Topic: [XMR] Monero Speculation - page 1400. (Read 3313576 times)

Altcoins being a prisoner's dilemma. Great post! It explains why there are so many anti-bitcoin shills these days.

I hope to make a much clearer and more cohesive case at a later date, but for now I must work.  The level of emotion and the rhetorical cast of the arguments I am seeing here does not inspire confidence.  Conclusions simply do not follow from the level of desire for an outcome, nor from an intense aversion to alternatives.

Of course, and I already made that post a few weeks ago:

Altcoins are a prisoner's dilemma and not possible to beat Bitcoin

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/altcoins-are-a-prisoners-dilemma-and-not-possible-to-beat-bitcoin-1398586

Due to this dynamic, if you like Monero for some reason and were operating under any sort of game theory or art of war tactics, even if you hated Bitcoin, you would pump Bitcoin for the halving then move to Monero afterwards because that's what is most beneficial to you.

The way that Eth went from nothingness to people pretending it's challenging Bitcoin (mostly with automated spam accounts), while having absolutely garbage fundamentals, reeked of a banker attack on Bitcoin itself.  They're monopoly men and drank the koolaid make believing Vitalik is the second coming of Jesus, so they thought they could both attack Bitcoin and make money at the same time.  They bought up all the coins in IPO and initial release, then banks like Goldman pumped it.  Now they get to find out they effectively pumped a useless turd.  So while it did have some minor, temporary stagnation effect on BTC, it's going to cost them a lot of money unless they can find lots of greater fools to unload those ethers on.

No, if everyone decided today that BTC is utterly uninteresting the price would very quickly reach 0. And there would be nobody buying BTC to exchange for XMR. No sane XMR holder would sell for BTC. The BTC/XMR pair would be rendered useless on the spot and at best fractions of XMR would be sold for BTC in the final hours of bitcoin's death.

If we extend the time period it takes for most people to lose interest in BTC to something longer like 2 months you'll still have early speculators dumping BTC to preserve their wealth. Some will dump for USD and some will dump for XMR. But a few enlightened speculators would likely be enough to cause major panic and havoc to the cryptocurrency space. The smartest speculators will recognize the fallacy that will haunt the space, namely: A coin can easily be replaced with a little improvement in technology with no ill effects on the economy. This is a fallacy because if that is the case there will be a race to the bottom in every following coin in the dawn of a new one. Competition will drive the time it takes to replace a coin down from perhaps 3 years today to 1 year, 6 months, 3 months, 1 month, 2 weeks, 1 week, 1 day... At some point coins are replaced so often that they can no longer hold any value. What is the properties of money? One is store of value. Which will be no more. Without store of value we can't have a medium of exchange. Without that, there is no currency.

Why should there be a halving pump? There is no information arbitrage, everyone knows about the halving.
It would be pure speculation/manipulation and not sustainable imho.

It is in progress right now, as we speak.  It starts with a volatility squeeze.

My stack observation is this: Lots of price suppression walls are getting tagged by the 'minnows' and I have observed immediately after it happens the frustrated whale will then throw up a new and higher price suppression wall to try to reacquire.  
  
Once we penetrated 360, there was a temporary wall at 380 before the whale reconsidered and moved it up to around 430.   He obviously considered that perhaps the momentum of our new upward movement might eat into it, which he doesn't want.  He just wants to keep the price down while he eats all the minnows he can.  
  
I say @#$%-em, this has been a nice healthy correction and there are many who would love for you to sit this out while they acquire at these levels.  Try to discern when the big boys are acquiring and swim with them, rather than against them.  (Disclosure: I am, of course, long XMR and have substantial holdings myself so take everything I say with a grain of salt).  

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As far as the 'bitcoin halving pump', I am becoming increasingly convinced it might not happen at all.  When the majority of players expect something in a market, it usually does not happen.  Ergo, everyone 'knows' bitcoin will go on a bull run soon, or barring that will retain its value (why wouldn't it?), so the most likely scenario is actually a horrific bitcoin crash/correction down to the $150 level.  I am not too worried for the altcoin market - it has shown recently a divergence from its classic enslavement to the Bitcoin price.  I think it might be rocky, but I would expect the strongest cryptos to soar under such circumstances relative to btc, not flounder.

You really need to distinguish a variety of cases and phases of development in order to apply that reasoning suitably.  

Firstly, we should distinguish application tokens and financial engineering vehicles from cash money.  The end-game for cash money has a well-defined fundamental valuation, with low model risk (Fisher quantity theory), whereas the model risk for app tokens and ponzis is vast, and the best case upside potential is much curtailed relative to cash money.  All crypto is now primarily a speculative vehicle, but BTC at least has a fundamental economy of some size, and that won't change suddenly.

