I agree. BTC bashing aside, having an identifiable, prominent, vocal person as the figurehead and/or creator of a crypto project is simply not a good look. No matter how noble their intentions, they are certain to rub at least some people the wrong way. Worse and more important, they give the impression that the project lacks sufficient decentralization. The following individuals and their blockchains are indelibly linked: Ethereum = Buterin, BCH = Ver, Cardano = Hoskinson, Zcash = Zooko, EOS = Larimer, Tron = Sun, XRP= Garlinghouse, BSV = CSW, Binance = CZ and of course the list goes on and on.

There was a similar post circulating on the Bitcoin Cash subreddit. The case for a massive short on either of these coins is likely based on complete fantasy.

The Bcash guys are blaming under-performance relative to Bitcoin on: a) massive shorting of BCH and b) rampant purchases of BTC with un-backed Tether.

I have been fighting this attack for days. The only way I can keep my node running is to restart it every hour or so, even with the block list.  I have conceded defeat and  shut down. Hoping for a fix in an updated release, but the effectiveness of this attack is certainly worrisome.

Not sure if the situation will last, but it's still a noteworthy albeit symbolic event: According to CoinGecko, XMR has passed EOS in market cap.

The BITUSD peg to the USD broke and to my knowledge has not recovered. The last time I checked bitsharestalk there was a lot of in-fighting. The project started to have problems when Dan Larimar departed for Steemit. This points to the danger of blockchains that claim to have decentralized development, but really don’t.

Incoming FUD alert.  Tone Vays hating on XMR:

https://youtu.be/7YWNwra9T5k?t=1665

Some notable excerpts:

1) "Monero's privacy is useless."

2) "It's just the Venezuelan peso with privacy."

3) "Monero will never retain value."

4) "I am buying a new computer, even though this one is $3000 and just 2 years old. I abused the hell out of it." 

I suggest that Comment 4 be carefully considered when assessing the credibility of Comments 1--3.

I'm in for 5 randomly chosen squares. But if the field is set that's cool.

This might be the first XMR-specific article to appear on the SeekingAlpha website:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4213406-monero-long-term-play-privacy-tech

Seeking Alpha is certainly not the Wall Street Journal...think of it more as a loosely organized collection of bloggers with self-proclaimed investing expertise.  It does have a lot of readers though, mostly older, and decidedly anti-crypto.

I've been running a full node and switched over to 13.0.2 CLI.  It immediately had trouble synching .  I keep getting notified about "Error adding block" and "Attempting to add transaction that's already in the db".  If I go back to 12.3.0 the daemon tells me to "Please delete the existing database and resync."  Do I have to spend a week re-synching this thing from scratch?

No, not much marketing happening.  There was a Monero-sponsored race car competing in a German road race series:

https://i.imgur.com/eSfGqsv.jpg

but it got destroyed during a competition.  The sponsorship came from a single individual.  There was some /r/monero talk of getting a new car built with a community fundraising effort, but it hasn't gained any traction.

Notice that in one model they have ADA increasing by 4270% and in another it's essentially worthless.  It's also hard to imagine that so many of these coins will be around or have any value in 5 years. The summary does claim that: "Currency and Privacy networks will be the largest beneficiaries, as most fundamental value will stem from store of value use cases"

In 5 years, 1 XMR = $18,498. This according to Satis Research:

https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2018/08/satis-research-upside-5-year-in-btc-96000-xmr-18000-and-dcr-535-downside-in-bch-268/

Another analysis of Dash privacy, although over a year old.  I don't know if these concerns have been addressed; searching didn't turn up anything:

http://weuse.cash/2016/10/26/warning-dash-privacy-is-worse-than-bitcoin/

Don't wish to hijack the XMR price speculation thread, so mods can delete as they see fit.

I know this is not supposed to be a Dash-bashing thread and I suspect this has been addressed somewhere way back in this massive thread, but how did Dash absorb would would appear to be a massive body blow as a result of this Princeton research paper (i.e. section 3.2)?

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.02489.pdf

Is there an official Dash response somewhere? 

Reasonably well articulated points of contention are being raised here. Responding with cartoons and ad-hominems does not speak well for the credibility of this project. Clear, dispassionate rebuttal would be most welcome.

Gaming the EOS crowd sale:

https://coindecode.io/how-swim-made-thousands-gaming-the-eos-crowdsale/

As a long-time forum lurker, I appreciate the time and effort that was taken to make some of the thoughtful posts in this thread.

Even if the price drops back down below $30 I would not worry.  This reminds me a lot of the various Bitcoin runups over the years.  There are, however, some important differences now vs then that make continued accumulation of XMR a wise move, IMHO.  At the present time there is so much noise from other projects in the crypto space that there is no way anyone can realistically keep up with it all.  It's hard to get noticed, but that's OK.  Quality eventually emerges.  Always does.  The devs went about this exactly the right way: building solid tech without a glitzy marketing/ICO campaign for an immature (or even non-existent) product.   Couple XMR's not-yet-ready-for-the-masses software with a well-defined roadmap and you get a "perfect value-investing storm" for anyone with a reasonably long time horizon.

If you are in a hurry, you can safely do this without waiting for another Trezor.  Setup a new Linux partition on the hard disk of a PC, install Electrum, and enter your recovery phrase.  Yes, this exposes you to potential keylogger malware, but having this happen on a fresh Linux install without root permission is as close to impossible as I can imagine.  And installing Ubuntu or Mint has become a very simple process, probably easier than Windows.

If people are investing in an ICO entirely because of the presence of a single developer, this introduces a perilous, single-point of failure.  On the plus side, the mandatory investor due-diligence becomes much, much easier -- you simply dig up that person's history on past projects.  This is not the same as relying on 3rd-party opinions expressed in the various forums. 

Your money is at stake.  Do your own research. All the needed information is archived online.