There's no Government support for LTC but what I meant is that LTC has rich backers who'll presumably engage in Keynesian practices.   Don't recall that BTC was going off the ends until the Winklevoss twins started pumping money into it.
 

Implied disrespect.  It's not the 1980s or 1960s anymore.  Quality of life and standard of living in many areas of USA is parallel or less than most areas of Europe, yet many people still think the streets are paved with gold in America.  The reality is the American dream is more likely to be found abroad than within America.   America hasn't been great since the 1980s.

Many American cities are simply terrible nowadays.  If you think America's great then go ahead and live in a typical American city like Chicago and come back to me (alive).  The reality is many American cities suffer from urban decay.

Cities like Belgrade, Sarajevo and Riga are considered "dangerous and the worse" in Europe but compared to typical American cities the "worse of Europe" beats America's best.  I'ld sooner live in Riga or Sarajevo then in Portland Oregon - I've been to all three cities in person, so my mind's made up..

No I intended to use the word irreverent.  These sort of articles are often printed with the intent of making Americans look privileged, when in reality there's many poor people in America.

Tribal or regional identities =/= national identity.  If you were to used that argument in the Middle East or Africa then we can do the same in Britain, Germany or Russia.  Germany not long ago used to be divided, so let's break up that imperialistic state.   

And the proof is..?  Anyone can manipulate statistics to make it look like anything is happening.   The only thing which has happened is increasing urbanization and I don't know if I would characterize that as an end to poverty.  It's arguably better for people to live in rural villages with their own homes than to crowd people into slums and urban sprawls.

There's women serving in Iran's armed forces.  Where do you think the Kurds' cultural values come from?  Women were serving as common soldiers and officers in the past Persian Empires.  Women had more rights in the past Persian Empires than in ancient Greece or Rome.


Debate contemporary nationalism all you want, that's not the discussion here, but anthropologically and historically the Kurds are an Iranic people.  Iran is already the union of Iranic speaking peoples.  The reality, which is why the Kurds have been suppressed for so long, is that the Kurds (joining Iran or having their own 'Kurdistan') would become a proxy to Iran.

I don't think the Arabs or Turks are interested in weakening their own countries by letting Kurdistan go, and in turn making Iran stronger or Iran having a strong proxy.

It's irreverent and it's one of those propaganda articles to convince poor working class people in the United States that they're rich, even though someone making $20K in a third world country has a superior standard of living.

Coffee is cheap and I like the taste.  I can get 24 oz of ground premium coffee for maybe $15.

Theobromine / Roasted Cocoa is healthier and doesn't have any of the negative overload or withdrawal symptoms but it's costs twice as much.   24 oz of Crio Bru will set me back $28.   It's also not as tasty as coffee, like you have to add milk or sugar to make it taste like hot chocolate or else you get stuck with a bitter watery drink.

Cost of living does not seem to factor in that argument at all.  Someone who makes $5000 a year in Guatemala or Nepal arguably has a higher quality of living than someone barely scraping by on a working class (less than $40K) income in a developed country.

$32K a year in Los Angeles and New York is only going to get you a moldy basement with roommates or a dingbat apartment built back in the 1950s.   Whereas you can live like a king in a lot of third world countries at a $100 to $300 a month budget.

Nope.  Up until today, NEM effectively followed NxT.  This can be seen with the seven day graphs on coinmarketcap.  All the real decline in NEM occurred on sunday.  I suspect the "stolen stakes" is a non-factor here.  

Your second half of your post has merit, though.  There's been independent decline on sunday and I presume it's all the accused NODE socks (who are finding out today that they're on the public's radar) who are fireselling their NEM tokens. . but to suggest it's just them it's a foresight, NEM already took a beating when NxT lost a cent in value.

NEM's price is unrelated to the scammer fireselling.  It's still in its' healthy range around 25,000 NxT.    I suspect as we get closer to launch that the healthy range will increase to 40,000 NxT.

NEM losing value has more to do with NxT dropping a whole cent in the past days (as NEM is traded on the NxT asset exchange).  Recall back in April-May that NxT was only worth two to four cents (it was worth less than Doge for some weeks).  If NxT hypothetically went down to 2 cents again then a NEM stake would drop in value accordingly.


NxT could be in a free fall at the moment as its' upswing to 7 cents was likely all "hype buying" (speculation) from current users reacting to the news of the new asset exchange (June 1st) and the pay expos.  It's no different then how Bitcoin went up by $30 to $50 just from the news of newegg accepting BTC (was that from new people or was it, the answer, existing users speculating buying thinking Bitcoin will go up in value?  Ditto).


The reality is capitalization is often always manipulation or speculation to one degree or another.  The principle challenge is not trying to grow the capitalization but trying to grow the user base of a coin.  I think Doge did it right in that regard but Doge was later crippled by poor technical and strategic decisions which later led to an net emigration of users to other coins.
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The tokens aren't going to be discounted, AFAIK.  The loss is coming from the developers who'll have 8 less tokens worth of funding.

NODE's sockpuppet list has been discredited on their thread. Apparently they were grouping people without any substantial proof.

In NEM's case it just means we have those 6 to 8 tokens which are going to be firesold by the scammer.  NEM's price is inevitably going to go back up, so this is the time to buy.

