No need to rub shortcomings in people's faces. Investors are gonna get hurt anyways. It sucks, but they don't need training wheels and helmets from people they don't even know, especially if
all they want to see is rockets to the moon. Fortunately, they tend to keep coming back.
Now blatant scams on the other hand .. different story. Go nuts 
Zerocoin based rocket, worlds first working implementation ever third try
LOL.
I guess a lot of these things are shaped like rockets on first glance.
It takes at least a month or two before people realize they've exploded like in the picture
I do have to admit, that I've seen a few posts from people here outside this thread .. and now I've seen at least 2-3 more people minimum posting in this thread.
I'm ready to ride as many rockets as it takes, with other people, so long as this one's still being built
Whatever we're doing now .. I think we're doing okay. My personal goal is and has always and only been a larger community, and since at least the first few days of may we've come so far. I'll comment below:
So what can we do to grow the community? We've had a few nice weeks where the difficulty has risen quite nicely, but I'm not really feeling much on the support end. There's little to no talk and the logo thread seems to have died. Despite the growing difficulty -- I fear we're losing interest. I think we're suffering from a lack of a consolidated vision.
Difficulty now seems to swing between 15-20 Mh, and is holding reasonably constant. The demand for the support end .. well take a look at the 160 BTC in demand on PLX. I can remember when we were sub 10 BTC at that time. Demand has held pretty constant at about 15x that since I wrote that there wasn't much support, and it's half a year later. We have a logo, and although the difficulty is remaining stable, I'd have to say that interest is now turning positive again. I still feel we're lacking on a consolidated vision, but theres now thousands of posts on this forum attempting to bring us all toward a unified goal of having: A secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency .. if nothing else.
It's going to be harder/more time consuming right off the bat to build support for us because there's not one person we can rally around, and Monero is based off a protocol that's not well understood on this board. This is very apparently a decentralized effort where many people donate their little bit of time available to help out, but we're lacking in having one person who is available full time to this.
I don't consider that a complete weakness, as it's been invaluable to the present life of the coin so far .. but I still can't shake the feeling like we're just sitting around and waiting for people to pop in. Like there's no hooks other than a seriously impressive protocol. I hope I'm not alone when I feel like that's not enough.
Heh, we now have a very solid, reasonably sized and concentrated team that has shown over and over again that they're gonna be here. I believe I've read fluffypony at some point make the statement that "we are the benevolent dictator", which at the time of statement I'm sure I wasn't alone in feeling that I'd need to be convinced of that. Since then, I've become quite more convinced than I had been. They've been so much more agile, respondent, reliable and innovative than anyone could have hoped for. We've been pulled out of the fire at least three or four times by these people, when under direct attack .. tell me .. has there been any recorded history on this board of a group of people successfully fending a currency from attacks over and over again, all while providing satisfactory continued development? Maybe once or twice .. but is it three or four times now they've trumped the aggressor?
The will of these people to refuse to negotiate or find compromises with terrorists in the face of legitimate threats of attacks, and actual attacks, and instead provide solutions for us all that sends them packing is just .. admirable.
As far as the protocol goes - they've put together an entire research lab, have contacted cryptographers and the very developers that wrote the software that provides the tools necessary to even have Monero exist in the first place in order to both better understand and explain this protocol to people. They've provided us with research papers, and have clearly outlined future goals with regards to better understanding things like the difficulty mechanism, algorithm, and other core issues .. and then they've shared this information with us in mostly plain english .. where it's reasonably simple to understand what this is now.
This has continued to be a reasonably decentralized effort, despite calls for totalitarian change .. and it's been moved forward by people who donate more than "their little bit of time available", it's been hours on hours every single day of the week since then. No, this has hardly been a side project. These people have donated so much time and there's no way to really thank them properly for being here and getting shit done that needs to get done. We're not lacking in having one person at all, one person has not broken down this protocol down into its indivisible parts, internalized it, and then made it do what we're about to have it do. Not evan, not even satoshi, for all their grand efforts. Cleaning up someone else's mess has been the most heroic, almost altruistic effort that I've seen to date on this board .. and it's definitely not been in vain.
