In the case of Poloniex it is pure FUD since they are registered as an MSB with registration number: 31000055869515.  Go to https://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/msbstateselector.html and search for the registration number or for Poloniex under legal name.

Edit: Money Transmitter Licenses in the US are a state requirement. So it is quite possible Poloniex are not compliant in one, more or all states.

The simplest solution is to get rid of Windows and use GNU/Linux instead. Do not run Wine on your main GNU/Linux computer.  If one needs Windows for a particular application put it in a virtual machine and use it only for that application. Alternatively use a second version of GNU/Linux in a virtual machine and run wine in the VM. It is not just high risk activities a simple email can easily infect a Windows computer.

As for high risk activities such as surfing porn I would suggest a separate GNU/Linux machine that is not on your network.  One can also use a live CD/DVD not a USB in that way none of the malware will be saved.  Also consider Tor. For Windows gaming use a separate computer for that purpose.

I would use a lot caution when making this of kind long term technical analysis on a fair launch POW crypto currency such as Monero. This type of analysis makes sense for stocks where price is directly linked to market capitalization but can easily fail in first years of Monero because one has to take into account the emitted coins since Monero was trading in the 0.004 - 0.005 range in the summer of 2014. To get an idea of this divergence take a look at the following chart. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/#charts. The current market cap is 3x what it was at the peak in July 2014. If we used the then price of 0.00614 and the then number of XMR to support the current market cap one would need a price of 0.0184. This would be the equivalent if Monero was a stock.

My take is that as a rough indicator one could argue that a support or resistance point from the summer of 2014 is less significant by a factor of  3.  Or to put it another way many of the "bagholders" from the summer of 2014 had many opportunities to average down, putting their average cost well below 0.003 and their positions in the black. This kind of opportunity would not have been presented itself to the same degree with a stock with a fixed number of shares.

Yes the circumstances are very different and this is fast becoming a serious problem for BItcoin.

The difference is that it is very easy to hard fork a cypto currency when the community is still small and there are no economic interests adversely impacted by the hard fork. As a coin matures it should be design be very difficult or impossible to hard fork if the hard fork has an adverse impact on existing economic interests. The problem that Bitcoin faces is that it needs to hard fork in order to scale, while at the same time it may be already too late for a hard fork that may have adverse economic impacts on members of the community. The miners trapped behind the Great Firewall of China may be a good example of this kind of economic interest.

There is a very critical lesson here for alt-coin developers.

Oh please you mean to say that reversing those changes is not a hard fork. Of course it is a hard fork. By your same argument one can introduce a 32 MB blocksize limit after say block 1000000 and claim it is not a "hard fork"

Placing a buy wall slightly above market, creating a combination taker / maker order, is a very effective way for someone to buy a substantial position at market with minimal slippage. This is what I suspect our 40K XMR buyer just did.

Edit: The idea is accepting that your order will move the market while at the same time minimizing slippage.

The 1 MB maximum blocksize limit was added,, I believe in 2010, via a hard fork.

Edit: The previous effective blocksize limit was 32 MB.

Replace SEC with FinCEN and I will agree with you.

Edit: Many ICOs are not securities; however the fact that they are not securities does not make them legal.

Virtually all ICOs become illegal in the United States because the administrator does not register as an MSB with FinCEN within the required time period. This is not about "banning" it really should be about enforcement of existing laws.

My take is that enforcement will come but it will take some time as government agencies are not known for moving fast.

I value the speculator because speculators provide liquidity and accept risk. A highly liquid market is important so that a vibrant economy can develop and merchants can accept Monero. In many markets speculators provide a very valuable service by taking on the market risk. This allows those engage in productive activities to hedge their positions. One of the strong aspects of Monero is that it is a very liquid coin for its size, and we can thank speculators and margin traders in part for that.

RingCT will take care of this.

Actually the more interesting question is how does slapper know who owns what amount of XMR?

The speed of light is not the limiting constant here. The speed of electromagnetic energy traveling down a telegraph line in say 1856 is actually comparable to the speed light in a fiber optic cable today. The bandwidth is however very different.

Edit: The bandwidth of a carrier pigeon has increased conservatively by a factor of 10¹⁰ in the last 40 years. The speed at which the carrier pigeon flies has not changed.

