Anonymity hype Philosophy & Warning of the ongoing Monero pump

[regexlove]

1. On anonymity hype:

As Richard Stallman said,
1.  You may want to support anonymity of most payers/donators generally,
    but you may not want to specifically supporting anonymity of receivers/services, including evil ones/gun sellers/....

2. Most of the technical foundations of blockchains aren't all new.    
   Important are the social developments.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ_3MKomQzY#t=220

Transparency VS Anonymity
If society had to chose one it would keep Transparency.
but there is no Transparency VS Anonymity  knock-out

(Neither   Direct democracy VS 'blockchain immutability'  to make another example)

Each thing exists to some degree anyway. Bitcoin supports annoymity as far as you an fun an account anonymously.
We (society) have to go for the best/safest design to define their scope and co-existence responsibly.
There is always advantages/convenience to be unlocked, yet more importantly we do not want to enable dangers.

- If something represents anonymity only in exchange for transparency that does not represent what supporters of anonymity generally meant,
 and it will not be used widely, when most people and legal behavior will stay out for good and all remaining users may be under general suspicion .

(Similarly:  If something represents 'blockchain immutability' in exchange for direct democracy, then it also does not represent the pure original point/relevant, but much rather the specific trade-off to favor immutability against direct democracy.)

But of course you actually want to come up with a solution carefully sorting out the safest combination of everything relevant

 2. Beware of the ongoing Monero pump.  

-Trollbox calls for buying or selling are more often false than true.  
-When shortsqueezes happen the market is in perpetual motion up for a short time but can crash any moment and the risk/reward ratio is worst.  Every money you throw on it may end in the pumper's pocket. They may also control spikes up and down in interest rates and thus trigger waves of waiting orders.

-Once people calm and stop falling for the hysteria,  the order book and trading volume vanish ( alone with the sneaky pump&dumping opportunity they triggered),
but before that they are not afraid to trade their >= Bitcoins in circles, wasting tons of fees,  raising irrational FEAR and FOMO equally.

-Other cryptonote based currencies did not jump a lot

- I correctly alerted several pumps already:
 Especially Monero and Factom pumping on the same day happend before
 (and was noway sustainable)

[Febo]

XMR coins at 0.006 BTC are sadly long time history my friend.

[regexlove]

it can sadly take some time to go down again, if short squeezed people can not recover their positions and until additionally people notice the price.
Yet the real order book is much thinner.  (The one i drew may be too big/high still).  
Most of the volume should be assumed to be fake. The real market has been taken hostage for these days.
- Later, when buy walls get eaten, then they run.  Logically this may be the only time in the process where the pumpers get afraid.

[regexlove]

.

[goin2mars.]

*simulated hysteria

[regexlove]

yes, let's hope it is mainly the pump&dumper selling to themselves and not trying as hard next time.
But of course they chose  some real event with presence of buyers and most people are not immune against FOMO and fear,
the real problem starts at latest when manipulation reaches the level of squeezing people into forced liquidation.

[dinofelis]

Total anonymity is necessary in order for distributed warfare to become possible financially.
Distributed warfare will be an aspect of the evolution for machines to take over without us humans noticing in the beginning.  We have to organize the Singularity with anonymity, otherwise people will notice too quickly and be able to stop it.

[pandher]

Monero also has on demand transparency via view key

Did you just waste thread space?

[Divinespark]

Any thoughts on whether the Monero pumping is just being set up to set up an exit for whales eyeing Z-cash as the next thing?

[jacaf01]

Any thoughts on whether the Monero pumping is just being set up to set up an exit for whales eyeing Z-cash as the next thing?

Nice theory, I believe alot of people will be burnt by the recent pump of Dash and Monero which is been fueled by the assumption that both can reach parity. Zcash is one to watch out for due to its fundamentals but some have argued that there is nothing new in Zcash that is not in Moreno. Lets play the waiting game

[bbc.reporter]

Why is it that when a coin is going up substantially there is always someone in the forum who will question it and post something bad sometimes it is always fud. Would it be more profitable for everyone to also buy and see where it goes and how high? I cannot get these people sometimes.

[Divinespark]

Has anybody seen a good, well-argued critique of Z-Cash that they can link to?
I like what  I have seen of Z-Cash so far, but want to be sure that i have also absorbed dissenting views

[dinofelis]

Has anybody seen a good, well-argued critique of Z-Cash that they can link to?
I like what  I have seen of Z-Cash so far, but want to be sure that i have also absorbed dissenting views

I found this as a good, critical view:
http://weuse.cash/2016/06/09/btc-xmr-zcash/

There are others.  I'm not totally out of it myself, but I also have my reserves for zcash, in the sense that I wonder what it brings in over monero.  I know what it brings: *total* mixing with the entire user base, instead of a randomly selected subset.  That, in itself, is good.  However, the price, cryptographically to pay, seems not in balance.  If it is really true that not every transaction is automatically anonymized (which I think is true, but I'm not sure yet) then I would say: forget about it immediately.  Anonymity must be automatic and passive, or you render those using it suspect.  If, on the other hand, there is automatic anonymity for every transaction, then one should look at the trade-off on one hand of this increased anonymity set with all the cryptographic problems that come with it, and the fact that the company is assigning itself 10% of the total amount of coins (how can the company do that ?).  The trusted setup is a risky affair, but it could be solved if they wouldn't just take a few 10 personalities, but rather a million people or so.

[SmirkinPepe]

1. All those trying to insert (socialist) morality discussion into a financial value transfer/storage system should be disregarded immediately.
2. Dark market money is one of the only proven real world non-speculative use cases for bitcoin and other crypto.

That being said, does anyone have some numbers on Alphabay users / size of the markets? Thanks.

[regexlove]

SmirkinPepe, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaBay
2.  Crypto is young. The most positive (biggest/most relevant) part yet may (hopefully) be (stay)
the open source development processes!  
(Dark use is a confirmation of use of a certain size just as much as it scares people away for good
- Bitcoin is in fact accepted by many big, transparent/legal services)

1. Its Sounds as if you'd want to relativize/justify all bad parts and disregard morality and social processes as well? Assuming "money/world is chaos(including evil) anyway" discourages those thinking about improvements, like finding a better combination of privacy and transparency/consensus aspects or anything.
Given the choice of a currency, with no other incentive, people do opt for the one with more fair and positive uses rather than the opposite, don't they?;

[r0ach]

Am I the only one that feels like the original post was not written in English?

[regexlove]

not a native speaker; yet written down in English only. Any correction appreciated

[btcxyzzz]

Clearly it's not a pump but market adoption. And you're BTC butthurt doing some babbling here...

[regexlove]

no need to polarize.  Most short time price spikes are obviously both, not sustainable and also waste of nerves or money to a majority of participants (besides maybe those who own enough to control/manipulate a market)   The events named triggers of pumps were often expectable and represent a many times smaller real effect/relevance sometimes even in opposite direction. So instead you could try to imagine, estimate, count together expectable real positive&negative effects on the price in x month through an event (example: Alphabay accepting Monero) and come up with a rational  estimate of +/-x $ % or million in market cap

[raphma]

Clearly it's not a pump but market adoption. And you're BTC butthurt doing some babbling here...

if it was going up, it was a pump.... i think you were trying to say "it's not a fake pump". and i agree with that but you need to understand that 100% in  ONE day isnt healthy and it was clear to any analist xmr were going back to 600~750 área.

i've lost the first pump but i bought at 750 today and im sure xmr will surpass 0.02 till december.