Monero could have been a taco. Sadly, tacotime was opposed to calling Monero's smallest unit a tacoshi (a la satoshi for 1e-8 BTC). A bold opportunity lost.

Mixin choice affects tx fee so from that perspective it should be left to the user. On the other hand, foolishly compromising your own privacy also very slightly degrades others' privacy (1 element removed from anonymity set*) so it can make sense to restrict choice. It's not very different from making everyone use only base 10 denominations like we already do.

* This is more academic than practical since the total combinatorial space is still huge.

Isn't Monero empirical proof that scam-free open source crypto projects are still viable? I'm not ready to laud the benefits of assorted scams until all the honest projects die off.

And, yeah, some shadowtrash sympathizers are on a deletion spree. My mundane mention of their PoW schedule (as stated on their OP) got deleted.

Interestingly, an increasing number of researchers in top US economics departments think cash should be eliminated, but for an entirely different reason: it lets you avoid negative interest rates. If all money was electronic and had to be held in state-regulated banks, then zero* is no longer the lower bound on interest rates as a monetary policy tool. So you continually lose your savings and have no choice in the matter, but supposedly recessions will become easier to fight.

* In reality, it's more like -0.5% than 0% because of the practical difficulty of storing very large amounts of cash.

Current holders shouldn't be the target. In general, confrontation is a win for the smaller brand because it's extra publicity. I don't think crypto is any different.

There are plenty of now dead shitcoins that played games with supply. Supply tinkering != returns.

A possible corollary of your line of thinking is that someone could copy-paste XMR right now but with an emission-capping hard fork. The investors and the market should then naturally flock to this new chain. I doubt that will actually happen.

Perhaps, but we can't know how that would've turned out. Very early on someone (OracionSeis) did launch a Bitmonero copy with no changes but an emission schedule that's similar to Bitcoin's. It briefly reached a high valuation and then floundered. However irrational it may be, having some non-zero amount of buy-in already present is a big head start over a new launch (probably due to risk averseness). I liked the legitimacy that came with being the second oldest CryptoNote chain, even with a dysfunctional founder. It may be why Monero beat out BBR (the horrible name choice helped).

Roughly correct - the 'printed' money is actually composed of deposits held at the central bank. Although the owners of these deposits (other banks) could withdraw it and put it into circulation, they're being paid interest on it. The interest rate is very low, but it's risk-free so it's still a good deal from the depositors' point of view. Thus they keep the money locked up and the rest of the economy doesn't experience increased money circulation.

There's definitely something wrong with their numbers. Typical daily USD volume is actually in the neighborhood of $15-20 million.

I think O(root(n)) is the smallest known implementation of ring signatures. The CryptoNote developers were aware of this -- one of their citations in the original white paper was to a publication on O(root(n)) ring signatures (Fujisaki CT-RSA 2011). However, it uses pairing-based cryptography for which there was no standard library so they opted to be conservative and implemented standard ring signatures.

No, it makes equity holders richer. But almost everyone is an equity holder, whether they realize it or not -- pension funds.

Seeing as it's open source and uses a standard elliptic curve, no.

It desensitized me to volatility in stocks (a small fraction of BTC volatility, let alone altcoin volatility). This allowed me to go and invest most of net worth in emerging market stocks. Should work out nicely in 2 - 4 decades.

Like any floating commodity, BTC is backed by demand. If it were backed by something else, it would simply be a proxy for that something else's demand.

It just follows from the unpredictability of market movements - doesn't have anything to do with individuals, or the type of asset, or any associated politics.

Yep, this is Buffet's advice that's universally applicable to any asset. You can get out, but it's also hard to catch a rise, if and when it happens. Alts wouldn't be fun otherwise.

Activity dropped drastically right after the last of his ever-moving deadlines for XMR's death. Perhaps he's embarrassed to show his face and switched to a new account?

Poor, poor academics. They were trying to correlate BTC price with a few variables like news mentions and Google searches when the only advice anyone needs is HODL.

This would be empirically validated in Bitcoin by now (supposed to last until 2100+, only 5 years old, 60% mined out). Yet most new entrants into cryptocurrency stick with Bitcoin. The ones who bother with alts are mostly within two camps (1) the overwhelming majority who feel they "missed out" and are just shooting in the dark hoping to strike gold and (2) those who see scope for technological niches, a small minority.

Who are the ones who see BTC is 60% mined out and choose something else because of that? Are you sure they're not actually a subset of (1), i.e. they choose an alt because they're hoping for higher upside and not because they are bothered by BTC's fast emission? This latter group doesn't actually care about emission on some logical/moral level; they're just speculators who operate at a farther point in the risk-reward curve.

To respond to baghodler:

Yes, everyone talks about how they're going to hold for 2+ years when times are good. They promptly starts panicking on a downtrend and come up with various rationalizations for various schemes. It will pass; churn in the markets is a good thing.

HODL'ers haven't realized their capital gains/losses by definition. Traders are playing in their own zero sum game with each other. So neither group has won or lost, nor do they need to at each other's expense. The losers are the ones who are neither - i.e. those that exited with a realized loss.