Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
by
smooth
on 19/05/2015, 19:18:54 UTC
The network effects for bitcoin vs. alts are very real and already present a significant hurdle for any of them to overcome. For example, in 2014 VCs invested >$300M in Bitcoin firms vs. near zero for any alt. Currently numerous websites, VPNs, etc, that I use accept Bitcoin, none to few accept any alt. The fact is there are already network effects in place for Bitcoin vs. alts. This makes the hurdle higher for things such as Monero.

http://www.qhoster.com/clients/announcements/43/QHoster-accepts-all-cryptocurrencies-Buy-hosting-domain-names-Linux-VPS-Windows-RDP-VPS-and-dedicated-servers.html

The problem I see with most of those services is the same one you see with xmr.to. They're mostly using Bitcoin as a payment rail (and a marketing vehicle to target Bitcoin supporters as customers) and then they're going to dump it to pay their costs of doing business (most of it in the case of domain registration). There is no real circulatory economy there.

There's really not a whole lot of difference between using BTC to pay for a domain name and using xmr.to to pay for a domain name (via an even shorter holding period of BTC), or for that matter setting up a domain registrar that accepts XMR as payment and dumps it to pay upstream registration costs (not hard to do at all, but also not particularly profitable).