Quote from: solex on August 14, 2015, 10:16:53 PM

Quote from: smooth on August 14, 2015, 07:33:48 AM

Quote from: solex on August 14, 2015, 03:33:57 AM

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.

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.

Not at all. It's not hard to understand really..

The thing holding other crypto back is the amount of capital people are willing to trust to them. Not necessarily the amount of users. The increasing ecosystem size is a result of capital, speculative or not, being stored into Bitcoin. As far as the nature of the speculation this is beside the point which is that Bitcoin is not used, as we speak, as a medium of exchange to purchase goods or services.

People are not buying Bitcoin because the number of transactions or users is seemingly increasing. They are buying because it attracts wealth unlike what most other coins can claim.

I've stated this repeatedly but I honestly believe it to be true: we are talking about a money protocol, a money network effect. the unit concerned is not number of users but amount of capital.

Think of it like this : if the 1% of the world's population who apparently controls around 40% of the world's wealth moved that money into Bitcoin it would do more to strengthen & grow the ecosystem than if 25% of the other people on earth invested all of their savings.