Topic: Is it possible to destroy Monero (XMR)? - page 4. (Read 10399 times)

Exactly. And why wouldn't you want the devs to have sufficient financial motivation to continue their hard work? This is a very odd idea and goes against capitalistic principles in my opinion.

Not to mention there are coins other than Monero that the devs own less than 1%. That's a fact. In fact it's often been a problem with coins that devs not having sufficient stake in their own currency often need to focus on other things in their life in order to make a living and pay their bills.

I am also a business angel, funding people's things ever since 2004. One of the reasons I bought the castle is that people wanting to have funding can come there and make their way to my presence. After some time, I may discuss with them about financial cooperation. Such deals have already been done on these "castle terms" and results are expected to be announced in this month.

This is the way I want to make business and yes, many try to approach me via other channels and start communication by asking money, a loan or whatever. I try not to be rude towards them but the answer is "no", because there is no way for me to evaluate the other guy that way.

I am fine if you don't want to come to my castle but that is the necessary condition if you want to deal with me. Good thing is that world has millions of people with more money than me and you can ask them instead.

I'm rather new in all this but i'm starting to see some patterns that i'll share here. My intention is not to offend anyone but i'll be honest and to the (my) point.

First i'll put supporters of different cryptocurrencies in two major groups
1. Old school investors, think of Wall Street investors as representatives
2. Little investors, that represent the ppl
And when you think about it these groups are naturally opposed, at least atm.

Will not comment the first group too much as i do now have experience in that, but whole CN concept (egalitarian mining and whatnot) is intended to serve second group. It is not surprising that original CN folks does not like the first group, and it should not be surprising that a lot of average Joes will have more sympathy for the second group. That is naturally because CN folks didn't invent second group, they just recognized it.

Another, and more dubious, point is the privacy oriented monetary platform does not mix with first group as well as with second group. Will not explain this, just think about it for a moment. One could stretch this so much to claim that first group and privacy for ppl is a oxymoron, but that is just a stretch.

And now something completely different, i personally liked XMR to the point when shilling and FUDing e.g. BBR surpassed my limit of a good taste. It may be the point when some e.g. DRK supporters switched to XMR, wouldn't know. And i do not claim that my good taste limit should be general, but my feeling is that XMR is going in to direction which looks like the reason why ppl were drown to cryprocurencies actually.

That are my 2 Sats

EDIT: At the average the first group is much more aggressive and thinks that clear winner is a must to see, yesterday. Second group is more inclined to idea to have something that works good, and consequentially like idea of few CN projects at this early stage as this will bring healthy competition and develop whole CN tech much faster. There are just basic differences of those two groups

EDIT2: I personally like the Darwinian process at work in CN, maybe even few projects will survive on different niches, which shouldn't be a problem if there is frictionless conversion between the coins, with SuperNet and OpenTransactions. And rpietila, I think you are correct person, do not take this post personally

"There are specific recurring kinds of errors in speculative writing about the Internet that we get exceedingly tired of seeing over and over again. One is blindness to problems of scale; another is handwaving about deployment costs; and a third is inability to notice when a proposed cooperative ‘solution’ is ruined by misalignment of incentives."

+954.  no idea what this has to do w crypto but soooo true

r u irritatingmint or just imprsonting him?  u do a good job if u are.  accuse castleman of being a warlord with knights ramming top down w monero then later saying something about yabbering democratic masses is the problem.  aren't those two opposite things??    

good to see you back  

Thanks for the link. Again, we're seeing "History Repeating." Really, it comes with democratic capitalism. Both parts encourage people to think that they're stakeholders in anything they take an interest in, and they're typically not discouraged because  they're sized up (at a minimum) as potential customers or users.

You continue the miss the point. Capital in your hands is useless in this arena because you can't develop what we need. That capital needs to be out chasing those who can develop it. Spreading it around more gets it moving and not buried in a useless vault.

---

You are not controlling me. I am trying to give you feedback on the question you asked in the OP.

I don't really have a problem with what ever you do. Only you can win or lose, it doesn't impact me what you are doing.

I am trying to explain that your confidence in your ability to select the winners and losers at the nascent stage of development is misplaced. You'd be better off with scattershot than concentration.

But alas, I have to let go....

...this is my last post. Seriously.

Good luck. We will be in touch in private communications in the future.

