rpietila is a major actor in bitcoin. He is very widely followed. He never bought altcoin before. But he decided to buy Monero. Enjoy the reading.
My take on altcoins[...]
MRO (Monero)Okay, there was a reason why I wrote on alts. Cause I have just made my first altcoin investment ever! Monero has a trait which pretty much all other alts lack: slow and geometrically decreasing issuance. At present, only 5% of MRO is mined, and even after 4 years there will still be 20% left to be mined. There is no premine, and the community consists of several people
Furthermore, it is currently a CPU coin, since the 11 hashing algorithms make it difficult to implement for GPU let alone ASIC. These things make it "fair" so that there is no way to amass large stashes except by working for them in the competitive mining or buying in the open market.
The market for the coin is very active and extremely liquid. There was an
OTC market in the beginning. MRO was listed in Poloniex 5 days ago and the reception has been good. It has been the most traded coin ever since despite having a market cap of only 1-3 M$! Up to 10% of the outstanding MRO changes hands daily in Poloniex, mitigating the extreme volatility that is plaguing many alts with concentrated ownership.
And now comes the main point: The coin has a feature, which is not implementable in Bitcoin - privacy! It is called
CryptoNote, and means that all transactions are mixed in a protocol level. This is imo the most advanced privacy that is currently found in crypto universe, although I am sure that some disagree and let them teach me how I am wrong
The coin is probably circulating quite widely already. New mining is about 30kMRO per day (
BTC180), which is about $100k (!) and the price is rising (despite that). This is not a pump and dump coin, because the inflation takes care that new coins are constantly coming to the market. A word of warning though - the market cap may seem lucratively small, but the total issuance of MRO is 20 times the current, which is a little less than that of BTC. Therefore it is easy to compare the relative valuations by just comparing the prices. At 0.006 BTC currently, MRO is not the cheapest coin around (1:166 of BTC). I would advice to not buy hastily, and not participate in bubbles (if any). Mining is also an option.
This is the first altcoin I bought, and I did it during the time when it had been listed in the exchange. My relative position is less than in BTC though, so if only one remains, I would still do better if it is BTC
