rpietila Altcoin Observer

[Melbustus]

I am not doubting the network effect laws. I am doubting the 'Monero is strongest' part.

Being that Monero was out first (excluding BCN for obvious reasons) and that it has the highest market-cap and highest trading volume, I don't think you can empirically argue that it's not currently strongest.

Although I like the name, the name is best of them all. Some Hero members support is also good. But this race has just started. Bitcoin had a few years of network effect before others started to race with it. CN coins all begin at the same time, excluding Bytecoin for obvious reasons. Hence, the outcome is unclear.

As I stated, I agree that we're very early with CN coins (anon coins in general, actually), and that the network effect is not strong enough to make continued superior market strength of XMR an asymptotic conclusion. But if I had to bet 50/50, it's obvious what to pick. Would I be super surprised if another CN overtook in the next couple months? No... But I'm going to put support where I see existing strength because that has the highest expectation of success.

Let's not confuse probability with certainty; I feel like you're taking my probabilistic arguments as "this *will* happen, or that *can't* happen"...

[devphp]

Being that Monero was out first...

Hm, you really believe a couple of weeks is a serious advantage? Anyway, it's all new, let's just wait and see. Yes, it's currently strongest.

[Melbustus]

Being that Monero was out first...

Hm, you really believe a couple of weeks is a serious advantage? Anyway, it's all new, let's just wait and see.

Right now it's obviously proven enough to tip favor, yes...which gets the ball rolling. Indeed, we shall have to wait and see if that continues longer-term. Again, if I had to bet 50/50... At 100:1, I don't know. Allocate according to your own EV estimates.

[darkota]

Bytecoin was premined, over 85% of its 160billion total coin supply was mined by a few people.

Boolberry was instamined BADLY, most likely over 20% since a guy with a private gpu miner was making 7k boolberry a day for quite some time and its max number of coins is only 18milion. Some guy using a private gpu miner was getting 7,000 Boolberry per day(14 btc per day), now he gets 2,000 Boolberry per day(1 btc per day) That's a shit ton of bitcoins worth of boolberry he Instamines Every Day. I saw a 80,000 boolberry sell order 3 days ago on poloniex..I wouldn't be surprise if he owned more than 20%of all boolberries ever created

[Roy Badami]

Have you noticed all the Hero members in this thread voicing support for Monero? How many people with activity over 500 do you see in other alt threads?

It's not nothing that the people who saw the intellectual argument for bitcoin *early*, and bootstrapped it, are getting behind another coin....many of us for the first time.

Interesting.  I hadn't noticed that was the case more widely.  I'm not a hero member myself but I've been a Bitcoiner since mid-2012 and XMR is my first altcoin investment.  Risto's support for XMR was a big factor in that.  (I still don't know to what extent Risto's success with Bitcoin has been luck and what has been skill - I doubt anyone, even Risto himself, can know for sure - but I certainly read his opinions with interest.)

I had considered diversifying a little into alts a while back (LTC, DOGE, PPC) but thought better of it.  XMR is the first alt I actually bought (I also have some XRP, but I got that free in a giveaway).

roy

[aminorex]

To be fair, Zerocoin/cash is the other potential here. But given that it doesn't actually exist in the wild, and CryptoNote does, it's seeming likely that the network effect will materialize around a CN coin, probably Monero. As long as CN proves "good enough", it probably wins.

Agreed. (But personally, I would not buy coins from a trusted mint.  It's just not physically possible to prove the secret seed is not retained somewhere.  And the motivation for cheating is potentially so enormous, that no level of human trust suffices.  The only game grounds for thinking the key would not be retained is the notion that Green would believe that the possibility of discovery would damage him so badly that it offset the potential upside of defecting. I'm not going to let my treasure depend on my estimate of someone else's belief state.)

[rpietila]

I am not doubting the network effect laws. I am doubting the 'Monero is strongest' part. Although I like the name, the name is best of them all. Some Hero members support is also good. But this race has just started. Bitcoin had a few years of network effect before others started to race with it. CN coins all begin at the same time, excluding Bytecoin for obvious reasons. Hence, the outcome is unclear.

I think some of those hero members are trying to make it seem like a foregone conclusion that XMR is going to be the winner because they have already invested in it. BBR started just a few weeks later and has some nice innovation and arguably the most knowledgeable cryptonote dev in Crypto Zoidberg.

It is nice to have a good dev, (and we also have a good dev team in XMR), but it is the Hero members alone who can "fish" for more hero members to join, and others will follow. The hero members don't invest or promote junk. XMR has a disproportionate large number of hero members supporting it, and this exactly is the network effect that is hard to overcome.

[celestio]

I am not doubting the network effect laws. I am doubting the 'Monero is strongest' part. Although I like the name, the name is best of them all. Some Hero members support is also good. But this race has just started. Bitcoin had a few years of network effect before others started to race with it. CN coins all begin at the same time, excluding Bytecoin for obvious reasons. Hence, the outcome is unclear.

