Someone is spending tens of millions of dollars to suppress Monero
These past few months Monero is facing increasing attacks on multiple fronts. 1. Spam and Doxing campaign to discredit Monero 2. Several targeted DOS Attack in a month utilizing sophisticated zero days against mining nodes https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/km276x/second_monero_network_attack_update/ 3. Exchanges delisting XMR due to governments pressure https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/fyini7/huobi_korea_delists_monero/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/koexu5/montero_delisted_from_bittrex_on_jan_15th_thats/ 4. IRS open bounty for Monero 5. ChainAnalysis report on Darknet transactions https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-crypto-crime-report-intro-ransomware-scams-darknet-markets Completely left out Monero, though it is currently the only currency accepted by the largest darknet marketplace, WHM (White House Market). However ChainAnalysis did manage to raise 100 MM USD in their series D recently, bringing their valuation to just over $2 B USD https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/series-d-announcement Think about that, a company whose only product is logging and tracking crypto transactions is valued in the billions by investors. It's likely they will be providing real time blacklisted address info with exchanges and mining companies to only allow fully compliant transactions to be processed They aim to make email like this more common
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/mcxwhp/a_mail_from_block_fi/ Another company, Cipher Trace, raised 18MM USD and several undisclosed grant from the DHS(Department of Homeland Defense) for the sole purpose of tracing Monero transactions. They've filed some patents but all of it entails some sort of probabilistic methods, nothing deterministic, ie by pretending to be a Monero node using timing and ip information they may be able to narrow down the suspected address to a few hundreds addresses only under very specific circumstances that rarely happens in the real world. XMR Price chart exhibits very unusual properties https://www.reddit.com/r/xmrtrader/comments/mg95dt/xmr_volatility/ it follows a very specific 24H retracement pattern. Some posits that there may be an inflation bug or an early whale liquidating his XMR holding, that would not make sense assuming the actor is rational and seeks to maximize gains. Why would any whale do this unless he aims not to profit but instead to suppress And there's this SHORT INTEREST on Bitfinex https://www.reddit.com/r/xmrtrader/comments/lg5a8i/is_xmr_the_most_shorted_coin_on_the_market/ https://datamish.com/xmrusd/360d Comparing the short vs long ratio
On Bitfinex 34k XMR (170% of longs) are sold short, or about 8.5 MM USD at current prices. Unlike $GME, crypto exchanges are not like the regulated securities exchanges, shorts don't need to Locate the borrow and there are no Failure to delivers report by the SEC. Thus if some crypto exchanges are colluding with the shorts, there won't be any margin call short squeeze, unless a significant number of people actually start withdrawing XMR from the exchange. Furthermore, the recent Geopolitical instability in the caucus is actually bullish for XMR, as several Ukrainian elites have been known to stockpile it. https://www.coindesk.com/ukrainian-politician-reported-owning-24-5m-xmr My take on this is that a group of people are buying time, trying to slow down XMR mass adoption, because unlike other cryptocurrencies it can not be easily co-opted into the current world power structure. Governments around the world would have to give up a large chunk of the control (and taxes) they currently enjoy if XMR becomes mainstream. I believe they would continue to do these attack until either of the following happens They are able to crack or trace Monero transactionsORMonero adoption becomes so widespread that it makes continuing the attacks futile or prohibitively expensive submitted by /u/indonesian_activist |