This case has to be made to FINCen by someone who has a bona fide intent to set up a Darkcoin masternode.

Edit: The case for Darkcoin masternodes being MSB is actually very simple. The facilitate the exchange of one kind of DRK (un mixed) for another kind of DRK (mixed). This process adds value to the DRK of holder. The masternode is compensated for this service. So they are exchanging / converting money.

Exactly there are far more banks in the world than Darkcoin masternodes. Furthermore just as in banking case there are minimum capital requirements to set up a Darkcoin masternode.

Darkcoin's Achilles heel remains the centralization inherent in the masternodes. It may come down to whether FINCen in the United States rules that the masternodes are an MSB or not. In reality all it takes is a bona fide intent to set up a Darkcoin masternode and the a request for a ruling to FINCen as indicated here http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/1010.711. My take is that the result of such a ruling would be either very bearish (masternodes are MSBs) or very bullish (masternodes are not MSBs) for Darkcoin.

This baby boomer does not agree. In particular when it comes to this quote: If there is one valuable piece of financial advice one can glean form this article for a millennial is to Jailbreak all your iDevices!. A little history is in order here. I started buying Bitcoin in late 2011 / 2012 when the Apple ban was in full force. In fact in response to the Apple ban, during part of 2012, my saving for retirement strategy consisted in part to: 1) Price out an iPad. 2) Buy an equivalent amount of Bitcoin each month. The price during late 2011 and early 2012 was in the 2 USD to 6 USD range. Since Apple lifted its ban in early 2014 the price of a Bitcoin has ranged in to 200 USD to 600 USD range save for a short spike downward into the 160 range. The loyal iSheep who played by Apple's rules, and waited for Apple's permission to buy Bitcoin, were therefore destined to pay 100x what paid I paid for the same asset.

The lesson here is that true innovation will not occur on a platform where one has to get permission to innovate. If one waits for permission then the real opportunity will be lost. Yes there are real sharks here, and one way to ensure that one gets eaten alive by them is to stay in Apple's walled garden. If Apple or a Soviet style dictatorship bans something, it may actually be a great opportunity to buy. One can then wait until the iSheep are given permission to buy and then sell them a small quantity at a 100x markup. After all the iSheep are meant to be fleeced.

I would avoid Paycoin like the plague. My suggestion here is research research research first, before investing.

There are two scenarios:

1) An ICANN .bit registration that ignores Namecoin. This would actually have little impact on Namecoin's .bit functionality, but would create an ICANN TLD that does not resolve in 100% of all computers. In the fierce competition among ICANN domain registries this could prove a significant disadvantage. After all why would I register the ICANN .bit when there are hundreds of ICANN extensions that do not have this issue?
The biggest looser here could actually be the ICANN .bit registry.

2) An ICANN .bit registration that requires as a condition of the the ICANN .bit registration control of the Namecoin .bit registration. One can have as a provision of the ICANN registration that if the ICANN domain is seized legally without a legal seizure of the Namecoin registration then the ICANN .bit is simply disabled. This could be very interesting. We must keep in mind that no consent on the Namecoin network / community is needed to do this.

Edit: There is no need for *bit etc. Just have the Namecoin software override the ICANN root for .bit

I gave my theory in this post https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=946712.msg10378311#msg10378311 Basically the typical trading behaviour of a very weak hand in a mature bear market.

This is the classic behaviour of a weak hand at or near the bottom of a bear market. Ethereum is a very weak hand. Why?

They raise close to 30,000 XBT when XBT is trading around 500 USD.
The expenses of the project are highly correlated to USD, and CHF and not to XBT
They promise their investors they will hedge the XBT/USD or XBT/CHF currency risk. Instead they speculate on the XBT/USD rate. This is a big no no
When the XBT/USD rate reaches the low 300s serious selling begins
When the XBT/USD reaches the low 200s and falls below 200 for a while PANIC SELL!!!!

This model implies that we are at or close to a low comparable to that of November 2011.

Because Dogecoin has the same or worse fixed blocksize limitation issue as Bitcoin. Same problem with Litecoin, Namecoin, Darkcoin, Peercoin the list goes on. How far down the list does one have to go to find a proof of work coin that that is not a Cryptonote and is not plagued by this issue. What I find really interesting is that none of the close Bitcoin clones have jumped on the opportunity of dealing with the fixed  blocksize limit issue. Doge and LTC being the most obvious examples.

Edit: Peercoin is proof of stake and still has this blocksize limitation!

A sale of 5000 XBT that coincided with a 5000 XBT drop in the Ethereum address. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=946424.0. This is one motivated seller that cannot wait for a turnaround in the XBT/USD rate, so they will sell close to or at the bottom.

Traditional cash works very well for in person transactions. It is when transacting over the Internet where the buyer and seller are thousands of km apart that one has to use a crypto currency to get any kind of privacy / fungibility / anonymity.  It is in the latter situation where Monero with ring signatures built right into the protocol really shines.

One should identify coins that are not affected by the Bitcoin 1 MB limit / 20 MB fork issue, since this is the main message of the OP's post. When it comes to POW coins the obvious candidates are the Cryptonotes starting of course with Monero. By the way I found out about Monero totally by accident, when I came across this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=624223.0, while researching the 1MB blocksize limit in Bitcoin. This is an issue that has concerned me for a long time, going back to 2012 / 2013. 

