Games and social networking real-time person-to-person payments. And ditto in the lesser developing world.

But Bitcoin is traceable and it is illegal. Mainstream games and social networks will be pressured by the government to shut it down.

Monero is untraceable but can't handle micropayments volume.

See where I am headed with this... "Decentralized Transaction coins...".

Sorry your right - i did mean Vertcoin. i have had a reply on Rpietelia's thread informing me that Vertcoin just uses a mixer, and is not anonymous, so i will ignore VRT from now on. It was just some clever PR on their part that made it sound like it was.

Try this guide : http://coin.cubeconnex.com/poollist

Click on 'Stealth Address'.

great speakers,we will be in good company where we belong !!

Guys, a fixed subsidy will not work. All you're doing is delaying the inevitable. This was already explained in the MRO economy thread as well as here. If MRO continues to grow after the fixed subsidy is reached, miners will again start relying on tx fees because the reward will not be worth the work, and then fees will begin to escalate. A fixed subsidy will only delay the problem. You must have a fixed percentage annual debasement. You guys know perfectly well that a 1% debasement will not hurt the value of your coins one bit. Be reasonable.

Money will only lose value if you inflate the circulating money supply. A 1% annual increase to the total supply won't do a damn thing, except solve all kinds of problems. You must have a fixed debasement or the network will eventually be unsustainable.

Gold debases at more than 2%/year and it will not slow down in anyone's lifetime. We will mine from space or make our own gold via super colliders long before Earth's gold supply is tapped. Interestingly, the value of gold keeps going up despite the constant supply inflation. Go figure.

Please stop saying darkcoin in this forum now. I don't want us to pretend to be some rival to whatever other new coins are out there. Lets keep the topic to vertcoin specifically.