[XMR] Monero Speculation

[DaveyJones]

What happens if the MSM refuses to cover Monero (or any altcoin)? Can an altcoin overcome any way?

Can MSM overcome the internet might be another question.

Whats with the MSM? Before the MSM there were the church and/or kings,dukes, tribe leaders etc, history never changed because someone did NOT try. And with the Internet you can only keep something quiet till it catches attention.

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[adhitthana]

Monero does have a good base.  And...the longer the base the higher in space

[rangedriver]

Breakout?

[medusa13]

we need more bids!
show your support, increase liquidity, lower the spread

1w macd lets see how it plays out, exciting times 4 sure

[adhitthana]

What happens if the MSM refuses to cover Monero (or any altcoin)? Can an altcoin overcome any way?

Can MSM overcome the internet might be another question.

Whats with the MSM? Before the MSM there were the church and/or kings,dukes, tribe leaders etc, history never changed because someone did NOT try. And with the Internet you can only keep something quiet till it catches attention.

I agree. thankfully we had the bavarian illuminati to get rid of the kings/church etc in Europe . Might be up to us to overcome the MSM

[TPTB_need_war]

What happens if the MSM refuses to cover Monero (or any altcoin)? Can an altcoin overcome any way?

Okay good angle.

Did Bittorrent become popular without MSM coverage?

I'm not really sure.

Is Bittorrent as popular as Bitcoin?

Bittorrent is more popular than Bitcoin by a wide margin. I've seen reports of 30 million Bittorrent nodes at times, and that does not include all users.

Thanks that is very inspirational.

What I remember is the music industry in cahoots with politicians attempting to kill off file sharing by attacking Napster and some dumb ass politicians thought they could do the same to the decentralized file sharing apps and then later became aware they wouldn't have the power to shut them down (at least not without some global control of all internet protocols).

Then the battle moved to downloaded movies with Bittorrent and the subsequent Kim Dotcom saga which is still ongoing (but looks like they will be able to extradite him to the USA although that is irrelevant to the point of our inquiry I think except it shows the elite are the ones who are one step behind a popular activity).

It seems to me that if there is a popular activity that the world's users want to do and it is decentralized such that it can't be easily regulated by the elite, then the elite are on the losing side.

Thanks! That has been my theory all along and I just wanted to check it again with others to see if I am in delusion.

Bittorrent was spreading for the same reason that VCRs spread. It enables the popular activity of archiving and sharing your favorite media.

The problem for digital currency is it doesn't enable any popular activity. And all my marketing thoughts have been about how to find killer apps for digital currency that users will clamor for. And that is why I think the marketing discussion (and thus the design of the crypto currency to address the marketing) is the most important discussion. Hey I am not trying to belittle the capabilities of the Monero developers. I wish we could all work together. The first order of business is identifying how we address the marketing issue. We need a Bittorrent movement in crypto.

The reason I have resisted just contributing to Monero is because as smart as the devs are at coding, they don't have any marketing sense. And thus they can't lead. Sorry I am not trying to ruin you all, but I can't let you ruin me by leading me in the wrong direction. And Blockstream is no better at marketing and identifying which features are important. Thus again as smart as they are, they can't lead. You will end up in endless discussions and not getting any where.

Note that XMR.to was a stroke of marketing genuis. Who ever did that should be getting more attention from us. And Shapeshift.io was even better. But still both of those haven't identified the killer app for crypto currency that we need to make the masses clamor for it. I have some ideas to try out, but they require me to do a lot of programming just to be able to test the markets. It is a lot of risk for me to take on given I am nearly bankrupt. It is a major sacrifice and I am just thinking about whether I can manage. I am leaning on moving forward and stop posting. But I am still in deep thinking and discuss mode on this first. Maybe a couple or few more days max (hopefully).

