No. The spying in Windows 10 can be used to defeat Tor.

Unfortunatly this may be a sign of things to come. There is a chilling silence from Winklevoss twins and thier ETF for example. I have sold over 99% of my Bitcoins for a combination of Monero and Canadian Dollars, not because of fungibility, but because of the 1 MB blocksize issue. I understand where Circle is coming from.

Edit: The real problem is: How will Bitcoin develop a fee market once the emission runs out? This is the real reason why there has not been a solution to the blocksize issue.

My take is that this is a direct result of the 1 MB blocksize limit. If Bitcoin cannot grow, while Circle wishes to grow as a company they have to do something.

Fungibility rather than privacy is the killer application; however one cannot have fungibility without privacy so they go hand in hand.  I remain convinced that Bitcoin has a fatal flaw that has been exposed by the 1 MB blocksize limit debate, namely: How can a fee market develop in the absence of a block reward? Granted this flaw will not show up for a few decades but it one of the reasons why there is not a "simple" solution to the blocksize debate.

Crypto currencies provide a very important solution. This is the ability to send money at a distance without the need for a trusted third party. When the buyer and seller can meet in person to complete a transaction one can use fiat cash but this is not an option when for example the buyer and seller are in different continents. As for the market it is those who cannot get or use a bank account, debit / credit card, Paypal etc for the transaction for what ever reason. In many cases the reason is poverty on the part of the buyer or seller or both.

Edit: There are many innovative money transfer systems that work only within one country. It is when international boundaries are crossed that fees and intermediaries make relatively small transactions say below 100 US very expensive.

This depends on whether the altcoin developers get the permission of Microsoft. Microsoft and not the "owner" of the phone controls what software is permitted on a Windows 10 phone. The question is really no different from asking if one can run altcoin wallets on the telescreens in George Orwell's 1984. If Big Brother says yes, the answer is yes, if Big Brother says no, the answer is no.

Edit: On Windows 10 running on an x86/AMD64 laptop or desktop it is still possible to compile and run altcoins, without the explicit permission of Microsoft, since this version of Windows 10 is not yet fully transitioned to the Orwellian telescreen model. I have for example managed to compile and run Monero on Windows 10 as a test; however I would strongly advise against using Windows 10 or even recent Windows versions to run any crypto currency software, since this gives Windows and by extension Microsoft access to one's private keys for the crypto currency. GNU/Linux or another Free Libre Open Source Software Operating system are by far the safest options.

Exposing scams is a very valuable contribution. Of course those who are selling a scam wish to "shoot the messenger" rather then deal with the scam.

The rocket is not going anywhere since it is firmly chained to the ground by the 1 MB blocksize limit. It could blow up however.

I vote for the third option.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS-aLOm-6Vc

Edit: The first and second options do not provide privacy and fungibility in Monero since they are both members of the PRISM program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29

... because the coins in both cases are for a period of time taken off the market. Dash masternodes account for 3.2 million DASH or about 53% of the Dash money supply. The Monerodice bankroll above is about 300,000 XMR or about 3.2% of the Monero money supply. This is a big difference.

It comes down to backing 100 USD worth of BitUSD with 200 USD worth of Bitshares. If the market price of Bitshares falls by more than 50% in terms of USD then the 100 BitUSD are no longer worth 100 USD and the peg breaks down. One can do the same thing with gold, or even another cryptocurrecny such as XMR.

Edit: XMR is a better example than USD as to how Bitshares can fail, since XMR could all of a sudden rise very sharply in purchasing power on its own accord. A sudden sharp rise in purchasing power of XMR is not going to cause CK items to fall sharply in value, rather the exact opposite is more likely.

The timetable is here: https://forum.getmonero.org/4/academic-and-technical/303/a-formal-approach-towards-better-hard-fork-management

My take is that the price of Monero will be driven by the long term fundamentals rather than by traders who buy and sell, at a profit or loss, on a 10% spread.

The first indicator will be the market response to the updated official tagged binaries when they come out.

We make the following assumptions:

1) That M > N
2) If there is an even number of pirates left the senior pirate votes twice once in the regular vote and once to break a tie if needed
3) The coins cannot be broken down into smaller pieces of gold
4) There is zero cost for the hangings (For example the cost of the rope is zero)
5) Each pirate acts strictly in his best financial interest.

