Quote from: Este Nuno on September 05, 2014, 02:58:31 PM

Quote from: aminorex on September 05, 2014, 05:06:01 AM

Quote from: vuduchyld on September 05, 2014, 03:15:42 AM

(BBR) was drifting down around .00015 for a looooong time. All of a sudden, starting last week (August 28th), volume on Polo is wayyyyyy up and the price is up to .001.

What caused this?

edit: Supernet, maybe? If so, where can I short the fucker?

My take: Risk is poison. BBR is controlled by a lone anonymous actor, possibly Andrey Sabelnikov, probably a member of the team that produced the bytecoin scam. In contrast, the XMR team includes several well-known persons, some of whom identify by legal names openly. BBR just has a lot more risk baked in. The market priced the caps at a 32:1 ratio as a result (and ended up oversold due to momentum). This made hedging XMR with BBR cheap. That, and CZ's well-deserved reputation for development, kept attention on BBR. (Also the bytecoin gang's sockpuppet theatre raging against XMR kept using it as a foil, which drew attention.) SuperNET was all it needed to pump. Regardless of James' intentions he certainly seems to be surrounded by a cloud of PnDers. Now the hedge is no longer attractive, and only momentum and the pump keep price flying here.

I won't comment on how to short SuperNET. Look at its components. I have a lot of skepticism of SuperNET myself, but it's based on circumstantial factors rather than substantive ones. I find it difficult to locate the substance. Something about the copy always makes my mind rebel if I try to read it. It's like trying to look into your foveal blind spot. I probably have too much training in "legacy" finance to understand it properly. I'm too old, and I'll die soon, so that innovators can sail smoothly over the rainbow to crypto-valhalla without my trollish philistinism to harsh their mellow.

To short BBR, you need to find someone who will loan it to you. The interest rate will probably be exhorbitant. When I shorted I did fairly well but paid out a large chunk as interest. My short performance was degrading rapidly at the end, which means I was taking increasing risk, so I lost interest. Also I think I was making volatility worse, rather than better, at the end, which is bad for BBR, so I knew it was time to stop. Good mean-reversion strategy performance should result in lower volatility in the underlying. If it is doing the opposite, you're doing it wrong - or you're trading momentum. I may do again, but not until I have more clarity on the fundamental and technical situation in BBR - which may never happen since it is just not very interesting to me. I want to buy future reserve currency, stack it high, and hold it long. Anything else is just a distraction.

I think it's worth pointing out at least that 1) Sabelnikov was never found guilty of any wrong doing and Microsoft agreed that it was not him who ran the botnet. 2) Even if CZ was part of the original CryptoNote team, there's no indication that he was involved with Bytecoin at all. Not only that, but if he was involved with CryptoNote, the act of creating BBR(with the new PoW) alone by himself would be strong statement that he disagreed with what Bytecoin did and wanted no part in any sort of scam.

Personally, I don't think it's likely CZ is a bad actor. Whoever he is. At worst it appears he could be a famous hacker responsible for writing some code that other people used in a malicious way(the botnet). I'm not going to defend that if that happened. But we don't know anything about that what happened in that situation and there's a whole range of possibilities, including being coerced in to writing code. We will likely never have sufficient information to make any sort of judgment either way.

So there is some risk with an anonymous developer, that is a constant. On the other hand with BBR you also seem to get someone who is an expert at dealing with what is becoming apparent is a very shaky code base. So there is some trade off there. I'm not making the argument that BBR is less risky with a single developer than XMR is with 7 or 8. But I do hope that anyone considering the situation will at least take the time to make a fair evaluation of CZ on what he's done so far.

Sometimes more is worse...