[XMR] Monero Speculation

[Johnny Mnemonic]

I agree, and argued quite a bit on reddit that the mere possibility of blockchain rollbacks opens the door to the kind of political influence/manipulation that plagues our more established systems in society. If we give an inch we lose a light year.

Think about it: How difficult is it for a group of powerful individuals to lobby users and produce 'fake' media support for a malicious fork? If everyone thinks the popular chain is the new one, will they all support it?

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[ArticMine]

My take is that this would not work for a generalized malicious hard fork.

There is some significant human psychology here. A key component is to convince the majority that the attack targets someone else. Some individual or group who is "evil" in some sense. In the Ethereum case this was the "evil" DAO "hacker" out to destroy Ethereum. For this reason selectiveness was critical here. People will react very differently if they presume they themselves are the target.  

[TrueCryptonaire]

...

Given this wide margin and the tightness of Monero trading range it is pretty unlikely you will be able to trade much. Also, why would you sell if the price rises beyond the line? Isn't it a potential breakthrough and the start of new period of higher growth?
On the other hand, why would you buy a coin that is dumping, isn't it potential start of bearish cycle?

-------------------------

My speculation: I am slightly bullish... We will see if Monero can reach 0.003... The trading volume is low now (been it pretty much since 2014).
2016 is a year of results, but we will see if it is possible to get a nice uptrend this year. Still the charts are bearish if you look them from ATH.
The current community very unlikely can drive the price up - investments are needed outside and the outreach should take place. Unfortunately Peter Todd is not the person I am refering to. Some big names would be beneficial for Monero (a billionaire from Forbes for instance etc.).

I would not place much weight on on the early ATH in 2014 because of the change in market capitalization, https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/#charts. One cannot simply extrapolate technical analysis from stocks (where price follows market capitalization) to a POW crypto - currency during its first two years. There are critical aspects of technical analysis that break down in such an extrapolation. My take is that 0.0043 XBT is a critical resistance point here. As for the 2014 ATH, I am not sure at all.

Even though the number of coins have grown since June 2014, it still would be pretty disappointing if new ATH will not be reached - that makes Monero pretty much the same class with all the other alts here which cannot grow back to the initial pump because of the rise in the number of coins.

In case of Monero, the emission is less than 50 % from those levels so technically it should be possible even to maintain it. Bear in mind, the emission also represent very small portion of the trading so it is mainly trading with other bagholders since the real world use of XMR is very limited afaik.

[Johnny Mnemonic]

In the Ethereum case this was the "evil" DAO "hacker" out to destroy Ethereum. For this reason selectiveness was critical here. People will react very differently if they presume they themselves are the target.  

A wise attacker would never make it obvious who the real target is. I assume that's your point.

Just like you can manufacture an "incident" to incite legislation, you can come up with an unlimited number of justifications for a hard fork.

[ArticMine]

...

A wise attacker would never make it obvious who the real target is. I assume that's your point.

Just like you can manufacture an "incident" to incite legislation, you can come up with an unlimited number of justifications for a hard fork.

Not really. My point is that the attacker first vilifies the target, and then rallies support against the "enemy". That is why selectiveness is crucial. I guess it could be possible to use this as cover for a broader attack: however the attack still relies on a clearly identified target that is first vilified and the rallying of the majority in the war against the newly created enemy.  

History, has over the ages, unfortunately proven how effective this can be. I am talking about overall human psychology, here which is way broader than just the specific application of these psychological techniques to attack a particular block chain. In the block chain case it fails with Monero because the attacker cannot be selective.

[Johnny Mnemonic]

With Monero the attacker cannot be selective, but he can still lobby/influence/deceive users into supporting a fork to "undo" something of consequence (by rolling back the chain to before it happened). It would be even easier if the attackers are well-known figures in the community. I agree that such moves are more likely to be opportunistic, as seen in Ethereum (defeat the hacker and save my investment), but it remains a threat nonetheless.

[ArticMine]

With Monero the attacker cannot be selective, but he can still lobby/influence/deceive users into supporting a fork to "undo" something of consequence (by rolling back the chain to before it happened).

