Less than .1% has the potential to make someone extremely wealthy IF Monero can achieve its objective of establishing an important privacy hub.

I predict that in 10 years .1% of Monero will either be worth close to zero or be enough to retire on. Failure may be more likely but the potential reward is so great that the risk appeals to me.

You can blame /u/thedesertlynx who is an instrument of the Dash corporation.

I would imagine that the Dash corporation's investors were ruffled after Monero ascended them on the marketcap, and because Dash is driven by profit rather than socio-political ambitions, it acted much like any other corporation would do to try and take out the competition.

Joel Valenzuela (thedesertlynx) has often worked simultaneously for Dash and CoinTelegraph in crafting well-written pieces of FUD against Monero, that utilize subtle attempts at covert hypnosis along with mild neuro-linguistic programming.

It was /u/thedesertlynx who was recently responsible for perpetuating the meme that Monero's community held a poor reputation.

It was also /u/thedesertlynx who wrote a similar article on CoinTelegraph that purported to illustrate that "investors were scrambling to get out of Monero!" and that the entire project was a sinking ship.

Anyone with a genuine understanding of the socio-political variables that surround the cryptocurrency movement would surely be scratching their heads at how someone who claims to be a New Hampshire libertarian would choose self-serving immediate profit, rather than helping to lay down the fundamentals of a genuinely disruptive movement.

We saw the same thing with Amanda B Johnson. So much potential to globally expand libertarianism, and in the end they choose the immediate profits of corporate employment, rather than taking the path of most resistance and helping the community to build something amazing.

Monero has always been a fragile being. It is surrounded by dystopian antagonists at every turn, whether that be the Dash Corporation, the ZCash-hype sponsored by a foreign government, or the Bitcoin monolithic all-seeing blockchain that in its current form tiptoes toward a form of global egalitarianism where privacy does not exist for anyone.

It is always a catastrophic shame when a powerful corporation or a powerful country goes to war against a barebones civilian population, or in the case of Monero, a community of volunteers, cryptographers, and political activists.

But it is a devastation, when someone who professes to be politically active and is demonstrably intelligent, instead chooses a questionable path that would appear to run counter to the politics they exclaim.

Still.

Desite the FUD, Monero will succeed regardless. Because that's what we do, and that's what we always have done.

I have coins stored on wallets created with mymonero.com. Are they less secure than a paper wallet created with moneroaddress.org?

I do agree with the theory of a long term bear market in Bitcoin. I see this because of the following:
1) There is a widening chasm between the promise of Bitcoin,  a digital and fungible currency that can be used by anyone in the world to pay anyone in the world without the need of an intermediary and the reality a digital non fungible currency that can in practice only be used as a settlement layer between the intermediaries Bitcoin was supposed to replace under the promise.
2) The macro economic factors identified by Dent and Armstrong, namely a 30s type deflationary depression. What Dent got wrong is he failed to take into account the impact of the massive quantitative easing or money printing by the central banks since 2008. This would make a strong fiat currency such as USD attractive.

In the scenario above one would expect an overall bear market in crypto currency; however just as was the case during the 1930s with stocks there will be exceptions that buck the overall trend. Identifying the latter is where the real long term opportunities lie. Monero could very easily buck the trend since objectively it is very well placed to become the promise of Bitcoin. What this would point to for Monero is very strong long term prospects combined with extremely high short to medium term volatility and risk. My personal position is almost exclusively a combination of CAD and XMR with no debt. A convertible fiat other than USD can make sense where a person's expenses are denominated in that currency.

For two years now XMR has had December lows and late February breakouts. I'm thinking Monero is the sunshine currency. Fitting, considering the logo and the nature of the project.

:-)

Whale definition fluctuates with the price, if Monero shoots above $5, 0.1% is pretty much a whale