Really? Let's say it starts with 100 users and increases users by 10x every year. In the first 3 years it will still be below your 100k users, but after 7 years it reaches a billion users (and after eight years everyone on Earth, of course). That's approximately the same trajectory as Facebook. Yet for the first 3-4 years it seems totally irrelevant and too small to matter.

This is totally hypothetical of course but it just illustrates that different trajectories can result in massive user bases.

Personally I think crypocurrencies are facing bigger hurdles to user adoption than technology or marketing, which is that most users just don't have a use for them. We are largely playing a waiting-and-exploring game until new killer apps develop or conditions in the world change and make people want something other than traditional finance. The latter context existed in 2008 when Bitcoin was released but over the years has been largely lost. Trying to sell hard into a non-receptive market (which is almost the entire world right now) is a recipe for frustration, wasted resources, and failure.

I don't mean to discourage your enthusiasm for reaching a mass market. I certainly encourage you, I just don't share your (short term) optimism that there necessarily is a mass market to be reached.

No, it doesn't bother me. AEON has many more users than it had a year ago. Monero probably does too. Growth is often slow at first. But then we don't know whether they may hit a hard ceiling. That is certainly possible. Monero seems to have better absolute prospects by virtue of a larger profile and community (and I don't just mean bitcointalk forum users), but that is reflected in the price somewhat I suppose.


I have nothing against adoption but also nothing against speculation, nor development-focused projects that are rough but may or may not gain users at a greater level of maturity and utility. They all have their roles to play. If someone wants to create applications and/or use cases for AEON (or Monero or even Bitcoin or some other reasonably credible project), I'd be happy to help if there is something productive I can do.

No it is a minor tweak to the parameters of the CryptoNight algorithm.

EDIT: It is also properly credited to its inventor, which was not me -- see ANN OP.


I'd guess several hundred. Thousands is possible. It is hard to say.

You don't have to allege it, they acknowledged doing it, but stated that it was not a sham transaction because individuals were doing the buying and a business entity was receiving the proceeds.


No, other than by their statements, if they make any.


Iota isn't even launched yet I think. I'm not positive.

Smooth Investment Fund Dividend

For the first time in our long history, SIF has declared and paid a dividend of 228 per share (total payout 6 mil). This income is derived from dividends received from our holdings CKG, CON, and corporation stock holdings. Further dividends will be declared and paid as justified by investment returns and market conditions.

Conditions have stabilized with most BEER being sold at around 4000. We are continuing the dividend at 10000 per share this week.

But there is a soda machine, I heard.

Go ahead crack Bitcoin. Until then, STFU.

The difference between 25% and 50% is not really that significant anyway. With 25% you can easily acquire more hash rate to get to 50% or conspire with some other 25% to get to 50%.

Satoshi's method only achieves its strong security model with more highly fragmented mining (perhaps with the largest extant mining concentration at 5% or less, to choose a somewhat arbitrarily number), something that hasn't been achieved to date but not everyone rules out that the system could evolve in that manner in the future. (TPTB thinks it is impossible; I and others do not, necessarily.)

With numbers like >15% where investments in capacity comparable in magnitude to the amount already invested or small coalitions can easily attack the system, you can really only rely on Satoshi's secondary model, which is sort of proof-of-stakeish and not really very compelling.

FWIW I don't really recommend messing with limit-down unless it is interfering with your gaming, movie streaming, voip, etc. It is just going to make the sync process take longer and use about the same total bandwidth anyway. Usually "sprint to idle" is the best approach.

Limit-up is another matter, since that is a measure of how much you are serving blocks to other nodes. You can currently cut that down and leech if you want to. Although somewhat anti-social, it is better than not running a node at all.

I'll leave that to people who want to figure out how to exploit it. I'm not going to give them a free cookbook any more than I already have.

But I'd point out that even "a few CPU cycles" would be very significant if the system actually had real usage and adoption. TPTB makes good points on that.

First of all, masternodes will still be paid even if they don't serve lock requests. They're not being paid for performing the service. They are being paid and they perform the service, if they feel like it.

There isn't even a system to politically vote out bad actors as there is in Bitshares. In Dash any masternode operator who figures out how to cheat can get away with it indefinitely.

Second, the miners will just ignore the locks if they are more than six blocks ahead. All that requires is a big-ish farm get disconnected for 10 minutes, some luck in mining and propagation, or a deliberate attack, or probably some other scenarios I don't feel like trying to think up.

It is still a PoW coin under the current design because masternodes don't really decide anything important. They just sit around, stay online or pretend to be online, and collect interest (and possibly cause real trouble if malicious). In the proposed Evolution design that apparently changes, but it is hard to comment meaningfully about vaporware.

Neither did the Madoff investors, or they wouldn't have been investors. That's the obvious point.

Your comment about the investors being happy with the situation (and non-investors seeing it differently) is tautological and stupid. It applies to every single tradable asset in the history of the world, no matter how bad an investment, how fraudulent, or how doomed to fail. The ones who own it like it, but that doesn't make them right and everyone else wrong.

Do you think that Harry Markopolis was a Madoff investor. If not, why not?

