The other problem facing Monero is that their awesome RingCT upgrade just might not be actually desirable:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1516067.msg15381217#msg15381217

I say that with a heavy heart, because I invented essentially the same technology as RingCT, named Zero Knowledge Transactions. But I abandoned ZKT because I didn't see the great marketing win. I tried to find some coin to take my technology and no one was interested. Just goes to show there isn't much demand for it.

Monero's problem from the start was that DASH beat them to the first mover advantage of the hype around anonymity. AnonyMint and Gmaxwell had basically ignited that hype demand for anonymity back in 2013. Gmaxwell wrote about CoinJoin and AnonyMint was writing about how anonymity was necessary for fungibility and generally pointing out the coming battle against centralization of mining and potentially blacklisting. Then Mike Hearn proposed that redlisting,  blacklisting, whitelisting crap, and the interest in anonymity exploded.

So Monero was later than DASH on marketing, so they tried to compensate by emphasizing the fair mining launch and rpietila bought some and started telling preaching that it was the only altcoin he would buy after being a Bitcoin-only maximallist. AnonyMint got pissed off at rpietila (his former colleague in silver trading) for prematurely trying to kill experimentation in altcoins. AnonyMint become a thorn in Monero threads and they began to see him as someone they had to destroy reputationally wise.

DASH seems to have moved on to payment technology.

AnonyMint would waver away from criticizing Monero and then at times come back to it again. This was because AnonyMint was in the midst of sorting it all out in his mind as well. So AnonyMint was having mixed thoughts along the way of discovery. Of course there was the BCX incident along the way also.

Through all of it, I gained a lot of respect for smooth's logic skills and also his ethics. The one thing that bothered me was that smooth believed in the concepts of Monero's culture and I didn't. This includes the leaderless open source concept (which I don't think is how open source is really done), and the tolerance of bad apples in the community, as well as the censorship of the Monero Speculation thread. I could understand censoring the ANN thread, but not an ongoing discussion thread.

In any case, I still respect their coders, except the ones who are condescending.

I don't hate ArticMine. The issue is philosophical to the core of who I am. He has a Communist core (normal when coming from academia) and I detest Communism. It even bleeds into for example the culture I mentioned above.

Any way, it is too much to verbiage to try to explain all the nuances.

The bottom line is that Monero needed a market, but the only one they found was the delusion of "we are holier than thou" communism. That is my rough sketch stereotype, but of course there are other nuanced ways to look at it.

I don't see the demand for their technology and I don't see the culture of their community succeeding.

Sorry. And good luck. I could be wrong.


Edit: Monero could have done an ICO back in 2014 and pooled a lot of money to fund development. IMO, they blew their chance to be relevant. But let's see maybe they can shift their focus to corporations and compete with Zcash.