Secondly, we should distinguish the various levels of maturity of cash money.  Gold is mature.  Debt-based national currency under centralized management is experimental, but ubiquitous.  Bitcoin is unknown to 99.95% of the potential user base, and lacks essential features, and development is stagnating.  Monero is unknown to 99.9999% of the potential user base, and lacks essential features, but development velocity is quite respectable.  Clearly the growth potential of XMR is much greater than any other instrument in operation today, if you consider the prospect of becoming the primary international medium of financial exchange to be within the realm of possibility.

The best example of crypto achieving bitcoin mcap is bitcoin, and that took 5 years.  It takes time for money to flow, and the pipes are narrow enough so that back-pressure prevents too rapid a rise in mcap for XMR.  It would take perhaps $200mm influx to bring XMR to parity with BTC.  Poloniex can handle perhaps 20000BTC/diem, max, so it would take at least two months for parity to be achieved, if everyone decided today that BTC was utterly uninteresting, and only XMR mattered.  So, if XMR will be successful similarly to BTC, with no less speed, it will take between 2 months and 3 years to get there.  Meanwhile, there is no particular reason for BTC to decline while XMR ascends.  Quite the contrary, in fact, as buying XMR requires first buying BTC.  By the time XMR reaches USD 420, BTC will almost certainly pass $1k - unless a reliable and accessible fiat exchange or three opens meanwhile.

Once XMR\fiat exchange is safe and easy, then it becomes possible for XMR to supplant BTC in most if not all of its cash money use cases.  Whether it does so will depend on the robustness of the XMR economy, relative to the BTC economy.  As the size of both economies become substantial, the speculative fraction of the value of the tokens becomes much smaller, and hence the impact of confidence is much lower.  Moreover, the transition of a large economy from one medium to another is not going to be instantaneous, so there is plenty of time for users to adapt.  BTC will never go away in any case.  It will just be used less.  It is likely to continue to grow in value even as it is overtaken by XMR.  Only when the XMR economy is substantially larger than the BTC economy does it begin to threaten the value of BTC.  And that might never happen, for all we know.  I personally consider it very likely, because privacy is only increasing in importance over time, and because XMR is much better able to adapt to changing circumstances, by virtue of its release model and team dynamics.

I have to disagree with extreme catastrophic change models, because there is a lot of inertia and the channels for money flows are so narrow.  Huge volatility, yes, always, until the economy dominates over speculative flows.  But stuff takes time, and people adapt.  BTC has strong advocates, and they will keep using it, and keep supporting its value, for a long time to come, no matter how wildly successful XMR should become.

At that point bitcoin is worthless and there will be nobody who cares to defend it.

This analysis / perspective does call into question the philosophy of dedicated hardware resistance (ASIC resistance), or the desire to keep a coin network continuously ASIC resistance. Furthermore, I would argue that your scenario ignores the very likely scenario of network warfare - if monero replaced bitcoin today (replaced in terms of valuation per coin I assume), then all that would happen is the bitcoin empire would leverage their financial dominance, buy all available cloud computing power available...

(some quick googling).. amazon circa 2015 1.5 million servers (http://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-amazon-cloud-computing-infrastructure/), assume, i dunno, 400 h/s on each server (very low estimate)..... thats 600 Mh/s. And thats one company, roughly 6 months ago. Assume google and microsoft have equal power, there's 1800 Mh/s just waiting to crush the monero network, in case the bitcoin network needed to engage.

... and then destroy the functionality and security of the chain. This apparently happened once in cryptocurrency history (something with scrypt)

So I think as part of your analysis / perspective, one needs to integrate the influence of different PoW and the security that ASICs provide.

Thus, in my opinion, an established coin (with a strong network) can't be replaced overnight, and it has little to do with the software technology. Much like how the US interstate highway system (or any road network) couldn't be replaced overnight, and that has little to do with the changing technology of cars.

( And this isn't saying that Monero's (well, cryptonote's) choice of ASIC resistance was unwarranted - IMO, any new cryptocurrency needs a new PoW to defend itself against attack from other networks and promote healthy distribution. But what do I know)

Wow.  I could have written that exact post, except I never owned anoncoin.  This is so true: All crypto is far too correlated to constitute diversification. Should be obvious after these last 48 hours.

I agree, the chart is still bullish and no reason to worry chartwise.
However, now it is excellent time to hoard as many Moneros as possible before landing to Moon if not Pluto.
I do not see any reason why an investor should be worried the way the coin is mined in the first place. Obviously miners love to get bigger slices of the pie and I do understand their worries about competition in mining, as an investor one needs to calculate the emission fully dumped. The current trading volume can bear even higher emission without affect on price of the coin in my honest opinion.