I feel that you are needlessly patronising me. I try to find a place to function to the best of my ability, and in this case a little bit of creating that place also. This way I am happiest, and most productive. Not all the world needs to embrace the result, and as you said - potentially it does not even scale such high. It does not mean it is wrong, or even waste of time.

If you feel that I have tried to control you against your wishes, I am sorry. Every help that I have offered has come from the blessing I have received by being in Bitcoin in the right time.

With the high regard that I have to some devs of some coins, in economic matters I trust much more those who have actual success to show in being shrewd with money - entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs, self-made men, the ones that have not succeeded by bootlicking governments, but who rather have a track record that governments have continued to attack them, closing their businesses, confiscating their assets, accused them in court on charges based on their own anti-competition laws, yet they have not lost heart, and still have an unwavering spirit to accompish what yet needs to be accomplished. The type Ayn Rand wrote about. The little that we must yield to central management of any kind, I would like to hand over to these men. If there are concentrations of private wealth in this world, I would sleep most happily if it is in the hands of these men.

Thanks a lot! Just downloaded both.

In a sense, this is an old difference-of-opinion story. Sorry that you took his take personally, Melbustus, but kennyP has a global-level point. For the record, I've implicitly defended guys like you, even though I looked into Bitcoin in 2011 but got scared off by all those hacking stories (The scaredy point for me was keylogger malware; I got logic-trapped and was either too skeered - or too proud - to join Bitcointalk in '11 to ask for help. I didn't jump into altcoins until I got Raxco's PerfectGuard.)

As a (personal) result, I have no envy of you guys and surprisingly little regret. The way I see it: had I pursued that alternate course, I would have either been: a multi-millionaire; robbed; a theoretical 'multimillionaire' ensnarled in the Gox bankruptcy; or, someone who took the bird in the hand in '12 like so many others. There's really no way to tell that's not essentially mental masturbation. So: the way I see it, there's really no point in worrying, fantasizing or whatnot. What was done, was done and that's that. Might as well enjoy what you've got; you'll certainly have no complaints from me!

But to get back to kennyP's point: he's essentially saying that you and the other whales are specialists. The trouble with specialization is that there's an inevitable echo-chamber effect within the specialty; at a minimum, it shows up in 'expertitis': using jargon terms as if they were all defined in a basic high-school-level dictionary. No worries, in and of itself, but specialists who strike it 'lucky' [<--- pls note inverted commas] tend to yield to that ole debbil that lurks in all of us: namely, vanity. Many are the specialists who, after getting fortune and prominence, fancy themselves as experts in politics plus the entire field of which they're only a part. Case in point: Paul Krugman.

Had I taken that opposite course and had gotten 'lucky', I'd take that lottery-winner categorization as a cautionary tale. One of the open and sad secrets about the lottery is that the typical jackpot winner blows his or her wad in about five years. The reason why is important - and it does pertain to kennyP's point. Many of them fancy themselves to be skilled and shrewd businesspeople stuck in dead-end jobs. If they only had the bankroll, they'd become loaded and esteemed! The world would finally know their real selves!

So, they start up or buy a small business like a restaurant, bar, or whatnot and spend lavishly on it. And within five years...

Anyhoo: to get back to the point, all of Bill Gates' billions can't erase his social maladroitness [which to some extent I share.] All of Warren Buffet's billions can't change the fact that he's been flat-out wrong about Bitcoin. All the wealth that an old-style goldbug had shrewdly accumulated in the 1970s in no way prepared him for the 1980s, when gold collapsed and stocks (and bonds!) became the place to be. And...

If you need a little peace of mind, Melbustus, this might help: 'luck' is really a myth - a thought-sparing heuristic for people who have neither the time nor the inclination to get to the truth of the matter. We all use myths of this sort to one extent or another to get us by in our everyday lives, else we'd have no time to act! You can content yourself with the empirical fact that people prone to use the myth of 'luck' are preponderantly people who won't make much of themselves socio-economically. In an important sense, they've installed their own glass ceiling. 

"I haven't been blessed. It was through my foresight that I saw bitcoin for how valuable it was. No man helped me along, and many discouraged me. " - Garret Burgwardt

If someone's gonna own 1%+, who'd be better to have it than the dev(s)?

