So, is a monero a unique collectible unlike anything the world has seen since gold? Yes or No!
I think you mean to suggest no, but the answer might be yes. Satoshi proposed viewing Bitcoin as a new and unusual kind of metal with the property that it can be sent instantly over long distances. Monero is similar except that it has the ability to be sent over long distances without leaving a public record of having done so. Bitcoin and Monero are different in kind, but both new and usual kinds of "metals"
I mean yes, and I see that brg444 agrees too.
This just serves to prove my rebuttal to his "capital growth priority over user growth" theory.
It is the increasing ecosystem size (including user-base and mining power) which gives a crypto-coin an increasing market price (capital value), and any of the 600 alts could potentially be "unique collectables", and many already are. The only thing holding them back is their rate of ecosystem growth and network effect.
If we were to derive the latter from "ecosystem usage" as you represent it : transactions on the blockchain, then we should argue Bitcoin is a pretty low value network since the velocity of transactions on the network is, frankly, very low. Have a quick look at the top 500 (you can even go up to 20,000) on the website here
http://bitcoinrichlist.com/top500?page=40. A very short glance should make it very clear that most bitcoins rarely move on the blockchain.
The other important point is that markets always contain a speculative element about the future. Some percentage of the BTC price is purely a premium that the coin will scale to handle volumes of global significance. We will never know exactly, but 50% of the price may be an investor play on Bitcoin reaching MasterCard volumes. That is why many coins lie unmoving in cold wallets. The other 50% of the price is the current utility value of the payment network, free of capital controls, be-your-own-bank, escape from the fiat hegemony.