Bitcoin -18.7%

By the way in all of these cases I am using USD as the comparison currency.

Edit: I am using Market Cap in USD from. https://coinmarketcap.com/ Click on the corresponding chart for each coin and one can verify my figures.

Some notes:

1) ShadowCash is proof of stake.
2) Monero does support mass TXs and has a market based solution in place to allow the main chain blocksize to grow to accommodate them. This is done without the need for a secondary level that is subject to government regulation. It is by the way a classic case of take care of the long term and the short term will take care of itself.
3) The proof of stake vulnerability in Dash is actually much higher than in regular proof of stake coins because of the 1000 Dash requirement for masternodes.
4) Lumping "IPO or mineable by speculators" into one makes no sense from a US or global regulatory point of view.

I will elaborate on 4. The critical US government agency for crypto currency regulation is FinCEN and not the SEC. The SEC has already argued before the courts that Bitcoin is money. This was critical in the Trendon Shavers / pirateat40 case since Trendon Shavers argued that he was not issuing securities with out SEC registration because Bitcoin was not money.. Furthermore internationally we see crypto currency regulation moving on the direction of treating crypto currency as money. The European Union being a good example.  It is for this reason that FinCEN has issued clear guidance close to three years ago, https://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html, while the SEC has not.  There are three further FinCEN rulings that are also very significant.
https://www.fincen.gov/news_room/rp/rulings/pdf/FIN-2014-R001.pdf
https://www.fincen.gov/news_room/rp/rulings/html/FIN-2014-R011.html
https://www.fincen.gov/news_room/rp/rulings/html/FIN-2014-R011.html

The first question and this is critical is whether the crypto currency is classified as a centralized virtual currency or a de-centralized virtual currency. The definition of de-centralized virtual currency is as follows from FIN-2013-G001
Mining of POW coins has been clarified in FIN-2014-R001.

Now for my thoughts, First I am not a lawyer.
A POW coin with no premine, such as Bitcoin or Monero is a de-centralized virtual currency. Developers and miners are not MSBs. This is the ideal case. This requires that development of the coin be funded solely by donation of time, money or both. Any attempt to use the emission to fund development will require one or more of the players to register as an MSB.
Dash will likely require an army of lawyers to figure out. As far as I see it, miners are likely MSBs (since they are required to turn over a part of the mined coins to the masternodes) masternodes are also likely MSBs (since they are required to turn over a portion of their coins to development) and the holders of the spork keys are also likely MSBs (since they have in effect been given central administrator responsibilities). Anyone involved with Dash in the above capacities, especially those in the US, would be wise to get professional legal advice and get a ruling from FinCEN on their particular situation.
Delegated structures have also a high regulatory risk.
Issuers of crypto - currencies (such as those behind Ripple, Ethereum etc.) are MSBs

I do not know what issuance model is being proposed by the OP.

I do agree that for the most part the current use value for alt-coins is for the most part non existent; however this is not the point. Many people who buy crypto currencies are speculating on the future utility of the crypto currency and hence the future value of the crypto currency. The real questions then become: Are there serious problems affecting the future utility of Bitcoin that the alt-coin solves? Does the alt-coin introduce any new problems not present in Bitcoin?

Waiting until prices fall, with "strong hands", only makes sense if the long term fundamentals are very poor which is simply not the case with Monero. Furthermore if even a small percentage of the "big block crowd" in Bitcoin decide that Monero is the solution to the 1 MB blocksize limit in Bitcoin then anyone caught short Monero is in for a real shock.

Edit: Many in the market do not believe that the new version is going to come out, and do not have the skills and / or the inclination to compile code from source and test the improvements for themselves.

Actually by this measure Monero has done very well. If we compare peak market cap since June 2014 to current market cap.

Monero      -20%

Ethereum     -47%
Litecoin        -49%
Dodgecoin   -53%
Namecoin    -68%
Dash            -70%

What we a measuring here is the overall fall in alt-coin prices as the price of Bitcoin was falling from its 2013 peak.

The historical evidence is that during a Bitcoin boom alt-coins for the most part have increased sharply in value with respect to Bitcoin. The current low price of Monero with respect to Bitcoin is the market not factoring in the development that has occurred in Monero over the last year. This is likely due the very old "official" binaries. The 0.8.8.6 version of Monero (the last official binaries) require over 9.2 GB in RAM. Seriously how many computers can handle that? Now compare that to the memory requirements of a Monero binary that is complied from the current source code.