I think some of those hero members are trying to make it seem like a foregone conclusion that XMR is going to be the winner because they have already invested in it. BBR started just a few weeks later and has some nice innovation and arguably the most knowledgeable cryptonote dev in Crypto Zoidberg.

It is nice to have a good dev, (and we also have a good dev team in XMR), but it is the Hero members alone who can "fish" for more hero members to join, and others will follow. The hero members don't invest or promote junk. XMR has a disproportionate large number of hero members supporting it, and this exactly is the network effect that is hard to overcome.

It will also have a lot more of Hero members and others alike supporting it in the time to come. 

[shmadz]

I am not doubting the network effect laws. I am doubting the 'Monero is strongest' part. Although I like the name, the name is best of them all. Some Hero members support is also good. But this race has just started. Bitcoin had a few years of network effect before others started to race with it. CN coins all begin at the same time, excluding Bytecoin for obvious reasons. Hence, the outcome is unclear.

I think some of those hero members are trying to make it seem like a foregone conclusion that XMR is going to be the winner because they have already invested in it. BBR started just a few weeks later and has some nice innovation and arguably the most knowledgeable cryptonote dev in Crypto Zoidberg.

It is nice to have a good dev, (and we also have a good dev team in XMR), but it is the Hero members alone who can "fish" for more hero members to join, and others will follow. The hero members don't invest or promote junk. XMR has a disproportionate large number of hero members supporting it, and this exactly is the network effect that is hard to overcome.

It will also have a lot more of Hero members and others alike supporting it in the time to come.  

I personally am at least one example of this phenomenon. The only reason I even looked at XMR was because a hero member mentioned it in Adam's thread. I spent about a week looking into it and then I tossed a couple bitcoins at it.

Thank you very much animorex for bringing XMR and this thread to my attention btw.  

 (*off-topic: also hoping the monkey is still loving silver?*)

[aminorex]

(*off-topic: also hoping the monkey is still loving silver?*)

monkey says there should be a silver correction on a daily chart, so sell some and buy back cheaper, or sell some short-dated calls if you are using paper silver, but still loves it on a weekly chart.

also, please observe that i am no hero, merely a sr.

[Melbustus]

...
It will also have a lot more of Hero members and others alike supporting it in the time to come.  

I personally am at least one example of this phenomenon. The only reason I even looked at XMR was because a hero member mentioned it in Adam's thread. I spent about a week looking into it ...
...

Yup, me too.

I think many of us have been thinking about alts for almost 3 years now, and have concluded that no alt should have much long-run value unless it has *meaningful* technical differentiation versus bitcoin (and such that bitcoin is *not* likely to just incorporate it itself). The only options which really came along were NMC (which is not really intended as an everyday currency) and PPC (and PoS has potential issues)...

And to make matters worse, the most visible alts were stuff like litecoin and other meaningless tweak/clone coins. Plus the outright scam coins. I've long considered it a downright embarrassment to the ecosystem that some of these coins have attained non-trivial value. I get in arguments with guys like Jim Rickards and Peter Schiff and it's a real pain to convince them about bitcoin in general because they (somewhat rightly) can't get over the scarcity argument when clone-alts have clearly attained non trivial market value. I have to fall back on a few points in these args:
1) The alt space is theoretically a fertile experimental ground, which probably results, eventually, in some innovations which bitcoin incorporates.
2) The alt space's net market cap seems to hover a little under 10% of bitcoin's market-cap, and new coins generally just suck market-cap from LTC.
3) In the long run, the dynamic was likely to settle to 3 or 4 coins that meaningfully filled different near mutually-exclusive niches as the ecosystem (and its players' economic understanding) matured. And furthermore that the market leader retains its position due to network-effect/history/inertia (much like gold vs silver).

Also over time it became more clear that a fully anonymous coin would probably be the first alt that deserved real attention, and which would potentially unseat LTC as the #2. I was personally interested in what Zerocoin would turn into (still am, actually) and had said to myself that I'd seriously consider taking a position if the tech implementation looked solid.

And then CryptoNote just shows up out of nowhere, looking very much like the first viable implementation of a functionally anonymous coin. I think it's potentially unleashing demand from people like me who've been thinking about these dynamics for years, but never saw much value in the options that were out there.

A CN coin unseating LTC, or even just surpassing all the other trash, would be a nice validation of free-market dynamics. We are nearing that testing phase. There simply hasn't been the innovation until now, which let the clone coins live untested. Now we'll see how rationally the free market works.

[aminorex]

...

Nice summary.  I suggest some points which you may find it useful to take up when in discourse with the likes of Rickards or Schiff.

I don't like the characterization of the tendency of currency to monopoly to be characterized as network effect, although in a strong sense it is true.  I prefer to think of it in terms of liquidity and survival of the fittest, where the fitness function is some possibly complex function which is monotonic in two critical factors:

Liquidity absolutely abhors any friction or variation in efficiency of capital flow.  The points where such frictions occur define the boundaries of a market.  Whoever establishes the broadest scope of uniformly locally low friction flow is the liquidity provider, the natural monopoly of liquidity, within the domain of uniform locally low friction.  Now this is a multi-objective optimization process, which makes it a little more complicated, but the degree of friction within the locale and the bread of scope of the locale in which a liquidity provider operates (the market denominated in that currency) may be combined in some fitness function which is monotonic in each of those terms.  The details of the function are important only to making quantitative predictions about flows.  The qualitatively important part is the monotonicity, from which we can reason qualitatively but soundly about the general case.

