I was at the NYC event. The most blatant market manipulation I have observed was the smear campaign which followed. I have been quiet because I don't like to encourage people to sell, because they will probably harm themselves if they do so, yet I anticipated that the reaction cycle would be adverse to price, once I saw the event, so I have been lying low. I have now begun to buy again, and so I feel my influence is now less likely to harm anyone.
I am still very saddened by the intense negative emotion that has been expressed here. Surely you must see that such effusions are harmful to yourself. While you cannot undo the damage you caused to yourself, at least learn from this, and do not let facile emotions dictate words and deeds so incautiously in future.
As for fluffyponyza's tweets, I think they were very ill-considered. It seems particularly poor taste to say that pre-announcements would be unethical, after having made a pre-announcement. The fact that it was intended as a deceit does not make it more ethical. The logic of that is so bizarrely twisted that it saddens me.
I think the marvelous progress made by endogenic on iOS and Android support is the truly newsworthy part of the presentation. Surae's discussion of the process of cryptographic review was also of greater importance than fluffyponyza's troll. Unfortunately these are being overlooked, because they can not be exploited to make you puke up cheap coins.
I am glad you have posted on this and your response is reasoned and about in line with my own.
Yes, I think a lot of the reaction was OTT, but personally while I know what he 'meant' and FP's little joke was not existential, the ill-judged nature of it has created a bad atmosphere and a ton of troll fodder that it need not have.
Monero is still a great project and this won't change that, but by creating confusion and the potential accusation of pump and dump scam (even if inadvertently) was foolish.
That is about it. but one more small point:
I could do without people high up from 'Monero Mountain' with wine glasses in hand sneering at people who are genuine supporters of this project and deserve better. It only serves to entrench resentment, not heal it.
I used to truly respect monero and talk about it because it was great without anything majorly bad that I could tell except there being almost no marketing done and the community calling out scams. Monero and the code seemed to be solid, backed up by constant work done on it and a community growing. Now as I've been saying on reddit, fluffy has given other projects a reason to lash on monero by saying that the monero core team which includes fluffy as suspicious because of that announcement and could have profited. Being with the community for a while, I know it is far from the truth but the truth doesn't matter. Fluffy's trolling gave them a reason and has probably stalled the growing rate of the project a little.
Fluffy's stunt felt like a message to me: why are you trying to spread the words, why are you funding monero, I said don't buy monero. I told you so, I am a troll and so smart, I won't apologize to you people because I'm a troll. You guys are idiots for trying to tell people to buy monero when I clearly said don't. Why are you spending time on monero when I explicitly tell people to not buy it?
I'm clearly exaggerating and going to an an extreme but yes, I did feel a bit like that. It could be just me and hope it is.
I know where he comes from wanting to spread his message about not trusting people on a decentralized project but I believe he slowed down the monero project by his move although now the message he wanted to transmit is clearly understood by most people. I am sad to say that I have sold a small amount of XMR for the first time yesterday. I guessed that it would go to more than 100$ by the end of the year and I am still sure it will. I'll be on the sideline picking up some cheap moneroj when I feel it hit the bottom and stop trying to openly encourage people to buy Monero, like Mr. Fluffypony is so proud to have said. In the long term, I guess it will still succeed as any publicity is good publicity but frankly I was quite disappointed by his trolling.