My take is that staying "short" on Monero at this point in time is playing with fire.

If you want to learn more about ShadowCash and how it compares to Monero and Dash this is a good place to start. https://doc.shadowproject.io/#shadow-and-others. There are some very strong similarities with Monero. The critical difference is that ShadowCash is proof of stake while Monero is proof of work. Personally I believe that derivatives markets will make proof of stake coins fundamentally insecure. This is because the coin network has no way of determining if the stakeholder has shorted the coin on the derivatives market. If the stakeholder has a net short position then it would be in the stakeholder's interest to vote her stake against the best interests of the coin. This fundamentally undermines the whole premise of proof of stake as a way to secure a coin network. Dash is by the way vulnerable to this kind of attack since there is no way for the Dash network to determine if the holder of a masternode "secured" by 1000 Dash does not have a 2000 Dash short position somewhere else for a net 1000 Dash short position. It is actually even more vulnerable than most proof of stake coins since there is a built in incentive to set up masternodes using Dash borrowed from those who have less than 1000 Dash.

43. a5

I can see government regulators wishing to regulate the identities.

I dispute that figure of 0.07 USD for 1 XBT on January 01, 2010. The figure was closer to 0.0008 USD. This would imply a fast declining rate of growth as the demand approaches the fixed 1 MB blocksize limit in Bitcoin.

I would say that a mix of 75% USD 25% XMR beats XBT as a store of value hands down.

42. cb5

https://www.bolehvpn.net/blog/2015/12/14/what-is-dash-and-why-is-bolehvpn-accepting-it/

Edit: My take is that it is time to let the market decide.

A lot may also depend on the size of the HDD. I did not notice an issue syncing with a 2 TB HDD on Trisquel 7. I do suspect this can be an issue with a smaller HDD.

One other thing is that virtualization itself can be very hard on an HDD when both the host OS and the guest OS are on the same drive. If one adds to this a disk intensive application in the VM then I can see this problem developing. My experience with this has been with Windows VMs running on GNU/Linux hosts where I found a significant performance improvement by having the Windows VMs on a different HDD from the ./ GNU/Linux partition. The latter partition had the OS files. When I moved my laptop which had a single drive setup from an HDD to an SSD, I saw see a significant improvement in the Windows VM performance.

I will switch my vote to Bd5. So

Rc1: LucyLovesCrypto
Bd5: 8XMR, XMRpromotions, ArticMine,

41. Rc1 The bishop could be overworked trying to defend two pawns at the same time.

Yes, but I thought it had to be to a trusted node over a secure connection.

I was thinking about a high end smartphone or a tablet. For example a  Nexus 6P with 128 GB storage should have the capability to handle a full Monero node. I do agree that this kind of thing does not occur with other crypto currencies but the reason is that the vast majority of mobile devices are deliberately crippled with DRM by OS vendors and telcos, rather than the actual hardware capabilities of the devices themselves. Apple is by far the worst but even on Android one has to root the device, thereby breaking the DRM, in order to properly secure the device and get full use of it.

Edit: One way around this would be to set up a secure connection from the phone to a computer running a trusted node (say for example in the phone owner's home) thereby avoiding this issue.

That is very healthy for the upside.

Looks really great.

Now as for iOS: Apart from the technical issue of compiling the Java library for iOS there is the issue of Apple's DRM. So it would only work with jailbroken iOS. Also if the 32bit version of Monero is used with Berkeley db there is the issue that Berkeley db is licensed under the AGPL. This is not an issue on Android, GNU/Linux, Windows desktop (but not Windows RT/mobile or the Windows store), OS X or jailbroken iOS.

To run it on iOS that is not jailbroken as far as I can see one would need both a proprietary license from Oracle for Berkely db ($$$) and to pass the Apple censor board. If Monero does really take off it may be possible to enter into a license agreement with Oracle. The project would then have to pass on Oracle's license fee, Apple's markup and a markup and risk premium for the project that the iSheep would have to pay.

Edit: Java is GPL so again there is the same issue with iOS that is not jailbroken. So more fees that the iSheep would have to pay

There may be a high degree of correlation between the two.