The question of "wide usage" does very little to differentiate cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is about as widely used as Dogecoin or Quarkcoin when compared to the US dollar any major currency (i.e. not widely used at all). So the question doesn't help.  It merely lumps all crypto together. Bitcoin should not be lumped in together with Quarkcoin. All crypto is experimental. Any real long-term gamble (or "investment," if you want to be snooty about it) in crypto must be made based on expected value. Implied probability.  Aminorex said it better than I can say it:


And what he means by "asymmetric risk/return" is that there may be a small chance that xmr becomes the dominant form of private wealth storage in the world. Yet if it does, it will be worth at least hundreds of times more than it is now. I am not supporting or acquiring XMR based on its current use as a currency, but rather on its expected value.

jehst, don't use the word "gamble", xmr is not a day trading coin. 

Highest number is the best. It is safer, but you will pay more fees than when using a lower mixing count. I don't know for sure what it refers to, but I think it's the same as number of repetitions when using coinjoin (transaction will be mixed 3 times when using mixing count 3). I hope someone with more knowledge on this subject could explain it better.

Monero has seen quite a bit of transactional use, for a coin of its age and liquidity.  I can say this because I have used it enough, for actual goods and services purchases, so that I can place a respectable minimum bound on such uses.  That is not wide-spread use, just anecdotal use, like the bitcoin pizza and alpaca socks.  It proves that it *can* be used, an existence proof.  It does not prove that it *is* being used, or that it *will* be used.  Statistics from mymonero.com would be super-helpful in gauging trends in transactional use, or one could estimate on the basis of samples and transactional data from the blockchain.  Hard to put error bars around that, however, given the lack of a workable, rigorous sampling methodology.

Those numbers are so far from the sort of transaction volume required to provide fundamental value in the sense of quantity theory that they are largely irrelevant to that aspirational regime:  Likely, there are several model phase changes in between the current state and that goal state.  When you buy into XMR, you are buying into the tech, the team, the community, making a choice that the technology is sufficiently compelling, the team sufficiently competent, the community sufficiently vital, to create a compelling distinction from any alternatives meeting the requirements of a leading dark ledger.  Those are the only fundamentals that matter right now:  Tech, team, and traction.  (I needed a third "t", sorry.)

The numbers do improve over time, but 10% is beyond the pale.  It could be fixed with an airdrop or some other expedient to disperse those coins, but that leaves a lingering issue:  What does that history say about the competence, the moral and strategic capability of the leading actors?  The instamine distribution numbers could be fixed, but as long as those actors are still influential in the community, the technology decisions, the governance, I don't think it is a reasonable place to store value -- nor would I be inclined to trust lifestyle-threatening secrets to their quasi-cryptographic privacy schemes, let alone their implementation of those schemes, given the manifold ways in which they could subvert those obfuscations in order to conduct extortion which would be far, far more profitable than any instamine has ever been.  As an investment?  My observation of enterprises over the years has been that any sort of internal corruption absent rigorous and effective governance capable of detecting and correcting it, is probably going to be fatal to the enterprise as a whole.

I know this is not a DRK-bashing thread.  But DRK does have more nominal cap than XMR, so it is very important to the future of XMR.  XMR cap passed DRK briefly before the BCX fud fiasco.  Any meaningful speculation on XMR depends in some non-negligible part on its ability to take share from DRK.  thankful_for_today is no longer in the mix, so I feel the sources of potential corruption have been removed, the taint effectively washed away, from XMR.   The rapid mining start was somewhat rash perhaps, but entirely open and public, and the distribution impact miniscule.  This makes the investment potential much better.  The tech makes the transaction potential much better, because it is darker than dark, and less likely to be sabotaged, subverted.  The value store potential....well, that depends on so many other factors, and is so far out on the horizon that I won't even go there yet.

Emotional investment in the merits of a pet project (XMR for example), combined with a history of (e.g. FUD, and buffer/numerical overflow software) attacks upon it, can lean to an unhealthy level of sensitivity, paranoia even.  If you find yourself reacting in this way, you probably shouldn't be making investment or trading decisions until you've distanced yourself a bit from the situation emotionally, so that reason can do its work unclouded.  And please think twice before posting a reactive negative message.  It can harm your own interests by damaging the social atmosphere which your investment breathes, and depends upon.  God knows I've been guilty of hasty reactive hostility on more than one occasion.  Let that serve as a lesson for other kids.

That said, it is helpful to confront uncertainty with elucidating questions, confront error and falsehood with factual truth, and confront more subtle malignancies by exposing their dark folds to clarity in incremental steps with the scalpel of logic (rather than using a rhetorical hammer to smash at every perceived threat).

Which suggests to me that another use-case of XMR might be au courant :  In light of Über's "rides of glory" fiasco, I want to pay for car service in XMR.
Unfortunately that's not the whole solution:  The app is the root of the problem, not the credit card.  But it is a necessary part of the solution.
These flaps and furors will occur again in future.  When they do, we need to hop on them, inject the privacy benefits of cryptonote into the conversation.

The mixin count refers to the number of other signatures (aside from yours) in the ring-signature that authorizes the transaction. So a mixin of 3 means that there are a total of 4 signatures. This means that someone looking at the monero blockchain has no way of knowing which of the four signers is the true sender.

I'll see if I can find where it was cited, I think it was on either deepdotweb or reddit that was reporting that listings on Nucleus (similar to SR) were showing people asking for Darkcoin or Monero.

Either way, the casual Monero user is going to be interested in the anonymity of using it vs darkcoin/darksend. I could be wrong in my perception of what the casual monero user is going to use it for. Setting libertarians aside, what's the general use case for it vs something like cloakcoin? I think it's acceptance on more exchange and market acceptance.  Like I said, I could be wrong.