I see crypto currencies today are where credit cards were 60 years ago. I am sure many people in 1956 could not envision a credit card network processing 10s of thousands of transactions per second using punched cards and tabulating machines. They designed credit card and payment card business models around high value transactions where the retailer had very large margins. The dominant Credit Card networks of the day were Diner's Club and American Express.  Who are the dominant Credit Card networks today?

Bitcoin is heading with the above model to becoming the Diner's Club of crypto currency, while Monero at least has a chance of becoming the VISA of crypto currency.

By the way 10K USD and above is the kind of money where the existing banking system actually starts to become very competitive when it comes to transferring money internationally.

Bitcoin cannot scale, until the fixed blocksize issue is fixed. Off-chain solutions in Bitcoin will also require massive increases in the blocksize. Monero has a currently working solution for main chain scaling by using adaptive blocksize limits and a tail emission.  As for SPV implementations they serve to allow for the use of Bitcoin on devices with limited capabilities such as certain mobile devices. SPV does not solve the fundamental issue with Bitcoin scaling in any meaningful way.  https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security

I would not call it petty, and I do not have a "moral" problem with it. It is just in this case I find it extremely risky.  

To each their own, but personally I do not like the risk to reward ratio of financing Monero short positions that use Dash for example as collateral. Nothing against Dash, I would feel the same about a Dash short position that uses Monero as collateral. The risk of a double whammy here can be very high.

Seriously Monero has gone up over 400% in a period of 2.5 months and one can reach the above conclusion over a 25% correction? The reality is that a correction is in many cases healthy for the longevity of a bull market. This applies to any asset not just crypto currencies.
Maybe what the market is looking for here is for more bears to get deeper into margin in order to set up a good short squeeze. As I have indicated before a short squeeze involving crypto currencies can get real ugly real fast, which is why taking delivery and sitting back and watching this unravel is my preferred course of action.

Edit: I have said this before and will say it again. The most effective way to squeeze the shorts to the wall is to take delivery and wait.

This assumes that the Apple vs FBI dispute is actually about encryption which it is not. It is actually about protecting Apple's DRM and Apple's Orwellian business model. The FBI would be content with just  two things 1) The source code to IOS and 2) The ability to install software on an iPhone without having to get Apple's permission. This would make the encryption equivalent to say GNU Privacy Guard the software that Edward Snowden used for his leaks. Of course in order for the encryption to be secure one has to use a strong password. In the Apple vs FBI case, the FBI has reason to believe that the terrorist in question used a very weak password. This is like trying to crack a Bitcoin wallet "secured" with a 4 digit number. So the dispute is actually about DRM rather than encryption.

The Apple DRM that is currently inhibiting an anti terrorism investigation where the government has dotted all the legal i's and crossed all the legal t's is the very same DRM that Apple used used to censor Bitcoin from 2009 to 2014.

Part of the issue I see here is the focus on an "event", while ignoring a chronic problem that will over time take down both Bitcoin and Litecoin as well many other alt-coins. I am talking of course of the fixed blocksize issue and the lack of a viable fee market that will at the same time allow for scaling of the blockchain. The one solution to this problem that exists requires both an adaptive blocksize limit and a tail emission: Monero and Aeon. Dogecoin has a partial solution in that it has the hardest part of the problem solved (from a social covenant perspective) namely the tail emission. One could replace the tail emission with demurrage so one can argue that Freicoin also has a partial solution to this issue. In reality if one looks at the market capitalizations Monero is the most viable Bitcoin backup followed by Dogecoin.

Which is has a higher risk of death in the long run: A twenty year old who breaks his leg more than once and walks around in crutches for a few months after each injury or a twenty year old who is exposed to asbestos and catches a cancer that has no symptoms for 25 years and then kills him? Now picture the position of a life insurance company. If one is writing a 5 year short term life insurance the one exposed to asbestos is the lowest risk since the policy will be long expired before the cancer manifests any symptoms; however if one is writing a whole life policy to last a lifetime it is the injury prone 20 year old that is the lowest risk since the certain mortality at age 45 will cost the life insurance company more.