Yes, I agree. It is absolutely possible that Bitcoin would be doing better if that hadn't happened. I'd say the same for mining centralization, which a lot of Bitcoiners say is "no big deal", but likewise there is no telling how much more successful Bitcoin might be otherwise. There is certainly plenty of upside from Bitcoin's current tiny valuation (relative to traditional finance) and user base. Impossible to know really.


I don't necessarily mean clones, although that can't be ruled out. There was a fair bit of time between the first Bitcoin clones and the most successful one (so far), so its still possible someone will come up with the secret recipe for a successful Dash clone.

But competitors with comparable features may just include coins that go after the same feature points. Scalability is a big thing now. Clearly in a year or two there will be many deployed scalability coins, and coins with whatever other particular features seem important at the time. Some may be Evolution clones, but many will not.


The market to which he is supposedly proving his worth has shown negligible appreciation for his alleged hard work and "good" software solutions since mid-2014. That can be said for Monero too, although at least Monero has the excuse of high emission distributing a lot of new coins over two years (market cap is reasonably near its all time high, even if price is not).

Yes I said that. Whatever the number, there will likely be competitors with similar features that will not suffer from customer rejection based on perceived unfairness and a tarnished brand. They will outgrow Dash and Dash will fail.


Many of the things you pointed out are fixable and will likely be fixed long before any massive surge of adoption comes, if it ever does (though not all certainly). The instamine is not.

If you had to pick something about Monero that is in the same category (not really fixable) it would be infinite supply. You can take your pick I suppose, but I do not expect that to act as an impairment of a similar magnitude (as in allowing an otherwise-similar competitor without that attribute to outgrow Monero and cause Monero to fail). Anything is possible though.

It's still an order of magnitude bigger than Dash in market cap.

I think you are reaching.



Well it has given massive losses to many people who bought in after the first few months for one thing. It's been largely stagnant or in a declining phase for most of the two years for another. I don't really think pointing out that a few extreme early adopters made a bunch of money while almost no one else has helps your case here at all regarding fairness or anything else.

The story for Monero is much the same, keeping this on topic for the thread, with the exception that the mining is much more spread out over the 1.5 year history so there are more new owners as opposed to people who bought from early adopter/instaminers enriching them at the buyer's expense.

I guess the real point is that both coins have things that are holding them back in terms of the markets though.


Okay I agree with you that if that does happen, and there is a scramble for anonymous coins, then all the reasonably credible anonymous or sort-of-anonymous coins will pump. I'm not sure whether that will favor Dash relative to Monero or not.


They can't entirely, nor perfectly in every case, but in the case of Dash it is completely obvious, and widely known. That isn't going away.


You did not. To borrow your term, anything that you expect to happen in the future based on public information is already "priced in". There is no reason to expect the valuation impairment of the instamine to lessen over time.

I'll address this point separately because it is so important.

It is really hard and usually expensive to acquire customers. If you are losing 50% of the customers you would otherwise get because they say "it's instamined crap" then you are, to put it simply, fucked. There will certainly be some competitor (which need not be Monero, might just be Bitcoin, or it might be DOGE or some new system or who knows what) that does not suffer from that 50% handicap and will grow faster with less resources devoted to customer acquisition.

Now it doesn't even really matter if the percentage of rejection due to dislike of (actual or appearance of) unfairness is 50% or 20% or some other number. The point is that the difficulty of acquiring new customers will persist and remain a sustainable competitive disadvantage that isn't borne by competing solutions.

Charlie Lee is not a competitor really, butthurt or otherwise.

Smoothie has never been a big time Monero supporter. He's not involved in the project at all and wasn't an earlier supporter. He's been much more into Litecoin and Bitcoin for a long time, although he certainly does prefer Monero to Dash.

When I have talked to people outside bitcointalk and they have heard about Dash (Darkcoin previously) absolutely the #1 thing they know about it and associate with it is the massive instamine. Generally expressed in a very dismissive manner. If you don't experience this, you really need to get out and talk to people, because the perception is there, it is very real, and it has nothing to do with "butthurt competitors".


No, he's absolutely right about how the market works.

The correct interpretation of the efficient market hypothesis here is that the worth of Dash right now -- about 1/350 of Bitcoin -- incorporates its known properties, which includes the instamine.

Charlie Lee's argument is that the reason Dash is still quite unsuccessful (and indeed priced currently at the aforementioned low value despite "trying to be innovative" in his words, and I'd add despite building on top of the somewhat mature Bitcoin code base with additional features too) includes in large part the instamine. That impairment won't go away.

His advice is to other people wanting to do coins is not to make this mistake, because you won't be able to shake it off for a long time if ever. People value fairness and find it hard to support something that doesn't look fair (again his worlds). Even if that, to you, seems unfair.

There is no valid logical or economic reason to assume "the only way is up from that point". You just completely made that up. The effect is priced in, yes, but there is no expectation that it will be "unpriced in". Rather it will continue to hurt the value forever.


The magnitude is vastly, vastly different. The Dash instamine (roughly 30%) won't be anywhere near proportionate with the LTC instamine (low single digits; I don't remember the exact number) for decades if ever. That's really a farfetched and stupid comparison. If LTC had a vastly larger instamine and then cut its supply multiple times, it might be in a similar situation. But it didn't and isn't.