Ideally would be to join forces with other devs. But most devs (smooth included) don't want to work for free on crypto. They want something where they can see a reasonable ROI or at least where they are not coding full time (so they can sustain their larger income in their day jobs). Or perhaps they will work for free if it is their own project so they can express their desire to lead or be in that leadership role. It is difficult to figure out how to organize. Seems a leader (e.g. fluffypony) just has to do and not talk and not seek out anyone. Those who are interested chime in when they feel inclined to.

Yet again I come back to that for all the teamwork in Monero, there isn't the leadership focus on how to address a killer app for crypto (perhaps they thought originally anonymity was a killer app and that is another reason I won't follow Monero's leadership because I disagree with that marketing analysis). And the attitude seems to be "build it and wait...markets will come to us".

On top of all that, is since the focus of all altcoins are on speculators and not primarily on users, we end up with all these cat fights and inability to discuss user driven feature sets without getting mired in turf battles.

[Bassica]

Today the general meeting of a certain Finnish company that already owns about 1% of XMR outstanding, has decided to refocus the company's mission to be a Monero fund, with the objective of converting its BTC holdings to XMR, and issuing shares to select parties and use the proceeds to acquire more XMR.

Is the public listing of this company on a stock exchange something that may happen in the future? The reason I ask is that this could be attractive to people in Canada who wish to hold XMR in tax free or tax tax deferred accounts (TFSA, RRSP etc).

Public companies tend to have 10s of millions (minimum) in assets, so with a global marketcap of 4 million, XMR funds who own a fraction of it are not likely to go public due to the administrative costs.

I think in Estonia about $1 million companies can go public, because one of my companies was contemplating it when it was even smaller.

TL;DR: Let's see 

Hi Risto, could you please elaborate on the status of this?

[TPTB_need_war]

I first read about bitcoin in Wired when bitcoin was about $6-8 in 2011

The story in Wired that got a lot of attention (and introduced many people to Bitcoin) was late 2011. It was a large review (maybe cover?) that included the history of Satoshi, etc., the pump, the MtGox hack, etc. The price had hit $30 earlier that year and was on its way down to $2 or whatever the low ended up being after another year or so. Still I guess $6-8 when the article came out.

The one I read was before the bubble. Let me just find it

EDIT: Here it is. The article came out just before the bubble:
http://www.wired.com/2011/06/silkroad-2/

Price was $8.67 according the article.

Ah okay, I hadn't seen that one. The pump started in late April though (maybe Silk Road becoming popular?). The price as of April 15 was still $1, and arguably even back in October ($0.06). Maybe the Wired piece did contribute to the blow-off high at $30 though.

More to do the point, do you agree with my perception that the next pump that attracts mainstream media attention will be much, much bigger?

Yes, I've made some posts about how I think the recurring bubble cycle is based partly on the bitcoin hype expanding into increasingly wider demographics through different media outlets, starting with cryptoanarchists and STEM guys hearing about bitcoin from Slashdot getting us to $1, and then Silk Road/Gawker/Wired geeks getting us to double digits, and so on. We have a lot more demographics that we can expand into.  

We still haven't seriously broken into the worldwide baby boomer demographic at all.

We haven't broken into Japan at all. There are 450,000+ millionaires in Tokyo alone. Almost all babyboomers. How many of them own bitcoin? We can probably round the number down to zero. The yen is the third biggest currency in the world. We haven't cracked it at all.
We have very few women owning any bitcoin.

We actually haven't really broken into China. If Chinese retail investors were buying bitcoin like they were buying Chinese stocks in 2015, we would've broken $20,000 easily. All we did in 2013 was break into the Chinese geek population.

If we can break out into the wealthy babyboomer demographic and get them buying bitcoins like they were buying real estate or dotcom stocks, then we could have a media hype cycle and bubble that could dwarf anything we've seen.

The problem is that they are going to be the hardest demographic to crack. The previous bubbles were low hanging fruit. Of course we could get the DollarVigilante, Max Keiser, Wired/Gawker, Zerohedge, PirateParty, Wikileaks guys on board.  The delay between the last bubble in November 2013 and the next real hype cycle goes to show how difficult it is to crack the next demographic nut.

