short altcoin in my opinion, x, achain, crypterium,
is perfect for you if you want short trade and short investment

Anything at the moment, it's all dropping, so there's a good chance that if you sell any coin for Tether and then buy back later, you'll be buying back at a lower price.
We are nearing the previously established bottom though of around $190b whole market, so there may be resistance there, but we shall see.

Here's a nice article that came out in finder.com recently: https://www.finder.com.au/meet-merit-the-invite-only-cryptocurrency-with-deliberate-friction

Unlike many other cryptocurrencies, "Merit doesn’t use wealth as a proxy for trustworthiness"

many projects are trying to push through the green energy, but not at all it turns out as it should. im hoping this project will not repeat the mistakes of other projects that have encountered these problems before.

MERIT aims to be the most friendly currency in the world. In my opinion, the first thing is to find a way to make MERIT popular. Next, features easy to use, secure, economical ... in exchange, payment and asset management of everyone...

http://merit.tera.tn and http://merit.samp.io successfully added to Pool Explorer:  Merit Pools

During one of the live video chat's with Adil he mentioned that their focus was going to be on ensuring that the Merit Market was fully operational before pursuing any exchange listings, not because of the technical aspect of the listing, but in a coin's early stages, it causes the team or in this case, the Merit Foundation to pay absurd prices for such a listing and generally new coins end up on third-rate exchanges.  However, with the expanding user base and use of the Merit Market, volume baselines and interest can be established and it will allow them to skip the lower end exchanges and actually be pursued by the higher end exchanges and usually when this happens, the exchanges reach out to the team and waive the listing fee, so in the long run, I believe in this strategy.

It's really exciting to see such a positive response here on BCT.  And I also appreciate all of the thoughtful questions -- and the constructive feedback.  I'm even more proud to see members of the Merit community chiming in and answering before a core team member has even had the chance to! 

Anyway, I'll try to start knocking out a couple answers now.

How do MeritMoney Links Work? - From @scambuster and steener83
First, MeritMoney links are the same as the "Escrow" links that we put in the title and in the main announcement.  We used the term "Escrow" because we thought that it would be clearer and easier to understand for a more advanced audience like the one here on BCT.  (We are still working to build awareness around MeritMoney Links as a concept.)

MeritMoney Links have some interesting properties that enable people to easily send/receive MRT, even when the recipient does not have a wallet yet.  The tricky part in doing this, of course, comes down to doing it without centralization.

We actually implemented this at the protocol level with the creation of a new OPCODE that we call EASYSEND.  The idea here is that the user is able to use a decentralized (blockchain-based) escrow for any transaction they wish.  These transactions are signed by the sender, like any normal transaction, and sent to an intermediary escrow address, where they wait to be claimed or cancelled (if cancelled, they will be reclaimed by the sender.) 



When a MeritMoney link is being created, Merit is creating a SecretKey under the hood will be used as part of the payload to claim the Escrow from the blockchain.  When creating the Escrow on the blockchain, the sender also has the option to add a timeout as well as a secondary password.  These will be assembled together to create the Escrow on the blockchain. 

The recipient simply must produce the relevant secrets needed to claim the Escrow from the blockchain.  This will, at the very least, include the SecretKey and the expiration blocktime.  This same mechanism is used by the sender if they are going to cancel and reclaim the MeritMoney link.

So, if you, as a user are creating a MeritMoney link without adding a secondary password, then the link is as good as the money!  This is, of course, the way that fiat works -- a dollar bill is spendable as soon as you pick it up off the street.  The ultimate design of this on-blockchain  escrow is to make it easy for people to send small amounts of money to eachother.  If you are sending a large amoutn of money to someone, then it's a good practice to add a secondary password.  This way, if the link is intercepted, the bad actor cannot actually access the funds.



----

To make these escrows portable, we simply create a standard URI structure that can be used via the Web (as we do in our Web Wallet) or via a desktop protocol handler.  The application just needs to know how to assemble the MeritMoney link's secrets together to attempt to claim the escrow on the blockchain.  Today, our mobile wallets (Android + iOS), our Desktop LightWallet, and the WebWallet all know how to do this.

You can find more detail in the BluePaper in section 6.1 - Frictionless Transactions.

I hope that helps!

Thanks for this answer -- I will also wait for someone on the Core Team to elaborate more.

It seems to me that there are two paths: 1) Getting people into crypto for the first time (helping them get other coins, possibly).  2) Allowing people to use crypto in their daily life, like buying stuff. 

claims to be asic friendly so it is worthless.


Sounds harsh but we don't need asic  friendly coins or algos.


If all the world is a perfect super highway (asics)  what good is it without cars too drive on it?(gpus)

Now does this mean I hate asics no I don't.

It does mean we need

Fpga coins
GPU coins
CPU coins