Topic: [XMR] Monero Speculation - page 1583. (Read 3313576 times)

During the bubble for sure. Every fucking day (maybe not a roundtable but I really do think they had at least one guest or host discussing it literally every day). Before the bubble, no.

Huh? Afair CNBC was having roundtable discussions about it.

That dork Glenn Beck at Fox mentioning often.

A lot depends on your definition of mainstream. If you think it encompasses all manner of things including techie news, precious metals, alex jones, etc. then I guess I'd probably agree there was some element of pumping to it. Obviously people became aware of Bitcoin somehow, and while there was some word of mouth, there was also tech news, some blogs, probably precious metal stuff, etc.

Those sources were around in 2011 and early 2013 and probably were early to the game reporting the late 2013 pump (and reporting on the halvening).

If you define it as the way the middle 80% (say within one sigma of average ordinary people on whatever sort of spectrum you want to use) get their information, then I don't agree it had anything to do with it. Yet.

There are many people who are of the opinion that Wikileaks was a global elite funded entity. For example they point out who Assange was staying with while under trial in the UK, how Wikileaks launched the Arab Spring (which appears to be the work of the global elite), etc..

The pizza story was spread all over the internet. And then the Wikileaks event was the next big one that spread all over the internet.

Also smooth you dismiss the effect of the articles between the first and second bubbles. Any one who knows marketing understands, repetition, repetition, repetition. So these articles were building the awareness in people like myself, so that we were more poised to jump in 2012 and 2013. I actually was tempted to jump in 2012, but then I got so ill starting around end of 2011. I had read Szabo's Bitgold and seen the Bitcoin whitepaper even earlier than mid-2011 (I believe it was roughly 2010 when I was working on a silver vault idea).

Perhaps my awareness was due to being in the silverbug community. And perhaps it was viral due to word of mouth. The scale at which so many of us were aware of these things, tends to indicate that it was receiving some other forms of distribution boost on the internet.

I hope we can get to the bottom of this. I am curious. Wish we had more hard data to work with. I am very sleepless at the moment, so I can't really think clearly.

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? I think we discussed this here recently. Some say it will take a new ATH. I think $1000 is enough.

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.

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 a year or so after the first pump. Still I guess $6-8 when the article came out.

I first read about bitcoin in Wired when bitcoin was about $5-$8 in 2011. The bubble was already underway I guess. I had just enough time to get my money to dwolla and then gox and then watch it crash and crash and crash...

The pizza was in 2010. If you heard about when it occurred, that was at a time when there was even less coverage.


Okay, so anything you read is mainstream media. I'll stick with the conventional definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_media

I don't know whether Alex Jones mentioned it in 2010 or who did (quite possibly some precious metals sites -- again I wouldn't call those mainstream media, but maybe you would). I can say that most of the people trading Bitcoin in 2011 were just actual regular old Bitcoiners. People who had been around for a while, downloaded the Satoshi client, did mining, etc. People who would have been hypothetically pumped in by mainstream media wouldn't have even had any idea how to buy it if they wanted to, unless highly motivated and at least somewhat techie. Did you ever try the MtGox UI? Enough said.

There was no Mainstream Media Pump in 2011 or early 2013 in my opnion as a participant. Late 2013 is debatable, but I still doubt it. If it happens that way it will be the next one. Now that's a different story entirely. There was no Coinbase (existed by barely usable in 2013), Gemini, etc. back then. Now there is. Look out above (XMR too).

I remember that Wired article too which I had read some of. But I heard about the 10,000 BTC for pizza when it occurred. If slashdot was the only source to publish that, it somehow was showing up in my Google searches and other MSM ways that I was connecting to news.

You can't say that just because the news source is slashdot, that the MSM weren't promoting it.

Slashdot didn't spread to me by word of mouth!! Rpietila didn't tell me. I wasn't talking to anyone else in the tech industry at that time.

Perhaps I read it on Alex Jones which is very MSM.

You seem to entirely discount the effect of Google and other portals to influence awareness.

Post-bubble by 2 weeks and sucking in a lot more fools to buy on the way down trying to catch a falling knife.

I need to sleep. See ya next day...

That story was already post-bubble! The bubble ran from mid May to June 15, 2011, when MtGox was hacked.

From then onward it was a long, long,  long, cold winter.

EDIT: Look like peak was actually a bit earlier, June 9, although I don't have high confidence in chart data from 2011 being accurate.

EDIT 2: If you click through to that blog post, the same author wrote another one in April, so there was SOME coverage, but realistically very little.

It's surprising, given the public's interest in privacy/surveillance issues post-Snowden, how little MSM coverage there is for the privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies.

Incorrect:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110627061856/http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/06/14/wikileaks-asks-for-anonymous-bitcoin-donations/

Now I remember that story too. I was sort of aware of Wikileaks and when I heard that, it added fuel to my building awareness of Bitcoin as a phenomenon.

You see only what you want to see. That is a problem with objectivity.

The first bubble was in mid 2011. I was here for that too. There was NO mainstream coverage at all. If you didn't find out about it from word of mouth or techie sites like slashdot (not at all mainstream then), you didn't find out about it all. The first article in Wired I can find was June 2011, but even that was post-bubble (May).