Good analysis. Is there another intermediate stage?

Not for investment without widespread user adoption. Without viral user adoption, we probably need Bitcoin to be sanctioned by the State as money to bring the wealthy demographics into it.

The only angle I see is viral user adoption, thus of course driving investment like crazy.

Achieving viral user adoption of money is crazy difficult because money has no utility until it is wide adopted. Thus it is a chicken and egg problem.

With file sharing, you only need a few people to share and then any one can gain utility from it.

Thus it seems any plans for viral adoption are doomed. I should just quit.

But ... what if users became investors and investors became users in a virtuous spiralling cycle that lead to wide spread adoption by both. 

[Bassica]

What happens if the MSM refuses to cover Monero (or any altcoin)? Can an altcoin overcome any way?

Okay good angle.

Did Bittorrent become popular without MSM coverage?

I'm not really sure.

Is Bittorrent as popular as Bitcoin?

Bittorrent is more popular than Bitcoin by a wide margin. I've seen reports of 30 million Bittorrent nodes at times, and that does not include all users.

Thanks that is very inspirational.

What I remember is the music industry in cahoots with politicians attempting to kill off file sharing by attacking Napster and some dumb ass politicians thought they could do the same to the decentralized file sharing apps and then later became aware they wouldn't have the power to shut them down (at least not without some global control of all internet protocols).

Then the battle moved to downloaded movies with Bittorrent and the subsequent Kim Dotcom saga which is still ongoing (but looks like they will be able to extradite him to the USA although that is irrelevant to the point of our inquiry I think except it shows the elite are the ones who are one step behind a popular activity).

It seems to me that if there is a popular activity that the world's users want to do and it is decentralized such that it can't be easily regulated by the elite, then the elite are on the losing side.

Thanks! That has been my theory all along and I just wanted to check it again with others to see if I am in delusion.

Bittorrent was spreading for the same reason that VCRs spread. It enables the popular activity of archiving and sharing your favorite media.

The problem for digital currency is it doesn't enable any popular activity. And all my marketing thoughts have been about how to find killer apps for digital currency that users will clamor for. And that is why I think the marketing discussion (and thus the design of the crypto currency to address the marketing) is the most important discussion. Hey I am not trying to belittle the capabilities of the Monero developers. I wish we could all work together. The first order of business is identifying how we address the marketing issue. We need a Bittorrent movement in crypto.

I think you are way, way ahead of yourself. This is not the time to judge yet. The 'marketing', ie building out the monero ecosystem has just kicked of.
- China is being addressed (translations & campaigns)
- Privacy centered services are being approached (succesfully)
- additional exchanges are being talked to
- Websites/blogs/infographics are popping up everywhere
- twitter / facebook is being actively used

I also believe that the community is greatly responsible for this, not the devteam. The devteam must make sure they optimize the code and features, so that the community can build out on those fundaments.

It just takes time to develop this project into something that is worth the effort to market. As the features pile up, so will the possibilities and thus ideas.
For example think about what will be possible when Monero has multisig combined with the existing killer ano-features, so many ideas will be springing up.
- Marketplaces (like openbazaar)
- Monero streamium copy for ano webcam-chat etc
- Privacy crowdfunding / political donations platform
- Darknet markets
- filesharing (bittrust)

There's so many bitcoin examples which would work a lot better with untraceable and unlinkable payments. It's just a matter of time for someone picking up an idea and replicating it. And over time, yes, users will recognize the benefit of anonymity. As they are slowly discovering now (outside of the crypto-currency spehre). It just doesn't happen instantly. Rome wasn't build in one day...

[iCEBREAKER]

Did Bittorrent become popular without MSM coverage?

I'm not really sure.

Yes, it did.  The Bittorrent whitepaper was a breakthrough in p2p not matched until Satoshi came along.

