Yes - it's primarily due to the limitations we'll place on ourselves if we only think of it as money. I am talking more from a technical perspective than an economic one, since my grounding in economic theory is admittedly shaky, and I know that the association with traditional money is unavoidable (hence the ISO 4217 compliance in the XMR symbol). At the same time, we don't want to limit ourselves and our thinking.

With regards to the "layperson" understanding it: once we start down the road of saying things like "digital cash" the layperson goes "oh, so like PayPal?" Then anything awesome like M-of-N multisig (which Monero supports in the protocol just not in the client yet) is completely foreign, because you keep having to force the analogy. The same problem exists if you use "just like gold and silver" in place of "store of value", because people have this preconceived notion that gold and silver have value because of scarcity and utility (when most of its value is artificial and market driven anyway). You'll also run into difficulty trying to apply the analogy with regards to Monero's untraceable and unlinkable nature.

I already replied to you here

I do find the comments post-logo to be funny: some people love it, some hate it, some think we're too corporate, some think we're not corporate enough. We're just going to carry on, then;)

One of our designers did a bunch of tweaking and switched to the paid-for version of Century Gothic (because of quality concerns on the free one) - thoughts on the changes that were made? Here: https://i.imgur.com/0ed1UIV.jpg

Good - the logo shouldn't strike you as money. Monero is not money. It's a store of value and a very private medium of exchange. The sooner we stop thinking about "money" in the traditional sense the better, as that thinking limits and retards our ability to innovate. And, at any rate, the arguments you make could equally be applied to Google - "The logo reminds me of a children's toy. In no way does it strike me as innovative or even a search engine. The Google search page doesn't have that hip web 2.0 feel. Overall Google's branding is very poor in my opinion."

In terms of the website, have you read this week's Monero Missives? I'm guessing you haven't yet - probably a good starting point before discussing the branding.

Lastly, we are not in control of exchanges or their adoption strategy. I will say this much: Blackcoin and Darkcoin are forked from Bitcoin. The amount of effort required by an exchange to add them is exactly 0. Monero requires a massive code change; it requires two daemons to operate (we are working on bundling this for exchanges) and it requires a vastly different RPC API. It more than likely requires a major change to the underlying database design, since payments are made to a single address with a different payment ID per-user. Watching for deposits is also challenging: the get_payments RPC API call needs to be polled for every payment ID instead of just hammering 'listreceivedbyaddress <min_confs> false' as one would for a Bitcoin-forked cryptocurrency.

This is why Monero can do things that the Bitcoin-forked cryptocurrencies can't do at all (or can't do cleanly and in a non-kludgy way), but it means that exchange pickup will be slow. Instead of viewing the Monero development timeline as you would view some Bitcoin-fork that has 99% of the work handed to it on a silver platter, view it instead as Bitcoin was in February, 2009, when it was nary a month old, but with the advantage of some network effect and peripheral infrastructure already in play. Ask yourself: what would you expect of Bitcoin in the beginning of 2009? If Monero succeeds it will not do so because of a slick website or a logo, it will be because it provides a unified user experience whilst delivering on the promise of being secure, private, and untraceable.

Monero should always be handled professionally. This is not a libertarian wet dream from our perspective; we are trying to build and create something that will allow for financial transactions that are secure, private, and untraceable. We do not define use-cases for the project, which means that everything should always be kept clean and above-board:)

lol - that's my wife's alma mater, top notch university:)

We consulted with:

- two independent groups of advertising executives
- a PR firm
- several groups of marketing resources
- UX designers
- graphic designers

Some of them we consulted on a professional (paid) basis, some over business dinners, and some just by tapping into acquaintances. We are a diverse core team, geographically scattered across the globe, and we used our connections and resources to make an informed decision. These domain-level experts all had various opinions about which of the potential logos they liked, and none of their choices were the ones I personally liked. But the common thread among these domain experts, from South Africa to Germany to France to Canada and the United States, was that this logo was in their top 3. It was literally the only logo they all liked enough from the wide selection of paid-for submissions.

Now, I'm not saying the decision making process is perfect, but both casually acquainted with and paid-for experts in this field agreed on the logo. We are thus confident that it is the right choice, and that the logo is interpretive enough that it can be adapted to suite any environment.

I think what we're observing here is our very own mini version of the Streisand Effect.

That's hilarious - those are Bitcoin and Bitcoin-fork conf values. They wouldn't be used or even picked up by Monero or Ducknote:)

Just donated to thank you for your excellent work:)

Two things I'd like to see, in order of importance, if you could be so kind:

1. A block time chart - a lot of people seem to think that the block time is jumping around, and having a chart to show it average out over time would be awesome

2. A publicly accessible API

More like what Bitcoin uses - Berkley DB or something. I don't think sqlite would be performant enough, but maybe worth a looksie when we have the time:)

I'll do it for 2 Monero!

I believe their business model is the same as Bitcoin's block reward - they want the share price to approach nil.

Rumour has it that Seedfund III will be subtitled "Zeno's Favourite Investment"

It's either a scam or an extremely inept operator. Which would make you sleep better at night?

It's run by Kumala.

You may know him from his other popular scam, Vircurex.

http://www.cryptoarticles.com/crypto-news/2014/3/24/vircurex-freezes-users-withdrawals-the-next-mt-gox

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=569037.0;all

He hasn't been around here since April 11th when he posted in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140700.0;all

It's irrelevant if it was in a different datacenter. "The same person" means "the same idiot that can't keep a VPS slice up and hot-swap RAID disks if they're being testy".

You're probably right - you are laughing at me. I'm ok with that. I have no problem with someone on your level laughing at me.

This is especially true when everyone else is laughing at you: http://bitcoinpete.com/2014/05/31/usagi-back-back-back-it-up-ayee/

You've posted in the wrong section - here is the lending section of the sub-forum: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=65.0

Generally speaking, an IPO includes a firm business plan (or at least the semblance that you know what you're doing), a singular and focused strategy, and less pictures of ninja turtles eating pizza.

Kenneth, your new altcoin is being pumped quite hard, all the best and I hope it succeeds: http://virtualminingcoin.org/

This would be your backup under your control, so in the event your primary system is destroyed (it was) and your automated backups are unavailable (they are) you have a manual backup from which to begin rebuilding. The "multiple flash drives" bit is merely to combat any one of them failing. The chances of what you encountered happening are statistically high (because you trusted backups to the same person doing your hosting), but you could have at least marginally circumvented that by having a backup 100% under your direct control. I fear that your inability to comprehend the fundamentals of "what is going on here" are indicative of your ability to grok incredibly basic fundamental principles. Doubling down on your stance doesn't really help your situation at all.

Whether he does or not is irrelevant - I do, at C-level at a listed company for several years, and everything he has said has been entirely valid. Delegation of authority does not mean you hand the job of backing up over to an external company. It means you or a trusted aide ensures you have fully controlled backups on your territory and THEN you additionally allow someone else to handle encrypted backups for a faster and smoother DRP.

Again, operating at your level means backing the wallet.dat up to a couple of flash drives, no need for any formal DRP or delegation of anything.