Yes, but we are then talking about a different attack. An attack that does not rely on the historically proven and highly successful psychological techniques of rallying support against a manufactured enemy. For this reason I would expect this non selective type of attack to have a significantly lower chance of success.

Edit: Rolling back the Monero block chain to reverse a particular transaction could create very significant collateral damage; which would be orders of magnitude harder to sell.

[Hueristic]

With Monero the attacker cannot be selective, but he can still lobby/influence/deceive users into supporting a fork to "undo" something of consequence (by rolling back the chain to before it happened).

Yes, but we are then talking about a different attack. An attack that does not rely on the historically proven and highly successful psychological techniques of rallying support against a manufactured enemy. For this reason I would expect this non selective type of attack to have a significantly lower chance of success.

Edit: Rolling back the Monero block chain to reverse a particular transaction could create very significant collateral damage; which would be orders of magnitude harder to sell.

If transactions ever got hard forked in XMR it would be the end of the coin period. But that will never happen so no worries here.

I sparked up a miner just for ETC, just for the principle. I still hate ETH.

[explorer]

Wow, this thread made it to page 3 with all the ETH threads cropping up in the past couple days. I don't think I've ever seen it so far down. Markets aren't doing much, but they will be....Soon.

Others make splashy headlines, Monero keeps working methodically toward the goal.  I see steady progress, and of course, impending Soon^TM stuff.  Excitement will follow, I have no doubt.

[kennyP]

where is risto? haven't seen him in this thread for ages now ...

[smooth]

where is risto? haven't seen him in this thread for ages now ...

Some sort of summer vacation I think. I remember seeing something about it on the Crypto Kingdom IRC, but I don't know any more than that.

[kennyP]

where is risto? haven't seen him in this thread for ages now ...

Some sort of summer vacation I think. I remember seeing something about it on the Crypto Kingdom IRC, but I don't know any more than that.

thanks, sometimes you don't realise how much you appreciate someone until they're not around haha

hope he has a good holiday!

[iCEBREAKER]

I'm not going to speculate on the future of Ethereum ring signatures here. Monero already has a working system today - I think it will become more popular once we have more web services using it.

You don't even have a GUI, monero man-child developers (thats how Vitalik calls them) are useless. Way over 50% of hash rate are botnets.
It's dead Jim...  I'm still holding a decent amount (couple tens of thousands) but the first pump that comes along - I'm out.

Oh well, I guess I'd better copy-and-paste my comment from Reddit on the state of Ethereum:

On the topic of poor design:

- Vitalik has repeatedly eschewed and ignored commentary from researchers and plowed ahead with poor design decisions.

- Where he hasn't ignored the commentary, he has instead noted it and then layered complexity on top of the bad idea in order to make it workable (complexity is the enemy of secure cryptography and good system design).

- He also repeatedly fails to cite prior research / researchers, which I guess leads some to view him as more than he is, which in turn leads to an inherent trust in a poorly designed system.

- He uses mathematical notation in a completely incorrect manner in formal papers (some of which govern the very inner workings of Ethereum) such that mathematicians are unable to peer review the paper. If you can't understand what he's trying to express, how can you confirm if the concept is valid or the mathematical proof is correct?

- When the above is pointed out to him he (naively or foolishly or disingenuously) claims that the security of the model is "in the code" and not in the mathematical proofs. This bizarre world-view is only dangerous in light of the fact that the system has to at least protect its users somewhat.

On the topic of mismanagement:

- Instead of focusing on a single implementation they instead hired developers to build out at least 4 of the multiple implementations.

- The consequence of this was not only a breaking inter-implementation fork 6 months ago, but also has (as their security auditors put it) "testing needs...more complex than anything we've looked at before".

- They raised $18.4 million, which was almost entirely spent a year later. According to the blog post on the matter they have enough money to make it to June 2016, possibly a little beyond that. That is truly shocking, considering that Ethereum had the 4th highest crowd-funded project funds.

- Instead of biting the bullet and immediately beginning a systematic process of converting the majority of the funds raised into a store of value that would remain relatively stable for the 3-5 years it would take for the project to be built up, they kept the bulk of it in Bitcoin, resulting in a $9 million shortfall on their initial funding amount (when viewed in USD terms).

