Also seems the GUI release is (unsurprisingly) resulting in more people running full nodes already.
Node count had been hovering 390-420 ish last few weeks, now up to 447, highest I have seen it. This is great for the future and we are only one day in
https://monerohash.com/nodes-distribution.htmlIf anyone has a historic chart of node count I would be really interested to see that.
Can't wait for Backround Mining to be introduced - is there any timeline on this ? I think one of the most important issues for monero now is to get the security level up and I am pretty sure that there are many of us here who would gladly 'donate' hash power to the network will little expectation of reward (other than the intrinsic reward of helping to secure the network in a distributed manner)
I hope Jaxx can follow through in a timely manner with their mobile wallet and integration into their upcoming hardware wallet that is being developed. Or anyone else!
The pieces really seem to be falling into place for monero now. 2% of Alphabay business already, with no GUI, no HW wallet, no mobile wallet, no Ring CT ... 5% by end of Q2 seems entirely possible imo. Then we can say the snowball is really starting to roll ...
Bring on 2017

I want to get back into Monero, I invested originally back in the day but eventually sold. It seems they are finally making it more user friendly with the GUI. But I still have problems with the scalability problem. Some people complain about Bitcoin's blockchain being too heavy but we already got it figured out with segwit, lightning network etc to scale for the next years. Now my question is, how is Monero going to deal with its blockchain which as far as I remember is a couple times heavier than Bitcoin or grows at a faster rate? Also how fast is Monero nowadays compared to Bitcoin?
I guess for its niche that is not an important but its still good to know how thinks are going to be dealt with in the future.