I feel I must reply, because I don't think you are getting my point. It is as if we are talking past each other. You keep repeating the reasons you like Monero, and I keep trying to explain that is irrelevant to my point.

I had written that you picking the winners in the market at a nascent stage reminds me of China's solar debacle. You are not even close enough to the technology to make such determinations.


The $trillions are not going into crypto-currency but rather since the peak of silver and gold in 2011, been shifting into real estate and stocks (mostly in the Five Eyes nations who allegedly made an unpublished central bank pact to raise interest rates and stop QE). Armstrong has explained why. It is about international capital flows and liquidity. Bitcoin (and certainly not Monero) will not have enough liquidity within the requisite 2 - 4 years until collapse.


There is no lack of experience (I know I haven't built investment companies as you have and I know it is not relevant to what I write below). I understand the utility of trying to pick solid efforts, then rallying capital and inertia towards them.

Nascent stage developing mass appeal software projects is precisely my area of maximum expertise. Applying your model of building investment companies to this arena is bizarre and mismatched to what makes the development and discovery process work. And I surmise that is why you are running into friction.

There is a scenario where you succeed with that strategy with Monero, and that is where nothing else sufficiently earth shattering comes along that renders it irrelevant and unable to compete. But even within that limited success you may attain, it is very, very unlikely that Monero as refined by a committee will ever do anything earth shattering. For example, the genesis of Firefox was a teenager Blake Ross. He revolutionized the entire internet browsing experience. He is humble and downplays his role, but you as an investor should not. It is difficult now to find an article that accurately describes the leadership role Ross played at the crucial early stage. I had read about this long ago. Now most of the information paints it as a collaboration between him and Hyatt (and later others). But the fact was Ross drove the idea. Hyatt was a Mozilla/Apple developer who had been around a long time (and he and I fought some about his XUL ideas, etc, also I fought with his comrade Ian Hickson who is the lead on HTML5).

Don't get me wrong. Engineering refinement is extremely important, and one guy can't do that by himself. But the design and idea generation that defines the revolution never comes from a committee; I can't think of one example where it has.

So my point to you is your model of discovery of the creative ideas and developer that will change the world is wrong. In order to find that you have to look for raw talent, unrelenting drive, and luck of the draw. You can't play if you expect it to be all so well structured and visible.

It is a game of chance. You have to play as you do those real-time games of chance that you regularly score higher than me on.

Monero is safe and secure, but probably limited upside. There are other chances you might neglect because you want to only roll the dice on that which you can see with top-down clarity.

And this forcing-to-have-the-answer is what is alienating the Monero investors from the community-at-large. Monero has not swept the anonymity feature. There are many competing efforts out there and more to come. And ring signatures is not the end-all and be-all of anonymity. Plus anonymity is not even sufficient by itself to make a big wave of adoption.

People are here because of the excitement of the unknown. They don't want some top-down castle government dictating what is possible and impossible in this world of exciting possibilities.

It is not your 1% they hate, it is the way you try to lock everything down in structured molasses and don't embrace the world of possibilities that makes them feel you don't deserve to keep that 1%. And I believe they are probably correct. But randomness will obfuscate the outcome.

I don't think people (well at least not me) are jealous of you having the insight to invest in Bitcoin and change your wealth status. We are watching you do what most people of new found wealth do. They change what made them successful (the creeping from risky to later assured investment in Bitcoin) and become married to safety and controlling (erroneously applying a confirmation bias thinking that all those investment companies they did before the Bitcoin investment where relevant). Your Cryptocrypt forum had like 400 members in 6 months and this Bitcointalk.org wildwest probably gets that many signups in one day. You can't shoehorn a free market into a top-down structure voting system of ranks of competencies. The communication overload makes it impossible to scale top-down organization out to creativity which is born in the small from the large population of chance. For example, I couldn't communicate all my ideas about crypto-currency to you even if I wanted to, much less trying to convince your investment board. I wouldn't even bother. Much better to drive adoptionally virally then much later you realize you missed out because you expected a Cathedral.

For example, why are you so harsh on BBR? It wouldn't hurt you one iota to send 0.1% of your capital towards his coin and boost his chances. More competition with Monero is better for you (makes your Monero devs less complacent and smug), and then you become a hero in the community rather than a villan. BBR's efforts are helping Monero since many of the source code commits get shared between the two efforts.