I think the one error here is that it's difficult to pass off a good counterfeit bill ~ especially the high tech new bills we are seeing in some countries.

On the other hand - it's incredibly easy to counterfeit money if you are a bank.  All the bank executive has to do is type "+$10.000" on the keyboard and lend that money out to people as mortgages and credit.  Yes all that money will swap hands but in the end of the day most of it remains electronic / digital.  Bank runs can only happen if everyone tries to withdraw.

Hey it happened in Bulgaria but Bulgaria is a former Communist country which hasn't experienced decades of bank panics and doesn't have rules to stop them.

Occupied Wallstreet tried to incite bank runs across America?  What happened?  Banks reacted quicker than the protesters by issuing banking holidays, withdrawal freeze or lowered the withdrawal limits to a few bucks.  Banks have had decades to figure this stuff out and they know how to stop bank runs.

Fractional reserve banking is here to stay until it's made illegal.

I found NODE to be interesting, so I went ahead and signed up.  That was after they hiked the registration fee to $25 something.  

Well we don't know the criteria NODE had used, except for this one particular post.  

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=590421.msg7550635#msg7550635

The problem I am sensing is that there could be false positives.  Despite Node's aggressive anti-sock detection they only rooted out individuals with between 2 to 6 stakes.  The biggest one I can immediately see has 6 stakes in NODE while most have less than that.  And that probably includes a few false positives.

Even with that aggressive sock hunting (even more aggressive than NEM due to witchhunting methods like "intuition" and other stuff), they didn't undercover any huge sock masters.  Like it's mainly guys with 2-3 stakes (with the odd person with 4 to 6), nothing which ruins NODE's distribution.

Does that mean NODE is worthless?  No.. it means, with the exception of 20 people who took 2 to 5 times more share, it was well distribution to over a thousand people.  I think that means NODE I would characterize to be a good buy since it's presumably has stability (no dumping whales).

NEM is the sameway I think.  Maybe if we used NODE's aggressive stance / witchhunt we could uncover maybe 30 to 40 sock masters (including false positives) but those sockmasters probably only have 3 to 4 stakes (the odd person with 5 to 7).


 NEM is still going to have that good distribution of maybe 2700+ unique persons (after the auction).

The reality is this: NEM was a fork back in January and there wasn't the incentive to create a billion socks to game what was then a fork, the samething was true for NODE.  All the time it takes to bypass taint analysis and other detection methods, never mind the anti-spam thing on Bitcointalk, the hysteria about huge sock masters just doesn't have any basis in reality.

It makes sense in the present to say: "if I had known the price of NEMstake I'ld had created 100 socks".  Just like saying I should had put $10,000 into Bitcoin in 2009.  One problem of that is retrospective knowledge =/= real world.  I was there back in January and it probably wasn't until March (after the registration was over) that we knew NEM was going to be this special thing we know it to be today.

I found more.  P9 - BestofSR, cryptonikus, Deftonikus, Djentriser and TeseracT.  Busted as socks on NODE.
All present on the NEM stakeholder list, haven't collected any tokens yet.

This looks pretty extensive.  It's a good chance that all the socks on NODEs' list are probably on the NEM list.  Seems like some had collected tokens (and presumably sold).  The others can still be refunded.

Perhaps should clarify first how NODE declared them to be socks.  They never had a public or transparent taint analysis as far as I know.   In a lot of circumstances, I see them just grouping inactives based on similar names.


For instance, P5 consists of two guys.  Bytemother and ivanluiso.  No chain transactions to put them together.  They registered weeks apart.  Only thing I see in common are messages in Spainish and both are named Ivan (meh I guess that's a probable link but still).

I went through the list.  P stands for Puppet.  A lot of those names are on the NEM stakeholder list and several own more than 3.


vonBerlichingen, Ziustag, BierKoch, TheGreatWodan, Manowar  are listed as P3 on the Node stakeholder list and had their stakes removed, but they're still present on the NEM stakeholder list.  That's presumably one guy with five stakes and he hasn't claimed any tokens for them yet.

waltz, ney, rockhill, beida, BitTom, shenjie are P18 and I know a couple of those names were on the NEM stakeholder list.  I find it strange Beida would get a refund from NEM months ago (yet made a post today about NEM  ) but keep a stake with the Ney, Waltz and Rockhill account.  He claimed those tokens; so he may have sold them already.


That's only just from briefly scanning the node stakeholder list - a lot more of their busted socks are probably on the NEM stakeholder list but you'ld have to go from P1 to P20 and search for them in the NEM list.

How they found these socks I don't know.  They made a post on it.  They did taint analysis like NEM but also went through other factors.    They may had collected IPs from the NXTL account generator and cross compared them.  Alternatively, they could just be grouping inactive newbies with similar names which really isn't busting socks but busting inactives with username similarities.

My Node account is 17780801381767481802 - which is currently working but seems to be absent from the stakeholder list, even though my name is on the list.  I pointed this out months ago but nobody had updated it with an account number.


So how does this stakeholder list work?  The highlighted names are socks?

What incentive was there for Winklevoss or Branson to buy up BTC?

A lot of rich people in this world with more money than they know what to do with it.  Seems like a fair trade off to dump $1 to $10 million into LTC while it's down, especially when it could make you $10-$100 million in a few years if LTC goes to the moon.