It seems like we're no longer sitting around waiting for people to show up. Maybe one or two more might pop up, but for the most part .. anyone that had something to say has already arrived here and said it. We're more than ready to take this to a new level of adoption, over the next couple of months.
This isn't much better than the alternative that this was forked from in that regard (Though we still don't have the ninja-mine).
You proved me right the fuck wrong
There's a few hundred other options calling people to one coin or another -- what can we do that brings them here, with the significant hurdles present today?
I believe that non-intrusive, non-aggressive, non-hostile advertising, coupled with legitimate participation with peers who are involved with cryptocurrencies will further solidify the basis of this community .. along with all of these people who continuously say 'we're ready to move forward with advertising' will help with this. The core team has reduced most of the immediately present mountainous hurdles to less than mole hills. I've almost no doubt at this point that over the next two months, we'll see the pieces fall into their places as we'll be able to leave this lulled chapter behind us.
Though there continues to be hundreds of other options, the interest in them is waning as people grow more tired of spinning their tires. We've watched the competition move forward with PoW distributions and PoS changeovers, ICO's, IPO's, IOT, ITO's, scams, Proof of Faucet, a few new PoW's, even Zero
CashCoin managed to pop out of the woodwork, along with all of the direct clones. I don't think it's much of a leap to say that the market is saturated, people are confused because there's not enough time in the day to keep up with all the repetitiveness, and it's getting awfully quiet here .. as people continue to look for the next best step forward.
There's surely a few good efforts out there, but it's looking like this one's gonna be ready to step up at the right time right along with the others. I know I'm rooting for it. I root for the competition too, but not in the sense that I think everythings gonna come out on top, more in the sense that there will be unfortunate circumstances that will likely cause more than a few to fade away. Those people will continue to come here though, as they won't fade along with it ..
Most people see CPU only, and are immediately dismissive because of the reasonable assumption that there's a hidden GPU miner -- or optimized CPU miner. How can anyone seeing this for the first time not feel like it's going to go the same route as Quark in a week or two?
Because quark had a six month distribution, and here we are, six months later, still calling for less coins to be spit out daily
Also, there's a GPU miner now. I think you can also rent hashpower to mine this as well. We've moved beyond the CPU only claim, and have been left with a very powerful statement that there is a reasonable parity of CPU mining to GPU mining, on levels that just aren't possible with so many other PoW's. When or if that will ever be close to asic or fpga parity, I don't really know .. but I'm looking forward to finding out!
Since I made the assumption above, we've been able to provide GPU miners for both AMD and Nvidia cards, being able to operate on both linux and windows. The software has been matched with continued development, even though there's still room for much more improvement. There's excellent pool software available too! We've made it pretty far as far as mining goes, even though I'd still like to see this all open sourced .. it's still pretty damn good for a little more than half a year.
Others see the anonymous aspect and are immediately turned off because of concerns regarding illegality, and fear of persecution. The fear of not knowing whether or not it's okay to have unlinkable transactions in the blockchain. How can we make the point that privacy is an integral part of inviting real business money into cryptocurrency (Where your competitors can't see who you do business with, or the contents of your wallet)?
This was something I originally was under the assumption that we would have to face alone. Since then, along with ourselves, there has been an impressive counter movement across so many different projects led by fantastic JL777, Dr. Zoidberg, dnote, Dan Metcalf, Evan, and so many other capable people and groups that have shown these people that a level of financial privacy is an absolutely important and integral issue in cryptocurrencies that is affordable and achievable. We have collectively shown this board that it's not something that's going away, despite our differences of opinion of how a cryptocurrency should manifest. There's many less threads popping up asking these questions, and some of it might be that people aren't completely interested, but I think it's mostly because we've all done a pretty good job at showing them why it's important.
Then there's the lack of usability -- where everything is still using command lines and there's no GUI (not a problem for me, but there's a distinct terror in using the command line that comes up constantly in the community). I understand this is being worked on which is fantastic -- but until that time how can we convince people that it's as simple as "download this file and double-click this batch file".