- Despite promising financial transparency with the money that had been raised, it took them over a year before they suddenly realised they actually needed to come through on that. A startup needn't make their financial activities public at all, but if that is the case then don't promise such transparency. Doing so, and then failing to deliver on that promise, points to incredible mismanagement by individuals that have no clue how to run or build up a company.

Anypony have a link to that clever bit fluffy said about ETC the other day?  You know the one.

[sandiman]

...

Given this wide margin and the tightness of Monero trading range it is pretty unlikely you will be able to trade much. Also, why would you sell if the price rises beyond the line? Isn't it a potential breakthrough and the start of new period of higher growth?
On the other hand, why would you buy a coin that is dumping, isn't it potential start of bearish cycle?

-------------------------

My speculation: I am slightly bullish... We will see if Monero can reach 0.003... The trading volume is low now (been it pretty much since 2014).
2016 is a year of results, but we will see if it is possible to get a nice uptrend this year. Still the charts are bearish if you look them from ATH.
The current community very unlikely can drive the price up - investments are needed outside and the outreach should take place. Unfortunately Peter Todd is not the person I am refering to. Some big names would be beneficial for Monero (a billionaire from Forbes for instance etc.).

I would not place much weight on on the early ATH in 2014 because of the change in market capitalization, https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/#charts. One cannot simply extrapolate technical analysis from stocks (where price follows market capitalization) to a POW crypto - currency during its first two years. There are critical aspects of technical analysis that break down in such an extrapolation. My take is that 0.0043 XBT is a critical resistance point here. As for the 2014 ATH, I am not sure at all.

Even though the number of coins have grown since June 2014, it still would be pretty disappointing if new ATH will not be reached - that makes Monero pretty much the same class with all the other alts here which cannot grow back to the initial pump because of the rise in the number of coins.

In case of Monero, the emission is less than 50 % from those levels so technically it should be possible even to maintain it. Bear in mind, the emission also represent very small portion of the trading so it is mainly trading with other bagholders since the real world use of XMR is very limited afaik.

Nice one 

[smooth]

Relevant comment from the ANN thread:

Talking about commits, this one caught my eye: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/ebf97d76f0020eb027175818ebbdafd6d578aa77

wallet: new {ex,im}port_key_images commands and RPC calls

They are used to export a signed set of key images from a wallet
with a private spend key, so an auditor with the matching view key
may see which of those are spent, and which are not.

finally the view-key functionally is optimal.

[americanpegasus]

Relevant comment from the ANN thread:

Talking about commits, this one caught my eye: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/ebf97d76f0020eb027175818ebbdafd6d578aa77

wallet: new {ex,im}port_key_images commands and RPC calls

They are used to export a signed set of key images from a wallet
with a private spend key, so an auditor with the matching view key
may see which of those are spent, and which are not.

finally the view-key functionally is optimal.

Those who pay attention to GitHub can effectively insider trade on Monero.  Insider Trading has been open sourced

[TrueCryptonaire]

Very short term speculation: The volume is getting lower in the current decline. Usually it is a sign that the uproar is on its way and the price will start to grow.
Seems there is some kind of resistance on 0.003. I hope that this resistance will be crossed for good and Warz can sell all his coins between 0.003-0.004 and then we can move to higher prices (he likes to sell there). 
Also, the longer we can rise without Aminorex becoming very bullish and signaling good buying opportunities, the higher it can climb.   

This is like playing cards, you need to read your opponents and know them. 

[thelibertycap]

Very short term speculation: The volume is getting lower in the current decline. Usually it is a sign that the uproar is on its way and the price will start to grow.
Seems there is some kind of resistance on 0.003. I hope that this resistance will be crossed for good and Warz can sell all his coins between 0.003-0.004 and then we can move to higher prices (he likes to sell there). 
Also, the longer we can rise without Aminorex becoming very bullish and signaling good buying opportunities, the higher it can climb.   

This is like playing cards, you need to read your opponents and know them. 

No, it is smoke and mirrors

[jehst]

Everything is moving more slowly than I anticipated. But we still hurl towards 2021.

[Febo]

Everything is moving more slowly than I anticipated. But we still hurl towards 2021.

Yes as it seems 2021 will be the Year of Crypto.