Coverage was still sparse even in early 2013. The main coverage around that time was 2013 was of Schumer calling to ban it because of silk road, but that coverage mostly dies out when the price dropped again. The pizza coverage you are talking about was specifically coverage of the bubble that was already happening ("The pizza now worth a million dollars!")

Mainstream covers stuff, including Bitcoin, that bubbles (or sometimes crashes). Other than that they mostly ignore it. Chinese stock market being another perfect example. Pretty much no coverage unless it is making new highs or new lows.

Oh come on I joined the forum in March 2013, because the fervor was picking up steam.

And the MSM did the 10,000 bitcoins for one pizza promotion that drove the first bubble, which even I heard of and I wasn't paying attention to much of anything at that time (I was off on other tangents including start of my health decline, learning Haskel, silver business, etc). I didn't even know about the first bubble though until 2013. Or maybe I had seen one story in the MSM that Bitcoin had dived from $30 to $2.

Do we have a different definition of MSM? I mean any organized news outfit (that depends on funding) that isn't a Drudge report done by one man.

That's not my recollection at all, and I was here, actively mining and trading. They were late to it. Followers, not drivers.

Now as for what actually did start it and drive it, that's a whole other ball of yarn. MtGox issues, China speculation, Silicon Valley heavy hitters buying in, reduced supply from the halvening, the transition to ASICs. I've heard all these theories and more. Who knows.

EDIT: If you are saying that an elite drove it behind the scenes, that may be possible. But the mainstream media did not drive it with public coverage.

The MSM drove the bubble in 2013. And now they drive the long-winded collapse. Perfectly fits with the model I presented for the Chinese elite (who we are know are in bed with the Western elite, e.g. see Nelson Rockefeller spends most of his time over there now and he was the one who told Aaron Russo the plan for 9/11 and Bitcoin before it happened).

I am often amazed smooth how you can be so intelligent in so many areas yet totally blinded in others. I mean you don't even acknowledge the potential timing correlation I just pointed out.

I actually hope you are correct and that my suspicions are paranoia.

Team Dash already has dibs on XT's Mike Hearn.  It's only fair Monero gets the unappreciated/disgruntled guys from Core!   

No, because they really didn't.

They started covering it only after it starting making new highs in 2013. They covered a bit of the Silk Road and MtGox stuff, but never in a manner that promoted Bitcoin at all. The latter was often mis-reported as Bitcoin having failed or gone bankrupt or something.

Since the price sagged in 2014, they barely cover it at all. Occasionally there is something in business news (WSJ, Bloomberg, etc.) but that's about it. Hearn's piece in the NYT was unusual, and again negative.  A lot of the (business) coverage now avoids mentioning Bitcoin at all and talks about "the blockchain" (of course, that's where most of the VC money is going too).

I don't see the MSM promoting Bitcoin at all. If Bitcoin enjoys further success from here it will without (short term) help from MSM/elite.

You can still find non-tech people or even some tech people who have never heard of it, or think it failed in 2014. Some techie I know outside of crypto recently owed me $20. I asked if he wanted to send Bitcoin instead of Paypal, etc. and he had no clue whatsoever. Pretty common.

Smooth's comment there catches my attention because it is conceptually perfect this notion that since this benefits the world then open source is the correct way that any one can contribute and together we can build something. And we can all profit by holding the coin and/or the ecosystem benefits of having the coin.

Unfortunately the economics and politics don't seem to be working out that way. Currency requires the participation of the majority.

Perhaps the missing ingredient was instant microtransactions so that the sucker could just blast off in the network effects arena. That is my bet if I proceed.

Seems to me that Bitcoin lost momentum (and encouraged forks such as Blockstream) when it failed to solve the key scaling features.

Contrary to CoinHoarder's total smearing of me in the other thread, I still see a huge possible window of opportunity.

How to make something like that happen without burdening it with too many cooks (devs) too early yet also not be ignored by the other smart devs because either they are correct that I am not worthy of their attenion or otherwise being a potential mortal threat to their vested interests if I was worthy. As smooth says, people have a difficult time seeing what they are paid (or vested) to not see.

Also I don't like this idea by Monero devs that they need the Bitcoin core devs (although nullc seems to be a really smart dude....isn't that gmaxwell?). You have enough smart guys already, but you need to have the right design. More smart guys will just be too many cooks in the kitchen and bog you down in endless discussions.

We need a leader (a new Satoshi) who can implement all by himself. I don't know if I am that guy. Probably not (too ill, over a decade since I have completed a major project, not even a cryptographer).

Apologies I am rambling because been awake too many hours. Maybe there is a morsel or two of coherence above.

Edit: I think my point is none of us are Satoshi. Certainly not gmaxwell nor Adam Back. As smart as they are in narrow fields such as cryptography, they have both proved they can totally screw up Bitcoin and don't have the leadership nor holistic design sense to be vanguard in revolution. When I read Adam Back's publicized and politicized exchanges over the block size issue, I just cringe (hey the entire point of trustless decentralization was we wouldn't need such soap opera spokesmen so I would rather hear some paradigm-shift technical solution that eliminates the need for any politics whatsoever, e.g. Linus adopted decentralized version control of Git to rid himself of being the only one with write permission on the Linux repository...as he says that many people value his repository but  they are welcome to grab from anyone else's so that no one has a monopoly).



Seems to me he is saying that Blockstream may be technically knowledgeable yet incompetent and irresponsible in terms of holistic issues, marketing issues, focus, etc..