The solution is the senior pirate distributes one coin to each priate, except the second most senior pirate gets no coins and he keeps M+2-N coins for himself.

We start with N=2. In this secnario the senior pirate keeps all the coins and uses his tie vote to outvote the junior pirate
N = 3 The senior pirate only needs the vote of one pirate. So he pays the cheapest cost by giving one coin to the most junior and keeping the rest etc.

I will elaborate on this.

The first question one needs to ask before even considering adaptive blocksize limits is: Can a fee market actually work in the absence of a base emission?

1) We first consider a blocksize large enough (or effectively infinite). In this scenario competition among miners will drive fees towards zero since there is no scarcity. This will in turn cause the difficulty and consequently the security of the crypto currency to collapse. We must keep in mind that orphan block based arguments will also fail since these are based on the presence of a base emission. This is in fact the very legitimate fear of the small block proponents.

2) In the second case we consider a fixed blocksize, where the blocksize is small enough to impact fees. In this scenario we have a potentially infinite demand with a fixed supply. In theory fees therefore would go to infinity. We must keep in mind that as the legitimate demand rises towards the fixed limit, It becomes economically attractive for miners with a even small percentage of the hash rate to spam the network in order to profit by raising the overall fees.  At this point only external competitive factors can stop the fees from rising to infinity. These take the form of fiat payment methods and other crypto currencies with the latter being not affected by a fixed blocksize limit. The impact of these external competitive factors is to reduce demand by devaluing the entire crypto currency. This will be delayed by miner spam, as miners will increase the spam in order to preserve the dwindling purchasing power of their fees until the system collapses to little or no transaction demand leading the first case above.

The problem as I see it is that the system is inherently unstable. Either the mining revenue collapses first or the purchasing power of the mining revenue collapses first. We now come to the next question. Can one create an adaptive blocksize limit formula that does not converge as time increases towards (1) or (2) above? My instinct tells me no, particularly since the network has no way to measure the key parameter namely the amount of fees collected per block due to out of bound payments to miners. Furthermore there have been many brilliant minds looking at this issue and they have not come up with a solution. Proving this negative, in a rigorous mathematical sense, is of course another matter entirely.

What the tail emission in Monero does is provide a stable anchor outside of the control of the miners on top of which an adaptive blocksize limit and a fee market can actually develop, by avoiding the instability above.

One final note. Why is this posted in the Monero speculation thread? The answer is very simple: Monero is the other crypto currency with the latter being not affected by a fixed blocksize limit above. In the collapsing valuation of (2) the valuation has to go somewhere and there a good possibility that Monero will capture some of this valuation.

The advantage that Monero currently has over virtually every POW coin and this includes Bitcoin, is that Monero has a current working solution to the scaling of blocksize question. One needs two things 1) Adaptive limits 2) A tail emission. Solving this problem without a tail emission is far from obvious, In fact I am not even convinced one can even create a viable fee market in the absence of an emission. There is a reason why there is so little progress with the blocksize debate in Bitcoin.

The house wins in the long run and the state also wins by taxing the house.

It uses a quadratic penalty function, so there is a penalty to the miner for an increase in the blocksize. The impact of this is to create a cost to increase the blocksize based on the loss of part of the block reward vs the increase in fees for the block.  It is explained in the Cryptonote whitepaper. https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf. The key is that for this to work there has to be an emission leading to a base reward. Monero has addressed this by having a minimum tail base reward of 0.3 XMR per block in perpetuity This add a small amount of inflation under 1% per year for ever. Other Cryptonote coins have not done this so once their regular emission runs out, the penalty becomes meaningless since it is based on the base emission, and  what you describe above is what would happen.

Edit: One needs both and adaptive blockszie and a minimum tail emission for this to work.

Good at least someone other than Monero is actualy dealing with long term scalability issue. By the way I am also of the opinion that there will be more than one successful coin; however dealing with the long term scalability issue is a must. If Dash deals with this issue then it will be a player.

It is more like a Litecoin copy, including my favorite the fixed blocksize limit.