I was kinda excited to see this and the price jump, because I thought I still had the 1,000 Lumens from when they were giving them away at launch. Turns out they accidentally corrupted all accounts created before some date in 2014, so my password and recovery code don't work and there's no way to recover. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
In my opinion, all crypto-currency ventures which rely on their token suddenly becoming money -- meaning it's liquid enough to absorb large sums in and out of traditional currencies -- will fail. Currently, only the Bitcoin market has sufficient depth to support a reasonable level of trade, since merchants -- as things stand now -- need to pay their bills in traditional currency.<p>It's a bit like creating a Snapchat/Instagram Stories competitor, claiming that you have a solution that lets everyone in the world chat with each other. All that needs to happen is that everyone switch to your protocol. And with money it's even worse, since people are not just risking incompatibility, but the loss of real wealth, in case things don't work out as intended for the users. The market, not the inventors, decides to what extent a given token can be used to transfer value, by doing market making at the exchanges which trade these tokens for whichever currency people's paychecks are denominated in.<p>Bitcoin becoming reasonably liquid is a damn-near miracle, in my opinion. I thoroughly doubt any crypto-currency that doesn't substantially improve upon Bitcoin will ever attract enough liquidity to become useful for tranferring value (and even in this case, I think it's much more likely that Bitcoin will just adopt whichever features that make this competitor superior).
Uh, Mt. Gox on your resume isn't a good thing. It was a horrible failure that cost a lot of people a lot of money and was revealed to have security practices not suitable for a small business, let alone a financial institution. So no, we shouldn't pay attention to this dime-a-dozen startup because it's Jeb McCaleb.
Nice to hear there are some actual news behind the price development of altcoins. The market has been maybe even too lucrative during the past few weeks. For example, my random purchase of Lumens with 20€ just two weeks ago is currently sitting at 180€.