All the cruft of Gnutella (anti-leech arms race kludges, supernodes, etc) was swept away by Bram's brilliantly elegant tit-for-tat algorithm.

Classic example of the world beating a path to the better mousetrap's door.  Everybody still uses it, 20 years later.

Please ignore the MSM, so it will go away ASAP.  Now excuse me, I need to watch The Kelly File!   

[TPTB_need_war]

Did Bittorrent become popular without MSM coverage?

I'm not really sure.

Yes, it did.  The Bittorrent whitepaper was a breakthrough in p2p not matched until Satoshi came along.

All the cruft of Gnutella (anti-leech arms race kludges, supernodes, etc) was swept away by Bram's brilliantly elegant tit-for-tat algorithm.

Well someone did come along before Satoshi in 2008 and that was me (Shelby), but I was apparently ignored. I basically predicted the Net Neutrality shit we have now and was trying to improve Bram's concept:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130401040049/http://forum.bittorrent.org/viewtopic.php?pid=178#p178

Did Bittorrent implement my proposal? I never followed up (my life went on a tangent).

You can detect some more coherence in my writing back then because that was before I became so ill. I am amazed in hindsight that I understood the concepts of Bittorrent so well having absolutely no experience whatsoever as a developer in P2P.

[BTKC]

To go back to some price speculation, the weekly MACD has flipped to green, which is pretty exciting. It flipped 3 times in our history, all 3 times it was precedent to, or during, a (major) rally.

Since bitcoinwisdom doesn't have all the data available crypttrader seems a broken for the last few days, I'll use two charts.

First, crypttrader, so the start is also observable:

https://i.imgur.com/eUCWf4P.png?1

Second, bitcoinwisdom, for the current trend:

https://i.imgur.com/eWHzZNm.png?1

The long downslide also seems to be broken:

https://i.imgur.com/JApStbA.png?1

FYI: I use log scale on all the charts, because it gives a more appropriate image in my opinion. Certainly in high volatility markets such as crypto.

Thanks for the analysis. Added a few thousand xmr to my stash the other day. Glad i did, lookin fairly bullish right now.

[jehst]

Hi Risto, could you please elaborate on the status of this?

Just do the math. If the company owns 1% of all monero, and you need to be a 1 million dollar company at minimum to become a public company in Estonia, then we need Monero to gain a 100 million dollar market cap (and stay there) before it makes sense for that company to go public.

[TPTB_need_war]

The problem for digital currency is it doesn't enable any popular activity.

I think you are way, way ahead of yourself. This is not the time to judge yet.

A captain without a map and compass (or a clear night sky) can get lost in a sea of wrong turns.

The 'marketing', ie building out the monero ecosystem has just kicked of.

The marketing should begin with the design of the product. If the marketing and the design are not in sync, nothing is likely to work out.

- China is being addressed (translations & campaigns)

Chinese investors who have a strong desire to invest in crypto already know about Monero.

The issues of why they are not investing in droves in Monero will be the same as why Western investors are not. My guess is because anonymity is not a very realistic feature for anyone. Who needs to use it? I would like to use anonymity to maintain my privacy from Uncle Sam, but I certainly can't trust Cryptonote's vulnerabilities to metadata correlation and systemic combinatorial analysis. I'd be crazy to risk jail time trusting that.

I only see highly criminal markets for Cryptonote, who tolerate such risk as their profession demands. Those are not who I want to be marketing too and in the company of.

I'd like to see really strong anonymity such as Zerocash, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that only a popular activity can resist the State. And anonymity will never be popular. People love to share everything on Facebook. We'll never be able to solve the metadata problem, probably not even with Zerocash.

Chinese investors are not going to invest in features which have no market, unless it is just a pump & dump or some other money making corruption.

- Privacy centered services are being approached (succesfully)

Elaborate please? What does this mean?

