Your competition is with Verge - not with Monero. Like yourselves, Verge is another Johnny-come-lately that believes that IP obscuration is all that there is to privacy.

You're both wrong, but feel free to pump.

Great catch. This is promising.

Well, for heaven's sake hurry up. The rest of us are waiting

I still sometimes find myself astonished that Monero - Monero! - has yet to achieve a 1B dollar market cap.

Take a look this recent twitter thread and, in particular, Riccardo Spagni's response:

https://twitter.com/jtgrassie/status/894672365157834752

Obscuring one's IP address is only one aspect of privacy. Verge does nothing to obscure blockchain analysis. Verge does nothing that running bitcoin through a tor client can't do. The Kovri project (a Monero project that uses the i2P protocol) will soon be built into the Monero client - later this year, perhaps? The issue of obscuring IP addresses will then be redundant.

I'd be wary of any currency that pumps itself as hard as verge does. How well do they know their cryptography? They seem to be everywhere these days - desperate to pump their price up from $0.03.

If you need more info about Monero you could do worse than ponder this for a few minutes:

https://www.monero.how/monero-infographic

What problem?

Comcast had an outage - I think it was a fire at one of their data centers. Large parts of the north east USA were out for a while.

The forfeiture complaint issued by the justice dept re AlphaBay detailed almost 840,000 BTC passing through the AB's accounts between May 2015 and Feb 2017. As someone else pointed out, one might double that to account for the next two largest marketplaces in the DNM.

Thanks.

With the exit of Bitmixer (allegedly due to LE pressure) can anyone explain how Dash's private send (formerly dark send) differs from the way Bitmixer mixed coins? I'm not looking for a Dash bash, just an explanation so that I can see whether (if) it's similar. If it is, would it be reasonable to assume that the LE might frown upon it?

Can you explain the implications of this?

This is a comment from a recent reddit/monero thread that I think is well worth repeating here:

In the "nuclear war" between governments and blockchains, only the cockroach protocols will survive. -Ari Paul
For bitcoin to make it, it needs to be banned by a few governments and critiqued by policy makers. Otherwise it will fade. -Nassim Nicholas Taleb


Right now, the price of most cryptocurrencies is primarily speculation on their future potential. This is reflected in the extreme price volatility as investor confidence surges and recedes.
The only way POW blockchains can justify their very expensive existence is censorship resistant value transfer and sound digital money in highly hostile environments. In all other scenarios, Paypal's blockchain database works faster, cheaper, and is infinitely scalable. This is why both Taleb and Ari correctly identified that a cryptocurrency only offers lasting value if it can survive in extremely hostile environments.
"In the short term the market is a popularity contest; in the long term it is a weighing machine." - Warren Buffett
Right now, blockchains are in the popularity contest phase, where any scam can attract speculation. On a long enough timeline, only censorship resistant currencies that function as sound money will survive. It's possible that no POW blockchain is up to this task. With Ross Ulbricht in a cage for the rest of his life, and Alexandre Cazes dead in a Thai prison, how do you think Evan Duffield, Zooko Wilcox, and Vitalik Buterin will hold up when the pressure is applied?
Do you think a centralized bitcoin fork with mining, development, promotion and exchange controlled by a cartel in china is going to be the cockroach protocol that wins this war?
Eventually, fundamentals will come home to roost, and the weighting machine will determine the winner of the blockchain war... if there are any survivors.

Monero - The Cockroach Protocol.

Just one example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/6p1i8v/to_the_creator_of_the_next_dnm/

I was actually quite surprised at how big those numbers were. I'm inclined to agree more and more with aminorex that the DNM is going to be the most important market for Monero - at least in the early stages.

Any future DNM's are going to have to make Monero compulsory if they want to be taken seriously.

Well, in the absence of any response from Smooth, I'll take a shot.

On the plus side. Once the Bitcoin shitshow has concluded, I suspect we'll quickly see new highs for BTC. If Monero can maintain its price relative to BTC, we should see a nice rise for XMR.

Moreover, the coming HF, Multisig, Wallets, and slow tightening of emission, should all result in a good deal of sweetness and light for Monero. The major criticisms of Monero will have been nullified and further adoption looks likely.

On the minus side, the crypto market is clearly irrational. Indeed, it's better described as anti-rational. So the market is just as likely to shrug its collective shoulders, give Monero a pass, and move on to the next token.

Lastly, Monero has rarely failed to disappoint me when I least expected it, and surprised me at other times. The next few months will likely be no different.

In summary, it's a crap shoot.

What are you talking about?

Any opinion on where we're headed over the next few months?

You know, I can't ever recall Smooth giving an out-and-out speculative opinion on Monero in this thread. I would be very interested in what he had to say.

Smooth - What is your opinion on Monero's price between now and Christmas? (With the clear understanding that this is an opinion and not investment advice).

I'm sure he knows that. It was an opinion, not a prohibition. We're all just talking here.

You're right, and I don't disagree. But at what point do we stop being a 'community' and start being a global currency? Because it might be the case that we have to leave one behind - or, at least, aspects of it - in order to become the other.