Quote from: comp on May 31, 2017, 02:59:04 PM

Quote from: aminorex on May 31, 2017, 12:38:41 PM

Quote from: sp_skeptic on May 31, 2017, 12:04:31 PM

Quote from: aminorex on May 31, 2017, 05:46:26 AM

I could wish the USDT market was bigger, as I would rather avoid holding BTC during this period of relative BTC weakness and volatility. Alas, the turnover is just too low there to usefully trade the vol by hand. (Also, once my XMR levels are back, I need to book in BTC to fund my constantly losing NQ bear spreads, so USDT is just one more layer of conversion friction.)

Do you really know what USDT is about?

...I don't get it. Tethers are extremely dangerous to hold, IMO.

Yes, they are effectively non-recourse. So is BTC. They are as good or bad as the tether market makes them, and it does make them pretty much on par with USD. The low was due to a lack of confidence in bitfinex, which is a related party to the tether corp, but I personally think that confidence plunge was by an erroneous analogy to mtgox history, when bfx lost its usd banking relationship with WFC. I think the rebound was pretty predictable, therefore. Of course tethers should be created whenever they trade above dollars. Doing otherwise would be proof of incompetence. Tether supply should be just as unlimited as dollar supply. Heck, tether corp is practically acting as an instrument of fed policy.

Folks seem to worship BTC a bit much. It's only as good as it's technology, and it's technology is simply failing. Failing graduallly, yes, but I have yet to learn of an adequate plan actually being implemented to decisively avert persistent existenstial threats due to scaling problems. Failing also by being persistently traceable, linkable, for which, again, I know of no adequate plan actually being implemented.

Liquidity is king, this I do understand. It is tragicomic that ETH, the centralized app coin with tarpit-complete scripting and an attack surface so baroque it would make Rubens blush, is rapidly becoming more reliably and promptly liquid than BTC. To me this proves that there is a vacuum at the top, and a crying need for XMR to fill it. Folks talk about how XMR really belongs in the #3 slot, but on fundamentals I find it hard not to conclude that #1 is very much up for grabs. Monero is much more akin to digital gold than either BTC or ETH. It actually does the job that BTC and ETH both fail to do.

But, there I go again. Always early to every war. So un-American of me.

I do wish we lived in a world where people cared more about truth and less about group-think, hype, thoughtless habit, and sucking up to the alpha dog. For one thing, rational actor models would work so much better!

It's the rational actor model in full swing following the alpha dog. At least if it's your aim to make (fast) profits. Most people know the game they play and they really do not care about the underlying value of something. It's just grabbings those $$ and run behind the herd and try to get out before the herd gets out. IMHO that is rational. I do not see a lot of emotionally attached people (to the bitcoin). I guess they know it's fucked in the long term. But everybody just keeps dancing until the music stops.

Can you point out the value of Monero. I invested in Monero, but more from my gut feeling than anything else.

I agree with Hueristic with respect to Tether. It is a basically a promise to pay USD without any of the safeguards in the regulated banking system. So one literally gets the worst of both worlds. If you want to hold USD then hold USD cash or a bank deposit up to the 250,000 USD FDIC maximum. If the deposit is uninsured then one better trust the financial institution holding the deposit. The same would apply to other fiat currencies, CAD, EUR, GBP etc.

There is a reason why ETH has been pumped so high. It does not have the blocksize issue that XBT has. The trouble is that ETH was not designed for use as a currency. It is a platform for smart contracts and that by its very nature produces a very significant attack surface. The analogy here is that if one's car does not work one can use an 18 wheeler truck trailer combination or maybe an Australian road train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train instead, but really what one needs is a car that works. It is here where XMR comes in. It is "the car that works". This is for two reasons:
1) It has an adaptive blocksize limit with a minimum emission of 0.6 XMR. This means there is no need to restrict the blocksize in order to ensure the long term security of the blockchain as is the case with XBT, LTC, DASH etc.
2) It has built in fungiblity, privacy and anonymity. This means it can operate as cash.