Anyhow, the point I wanted to make, which I have made before, is that transparent global instant liquidity is a natural monopoly, and dark global instant liquidity is a natural monopoly, because there are enormous utility barriers to a large subset of capital flows at the boundary between these two functional domains.  I am not even certain which of the two is larger, because there is almost no function of transparent liquidity which it is not possible to fulfill using dark liquidity, in conjunction with signed disclosure of otherwise confidential linkages between public keys and transacting parties.  It may be that the actual optimal domain of  transparent liquidity is quite small.

We will use crypto in preference to fiat or analog commodities in the future, because it offers efficiencies and functions unavailable otherwise.  Probably anyone can understand that, having seen the postal service eviscerated by email, the phone network overwhelmed by packet switching, stock trading disintermediated and commodified, &c.  The difficult part is always convincing them that a given specific protocol or ledger will dominate a given market.  But if that is a bridge too far, you may find it more useful to convince them of less ambitous claims.  E.g. you may convince them that a given crypto is "good enough"  for now, and that the best way to position yourself to move to the ultimate future persistent surviving liquidity provider is to begin to use and exploit today's incumbent leaders.

[shmadz]

(*off-topic: also hoping the monkey is still loving silver?*)

monkey says there should be a silver correction on a daily chart, so sell some and buy back cheaper, or sell some short-dated calls if you are using paper silver, but still loves it on a weekly chart.

also, please observe that i am no hero, merely a sr.

lol, I do not sell silver, never have sold an ounce, yet.

and "hero member status" is largely a subjective title in my reality.

[Its About Sharing]

I am not doubting the network effect laws. I am doubting the 'Monero is strongest' part. Although I like the name, the name is best of them all. Some Hero members support is also good. But this race has just started. Bitcoin had a few years of network effect before others started to race with it. CN coins all begin at the same time, excluding Bytecoin for obvious reasons. Hence, the outcome is unclear.

I think some of those hero members are trying to make it seem like a foregone conclusion that XMR is going to be the winner because they have already invested in it. BBR started just a few weeks later and has some nice innovation and arguably the most knowledgeable cryptonote dev in Crypto Zoidberg.

It is nice to have a good dev, (and we also have a good dev team in XMR), but it is the Hero members alone who can "fish" for more hero members to join, and others will follow. The hero members don't invest or promote junk. XMR has a disproportionate large number of hero members supporting it, and this exactly is the network effect that is hard to overcome.

Great dev team and big money behind it is a recipe for success, adoption etc. Hero members can't be overlooked - move the market and they will come. Create the features and they will use, tell others...repeat.

And this came on page 42 no less. The answers abound.

[bangersdad]

I too now own a reasonable amount of xmr after becoming aware of it from Hero members. I did some due diligence and really liked what i found. so diversified half of my btc holdings mainly due to fungibility worries. Do others think the bottom has been reached? i cannot decide if i should buy more at this price, or be patient and see if it goes lower.

[michaelb87]

What do you guys think about Crypti?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=654463.0

[darlidada]

I too now own a reasonable amount of xmr after becoming aware of it from Hero members. I did some due diligence and really liked what i found. so diversified half of my btc holdings mainly due to fungibility worries. Do others think the bottom has been reached? i cannot decide if i should buy more at this price, or be patient and see if it goes lower.

Personally I'm buying as much as I can within the dips. There are several GUIs out in beta already. The bounty will be distributed on the 1rst of July and then I think XMR devs will officially endorse one of them. So a GUI is coming very soon!

Here's a post by Eizh that confirms my thinking: http://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/2914y1/monero_vs_boolberry/cigi7x5

[saddambitcoin]

I too now own a reasonable amount of xmr after becoming aware of it from Hero members. I did some due diligence and really liked what i found. so diversified half of my btc holdings mainly due to fungibility worries. Do others think the bottom has been reached? i cannot decide if i should buy more at this price, or be patient and see if it goes lower.

Just be patient! - 50% of your BTC into XMR is already significant amount.

If anything you could say hero members are the type crazy enough to spot potential value and trends further in advance than the herd and capitalize on that. In the medium to long term the potential for XMR is very good, that's why I bought some. But the altcoin ecosystem is amok with short term traders looking for a quick profit. So be very careful, its risky out here!

[darlidada]

Difficulty is at an ATH.

If I use Aminorex formula to calculate marginal miner price at AWS with Wolf miner I get : 0.0054

Why are we in a downtrend when difficulty is rising? Why are people selling so low? Why are there not more people buying? Is this simply because of lack of demand or is the market dumb or is there something else i didnt understand/factor in?

[ShroomsKit_Disgrace]

rpietila Altcoin Observer  ---------> Monero PUMP thread!



Or am I missng something?