If there is a major fiasco in Bitcoin involving the 1 MB limit / 20 MB fork issue there is a very good chance that Monero would benefit significantly price wise. Of course there are other alt-coins that are also not affected. I would be interested to see which other proof of work alt-coins do not have a baked in blocksize limit that prevent the coin from scaling regardless of any improvements in technology. I am not a fan of proof of stake, but I do recognize that others are, so again identifying those proof of stake coins that are not so impacted would also be useful.

What is important here is not the absolute volume number but the ratio of the volume to capitalization rate. Furthermore this needs to be looked at during both bull and bear markets in the coin. a Healthy ratio is above 1% and is a market indicator of a widely distributed actively traded coin. Take DRK, BCN, and XMR for example

10    Darkcoin DRK    $ 9,435,633    $ 1.85                       5,099,019 DRK    $ 64,759    3.55 %     vol/cap = 0.69% fair
19    Bytecoin BCN    $ 1,959,401    $ 0.000012    169,166,153,197 BCN    $ 5,747    24.74 %   vol/cap = 0.29% poor
20    Monero XMR    $ 1,783,404    $ 0.293232               6,081,887 XMR    $ 19,525    4.67 %     vol/cap = 1.09% good

I have seen BCN's volume/cap well under 0.10%. This kind low volume/cap is indicative of a coin where most of the coins are held by insiders, massive pre/ninja/insta mines etc. It is also very common in scammy POS coins.

Even Ripple falls into this trap in a big way

2    Ripple XRP    $ 417,857,061    $ 0.013489    30,978,075,200 XRP *    $ 682,874    3.57 %  vol/cap = 0.16% very poor.
Yes it is worse than BCN, under this market snapshot, when it comes to control by a group of insiders.

Edit:

18   SuperNET Unity    $ 2,060,489    $ 2.52    816,061 UNITY *    $ 2,006    1.96 %   vol/cap = 0.097%  extremely poor. Ouch!

Boolberry BBR another Cryptonote is part of SuperNET. Remember Boolberry?

127    Boolberry BBR    $ 58,121    $ 0.019412    2,994,083    $ 127    -0.60 %    4.96 %    4.88 % vol/cap = 0.218% poor

Maybe BCN will overtake UNITY

But there is still the horribly low trading volume relative to market cap that has plagued BCN since its creation, and I am not even taking into account any claims of fake BCN trading volume that others have made, such as in this response to one my of my posts. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg10313811#msg10313811. Seriously the low trading volume relative to market cap of BCN is a red flag to anyone making an objective analysis of BCN, and serves to provide independent market confirmation of the allegations made in this thread; https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.0.

By the way it is not just XMR that BCN had to be concerned about here. Another Cryptonote, Darknote XDN also beats BCN in the volume game.

38    DarkNote XDN    $ 472,737    $ 0.000069    6,816,150,107 XDN    $ 8,217    -3.96 %

We must keep in mind here that the government has both the sending and receiving computers and the corresponding secret keys for both the sending and receiving wallets. They are trying in this situation to link the coins that were sent from the SR servers to the coins in the defendant's computer. My thought is that replacing XBT with XMR would not help the defendant in this situation since in the XMR case the government would still be able to use the corresponding view keys to provide evidence of the transactions to the court. This is actually quite properly by design.

Openalias can be used with Bitcoin (XBT). It also supports both Namecoin DNS (.bit etc) and ICANN DNS (.com etc)

The reality of this debate is that we need to step back and consider the impact of technological change over a period of say 25 years, 50 years, 75 years, 100 years etc.

Consider the early credit cards issued by Diner's Club and American Express in the early 1950s. The data processing technology of the time was tabulating machines and punch cards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine This technology was invented in the 1890s and marketed for the most part by IBM.  Does anyone seriously believe that the transaction volumes of Visa and MasterCard today could be supported using 70 year old data processing technology? Limiting Bitcoin's scalability today based on recent technology is equivalent to limiting the total number of credit card transactions to the data processing capabilities of tabulating machines and punch cards in 1945.

Suffice to say I voted in support of Gavin's proposal, but I must add the caveat that it does not go far enough! By the way it was possible to send 1 MB of data over the telegraph network in 1913, if one had the finances of J. P. Morgan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Morgan

Pirateat40 did it when Bitcoin was smaller than many of today’s POS coins. I do agree that one does need a certain amount of maturity in the coin for a significant debt market to develop. It is for this reason that we have not yet seen this kind of attack on POS coins. At the other end of the spectrum we see the failings of the fiat currency system in particular the collapse of 2008. This again was driven by the same issue: Stake with little or negative exposure. So if instead of pirateat40 one can consider the Conrad Black attack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Black Pirateat40 and Conrad Black have one thing in common: Legal problems with the United States government.

It is?

20    Monero     XMR    $ 1,837,481    $ 0.304616    6,032,122             $ 17,053     4.06 %    4.75 %    -3.58 %
21    Bytecoin    BCN    $ 1,657,071    $ 0.000010    169,036,273,692    $ 6,988    -0.12 %    23.58 %    -26.68 %

http://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/