This arena is more like a wildwest Bazaar. Your (desire to reform it into a) Cathedral style is incompatible with the open source and creativity.


As hard as you will try to avoid scammers, even your own group is profiting on your dependence on them. When you marry yourself to something, it can attract flies and also your "wives" can become complacent (and later demanding).

I heard you were ready to defend the Monero price with a stash. When I heard that I thought of how a couple that is headed for breakup, often try to make a baby first to double-down, e.g. Jason Hommel who is now a relative pauper after once had 200,000 oz of silver and $12 million in pink sheets mining companies.

I actually advised you to not buy the castle and I advised Hommel not to buy that $1 million mansion in 2007 and not to make the baby. He opted to double-down and have the sure outcome.

(I should talk about my own mistakes, but don't have time to explain and it would muddle this post)


If you were speaking to me, you are incorrect. I am competent.

It is possible that you are very right and this is a great insight. There is a kind of group that I feel connected to, consisting of people like aminorex, NewLiberty, (I don't want to add the names of not-so-public supporters), and people whom I know locally in Finland. The defining characteristics are that we are typically not old money, so the Bitcoin rally in 2010-2013 has changed our life, but we are also not nerds, just ordinary 30-50 yo adults who could invest a few thousand and not panic about it, resulting in that we still have hundreds if not thousands of BTC.

The willingness to change the world is a great motivation in us. Now Bitcoin has given new resources. Many have been searching for altcoins, but what's been offered did not interest us for a long time, as with a few exceptions, all altcoins have made terrible loss in their lifetime, and the high hopes of newcomers typically gone in vain. We have been able to see if there is no staying power, and invested only little, if anything, and watched the scene in sadness.

Then Monero comes and either analytically or intuitively sweeps our market niche with a promise of an anonymous coin, with potential to change the world, with an upright devteam and fair distribution. Knowing the mind of each other in our "group" (the "group" is just defined by being a set of people that think likewise) we rush to buy Monero, since the others will certainly do the same and of course we make money by doing it first My buying only really started in July when the 231 bottom was made. The previous months I was observing, very positive, but unwilling to commit.

This accumulation to long-term hoards has continued all this time, price has been very stable, and volume brisk. My predictions that our group's purchasing pressure overwhelms the inflation from mining have been unfounded, and likewise the doomsayers' predictions of lower and lower prices have not materialized. What has happened instead, is massive concentration of price in BTC0.004, which is the all-time-average, the current price, and the wedge closing point from the trends of higher lows and lower highs. Technically, it will soon break. Up or down, but with a massive move. Unless it stays in exactly BTC0.004 forever.


This is not really the way things happen in life. It is part luck (to be born in 1st world), but most part your choice to hang out with friends who follow tech. Then they tell you about Bitcoin. It is part luck (if you are minor and absolutely broke), but most part your choice to have money to invest and developed skills to understand it. It is part luck (if this is your first investment ever in something you don't understand) but most part your choice to throw money in fringe projects in carefully calculated small quantities, and then not worry about it.

It is no part luck if you were able to see Bitcoin was conquering the world in 2011. For most of us, it was about the choices that we had made in life that accumulated and made it much more probable to invest in 2011, and then hold through the days that took the price to half even twice the same day, and other things that the newbies don't know. My involvement in Bitcoin was certainly not luck, I take a methodical approach in investing and even in 2012, I lost $80,000 in several investments that went badly. Without investing into these stuff several times a year, I would not have invested into Bitcoin either.

Maybe somebody got in lucky, first buying, then losing the keys being thus unable to sell until now.

But my odds were stacked in 10,000:1 in my favor. And after that guy has sold, I still own them.



You also have 1 sigma higher IQ than me, it is not fair to use yourself as an example. Also I don't rejoice in your sickness.

Your model of the hackerdom, crypto-currency, the knowledge age, the future, and investing in decentralized technology is fundamental flawed.

Precisely Bitcoin and Monero are rich boy clubs and this is why they are going no where. Bitcoin and Monero are driven by investors, not by users. They are investment pumps, not currencies. Perhaps all of the crypto-currencies to date have been investment pumps. Perhaps BBR and James are experimenting to create features and try to discover what will drive user adoption. I am not saying they will succeed, because I am not following their work.