Also, very unlikely.  I expect XMR to gain during the BTC rally over the next two months, and to continue gaining as BTC retraces thereafter.

I went through a period of promiscuous speculation before settling on XMR as the best long-term value store and private transmission technology.  I owned anoncoin, darkcoin, boolberry, and maid during that period.  I have not owned any of these for over a year now.  I speculated in ETH for a bit recently, and rolled gains into XMR.  In general I prefer my diversification to be outside of crypto.  All crypto is far too correlated to constitute diversification.  I do scale between BTC and XMR frequently, while market making, however. 

My knowledge of those coins is largely obsolete, so I will make no comments upon them now.

If they serve two very different purposes, I can imagine two coins holding similar market capitalization. I have said before that I believe bitcoin can have a complimentary currency that offers better privacy and is better scaleable. But if you take a coin like LTC and tell me that since there are 4x as many LTC each coin should be worth 0.25 BTC (4 LTC = 1 BTC) you're going down a very dangerous path because that means limited supply is lost. I have argued against this fallacy for years, and finally people have mostly shut up with this stupidity.

But now they have adapted a new argument which is that a BETTER coin, one with improved technology can replace bitcoin (a more significant change than clone coins like LTC). Here I will argue that the improvement must be very significant and bitcoin needs to stagnate and fail to improve over a very long time, something which is far from the case at the moment. The block size FUD is a very recent issue.

If a coin can be replaced over night by another coin with better technology all coins become very vulnerable and nobody is going to want to hold any significant value in any coins. Imagine that monero replaced bitcoin today. Then next week the bytecoin folks clones monero and adds GUI to it. What will happen? Everybody will dump monero and jump onto the improved coin, because who'd want to hold a coin without GUI? I mean, GUI is necessary for mainstream success. Then the week after another coin is launched, a clone of Monero with GUI and some other nice feature integrated, RingCT maybe? Everybody dumps and buy the new coin. This will happen over and over again, an infinite number of times as improvements are added. The incentive is no longer to maintain a coin over long term, but to launch a quick clone with some new fancy feature and dump on all the suckers buying it. It's exactly what we've seen with the shitcoins and it won't work. People will stop buying them. If there's not faith in a currency staying around and holding value it won't hold any value at all. Without value the entire cryptocurrency space is dead.

A good example right now would be ETH, but also XMR. If any of these coins replaced bitcoin (as in bitcoin getting massively dumped for either) within say the next couple of months, we have the scenario I describe above. There is no reason to believe that there's won't come a coin along 1-2 months after that and replace monero or etherum. Thinking we have reached the maximum potential is naive.

The price of Monero is correcting and consolidating. If it stays around 0.0035 for a few months, that is good.

If I may, I've also been thinking about this for quite some time.

If there is no considerable price increase within the next few months, chances are that everything since the 152$ low in january '15 has been a very long correction within the larger bearish trend. In this scenario BTC would, at least, test the above mentioned low, having good chances of going into the double digits. In this case I would assume that alts would do what they do most of their time, which is to lose value against bitcoin, leading to lower lows.

Actually, from an Elliott Wave point of view, this scenario could be viable even in the case of a big BTC pump, but this analysis would be better suited then.

For XMR, this is what I currently see: https://i.imgur.com/dV1pCRh.png

There are 2 possibilities in my chart:

Red means that the action since the .00422 top is just another 4th wave correction, which should stop somewhere between .003 and .0026, before going back up for another top somewhere close to .005. This has support from the hidden bull divergences both on the AO and on RSI, as showed by the black arrows in the indicator section.

Blue means that the impulse has finished and the price is ready to heavily correct. Supporting this is the evident decrease in strength on the latest tops, with compounding divs both on the RSI and AO. Also, what worries me is the increase in selling volume on this latest move down, which suggests that a change of trend is possible (this usually happens slowly and then picks up momentum). This scenario would be in line with a BTC price increase in the next few days, as people sell XMR to "be" part of the BTC rally.

There's been much discussion here about current or future coins that might compete with Monero in private value transfer, but I don't recall discussion of MaidSafe / Safe Network, which claims to provide private value transfer without using a blockchain.

I was surprised to see Aminorex mention (long ago) that he owned some MAID at Poloniex. Aminorex, do you still own any, or were you just trading it back then? Is it worth spending time to investigate their claims seriously?

In addition to the above, I'd like to know why he believes there will be a big halving pump.
I'd also be interested in your view on these questions.

What is your view on what it will mean for BTC and alts if there is no (big) halving pump?

However unlikely that might be, please consider the hypothetical. I'm interested in your view.

EDIT: typo