- additional exchanges are being talked to

As if that is the problem when liquidity is already too low. You can further dilute liquidity across more exchanges.

Okay it perhaps provides access for some more investors. But access is not likely the major issue limiting Monero investment.

- Websites/blogs/infographics are popping up everywhere
- twitter / facebook is being actively used

Telling us more about an anonymity feature that we don't need.

I also believe that the community is greatly responsible for this, not the devteam. The devteam must make sure they optimize the code and features, so that the community can build out on those fundaments.

It just takes time to develop this project into something that is worth the effort to market. As the features pile up, so will the possibilities and thus ideas.

Incorrect. Marketing is holistic.

For example think about what will be possible when Monero has multisig combined with the existing killer ano-features, so many ideas will be springing up.

Oh the delusions we tell ourselves when we are bagholders.

- Marketplaces (like openbazaar)
- Darknet markets

As if they need anonymity that is not resistant to the tax and regulation authorities. What is the point? Do I want to buy shit from anonymous individuals. No.

- Monero streamium copy for ano webcam-chat etc
- filesharing (bittrust)

What does anonymous block chain tech have to do with chat encryption  

- Privacy crowdfunding / political donations platform

Wow that is going to have at least 1 or 2 participants.

There's so many bitcoin examples which would work a lot better with untraceable and unlinkable payments. It's just a matter of time for someone picking up an idea and replicating it. And over time, yes, users will recognize the benefit of anonymity. As they are slowly discovering now (outside of the crypto-currency spehre). It just doesn't happen instantly. Rome wasn't build in one day...

Keep on dreaming.

Now I need to get back to reality.

Edit: I still hold out hope for optional mixers based on Zerocash. I see no reason to prefer a bloated, unscalable block chain such as Cryptonote with its unreliable anonymity (but if you know of large markets for that please correct me).

But for that to be useful we need to make decentralized, permissionless crypto currency popular. Otherwise the mixers will be useless anyway.

[GingerAle]

no one knows what the future holds.

I doubt when the WWW was dreamed up that the developer thought "people are going to look at cat videos using this, and some company is going to track their viewing habits and somehow package that and sell it to another company"

I speculate that we have no idea what cryptocurrency networks will really be used for, and how it will be monetized.

All i know is bitcoin is http, and monero is https*

* credit moneromooo

[binaryFate]

Anyone kicking himself for not having bought as much as they were planning to, during this long plateau we seem to leave now?

[TPTB_need_war]

All i know is bitcoin is http, and monero is https*

And nasal snot is Vicks. I still can't sell my snot.

Very loose analogies are almost always misleading.

Marketing is about drilling down to the details.

[TPTB_need_war]

Anyone kicking himself for not having bought as much as they were planning to, during this long plateau we seem to leave now?

Short-term performance doesn't indicate anything about the future. Every rational speculator knows this.

Perhaps Monero will benefit from chaos and uncertainty in Bitcoin, and given such a small market cap might be ripe for pump & dump by the Chinese or whomever. This is what speculators often wait for and are actually just pretending to themself (or to the group) that they really have any acumen to pick and manage long-term plans with serious marketing.

I could have made a lot of easy money last year if I had just played this game and watched very carefully what I wrote and did not write. But I am not interested in pumps & dumps.

Edit: the problem is that in theory no one has been able to amass a large quantity of Monero at near 0 cost (e.g. no premine), thus no one has an incentive (nor the control over the float) to do the pump & dump.

[sofu]

300k easy 

[smooth]

- additional exchanges are being talked to

As if that is the problem when liquidity is already too low. You can further dilute liquidity across more exchanges.

Okay it perhaps provides access for some more investors. But access is not likely the major issue limiting Monero investment.

It provides resiliency, even if largely unused. Dash trading was potentially disrupted by the implosion of Cryptsy and the delisting on Bitfinex. Fortunately they could just move over almost instantly to Poloniex and Bittrex, which previously had very little Dash trading.