Six more weeks. Even then, there's still two existing GUI environments that have manifested as crutches to get us there. Point and click operation is the epitome of cryptocurrency success, and we've been teased incessantly, and I'm feeling reasonably confident that the teasing is going to come to an end in the very near future
For anyone that's lost money because of this .. I'm sorry. I'm sure I'm not alone. To have ever settled on making the choice between learning how to use a command line, or buying more RAM, or modifying your page file, opposed to leaving your representation of pseudo-XMR on an exchange .. and then actually seeing them disappear in an instant in regards to Mintpal must be heartbreaking. I had once advocated we use them as well as Poloniex. Clearly I was dead wrong. There's nothing I can say or do to get your money back to you, and I hope someone finds that asshole and gets their money back some day.
Following this, there are no pools. With the majority of people on this board being so used to having an immediate reward (however small it is), it's tough to catch one's interest. How can we keep people interested if they aren't getting the same instant mining gratification they get in any of the other coins? The manual faucet is a nice idea, but is there anyone working on an automated one?
We have fantastic pool software now, that's been tested and hardened against vulnerabilities like double-share submissions, and excessive dust on the network. We've come so far, thanks to the tremendous effort by all involved, which includes both miners and programmers to work the software into a usable state .. and we've accomplished it pretty well. I love not even having to make an account, and feel that it greatly lends to this being a private coin, as people don't have to be faced with using an email address they're familiar with. Additionally, we have an absolutely unique faucet idea that's being worked on by rpietila and implemented through his Crypto Kingdom game. I've seen him mention it as a type of faucet, and agree that it would put some XMR in the hands of some more people, while at the same time pulling a few coins off the main exchanges in exchange for entertainment. I'm eagerly waiting to see where it goes.
Even further, ubuntu gets double the hashrate of windows binaries . . something else that turns away the majority of end users. I understand that there are now binaries available that give a boost, but even only 60% will make any newcomer feel at a loss. I can't really see a way to convince people this is okay, and telling most of the to use ubuntu instead is unacceptable -- they'll just move on to something else.
So much work has been done on optimization on both windows and ubuntu since I made this claim. This is now a non-issue, and is yet another thing that will no longer be standing in our way. We worked together to make it this way.
The problem with the assertions above is that these people being pushed away are the exact people we need to be bringing into this coin. Even tougher is that once these opinions are formed, it's very hard to break from that mindset. It's been two weeks, and by now probably 90% of the board is aware that Monero exists . . and I'm worried that by the time the above problems are solved people will have just moved on, because an answer to each represents a significant amount of programming work or understanding.
With most of the people who have the skill to do this tied up in their own coin/different coin, and the other part being either too inexperienced or unmotivated to contribute -- what chance does this stand to pick up?
When I made the statement, there was either no subreddit in existence, or surely less than a few tens of people, and now we have: subscribe 740 readers with ~7 users here now. That's not bad, and surely can be better, but to say that growth hasn't occurred in a large way is illogical. We now also have our own forums available to us with totally custom software. I've made an account there, and will be posting there more often for sure. Just to have somewhere reasonably safe to go is a big step forward, afforded to us by the same people that have been carrying us for months now.
I don't think people have moved on completely, even those who are currently wandering surely keep an eye on us. I'm also seeing a few new people posting in this thread now, which is fantastic!
We've been given both fame and infamy, labeled as both trolls and great people, as a shit coin and the next best thing over and over again on this board by just about everyone at this point. Truth is, people don't yet know what to make of us. There's such a wide interpretation of what Monero is, where it's going, and what it can be that there's no possible way to fully define it as just one thing. We've been attacked on a technical level, and persevered. We've been socially abused, have taken the beating that everyone wanted us to get, and we're still here. We've provided information, new thought, and innovation that few if any people can or can even find the time to provide. We've made a niche, and are moving forward on taking on our new frontier.
Everyone here, espcecially smooth, tacotime, eizh, david, othe, fluffypony and everyone else posting, contributing, offering services, and writing source code here is just fantastic. Thank you all for everything you've accomplished, and everything you continue to accomplish every single day. We've really come so far because of all of you, in such a short amount of time.
As I sit here, thinking about the last six months, I'm finding myself really looking forward to the next six months, as all the groundwork comes to a close and we really start kicking some serious ass!
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