How sexy are ring signatures?

I've never seen one in the wild.

Did anyone explain how they are going to take over the world?

Litecoin was mined like hell because all the GPU miners such as BCX were escaping Bitcoin as it went ASIC.

A coin needs something to drive that inrush of participation.

Even if we had 100X more oxygen, talking won't do a damn thing.

And if no one would want to mine the unblacklisted coins, wouldn't pools emerge that don't enforce the blacklist, either because they are in a jurisdiction that doesn't force them to, or they can otherwise evade any requirement to blacklist?  It seems like a ban on anonymity would have to be more than just a blacklist if that's the case.

Mining like hell doesn't drive the price up, all it does is drive the difficulty up where everyone is losing money, and this is of course unsustainable.

People need to want to buy and hold the coin in order to drive the price up. Even just driving it up enough where increased mining becomes sustainable.

That likely happened with Litecoin because of people did not like how things were going with Bitcoin and ASICs and centralization, and possibly other things people didn't/don't like about Bitcoin. Maybe how it has started to become corporate, BCF antics, hacks and scams and bad PR, etc.?

Monero (and to be fair Darkcoin, even if I think it is inferior) has gained the following it has because people do not like how things are going with Bitcoin in terms of privacy and fungibility. There has been too much talk about blacklisting/whitelisting, too many papers showing successful blockchain analysis, reports about Coinbase banning people because they send Bitcoins to a poker site, etc.

We had this discussion already a month or two ago. I think we've had this discussion more than once.

I suggest you ask BCX about how mining at a loss for many months paid off for him with BTC ($3 to $1200) and LTC (<$1 to $30).

Why not just buy the LTC? Because I think he already had the mining rigs. Sunk costs are free.

Also because exchanges are not convenient for everyone (5 ids, a blood sample, etc).

It is important to understand that there needs to be some reason to demand the coin. Mining alone isn't it.

Perhaps it isn't important to understand what that reason was for Litecoin, since that is more or less ancient history and Litecoin is well on its way to irrelevance. But I think it is pretty clear what are the reasons driving demand for leading enhanced-privacy coins today.


Hindsight being 20/20 sure. I mined Bitcoin at very low prices too. I don't feel like I was a genius for doing it. I just did it because it was interesting and likewise in hindsight it paid off. Plenty of things I've done because they were interesting did not pay off.

If only somebody would invent a way for users to crowd fund software with a single click, maybe whilst also giving reputation. That would help software development massively!

This almost seems like deliberate FUD

Right now DRK and XMR are the only ones getting any real attention. That is not a statement of merit about the others, just that they are so small and obscure, they can't really be confusing any noobs (BBR for example is #49 on coinmarketcap). Honestly even XMR is much less well known than DRK.

Bingo!

Zerocoin doesn't exist and BTCD has no anonymity (it is supposed to be based on teleport, which isn't implemented yet). AnonCoin is #29 and CloakCoin is #79.

I agree about some people waiting on the sidelines to see about Zerocash and that is certainly reasonable, but as for the others, I think you are a bit too close to this to recognize that almost literally no one is waiting on the sidelines to see if CloakCoin will dominate the segment.