Quote from: Adrian-x on August 15, 2015, 02:50:10 AM

Quote from: brg444 on August 15, 2015, 02:13:22 AM

Quote from: Adrian-x on August 15, 2015, 01:57:48 AM

Quote from: brg444 on August 15, 2015, 12:50:10 AM

Quote from: Cconvert2G36 on August 15, 2015, 12:45:33 AM

Quote from: brg444 on August 15, 2015, 12:42:05 AM

Quote from: Cconvert2G36 on August 15, 2015, 12:36:10 AM

Quote from: brg444 on August 15, 2015, 12:06:07 AM

Quote from: Cconvert2G36 on August 14, 2015, 11:52:31 PM

Quote from: brg444 on August 14, 2015, 10:24:39 PM

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.

Capital flowing into Bitcoin is absolutely about expected future growth, in users, transactions, market cap, and in usefulness. Hard for me to comprehend how you can even divorce these metrics.

Remaining the domain of 10,000 geeks sitting on hordes of coins in paper wallets, occasionally trading some back and forth with each other... means failure to me. Not that it would fail to work, but that it would fail to reach its potential.

This is not to say that user/transaction growth is some kind of panacea to be pursued at all costs, just that it shouldn't be ignored.

Yes. And much like the others your mischaracterize the only growth we are really concerned about : market cap, or how much of the fiat economy we have absorbed. As I've said previously I couldn't care less if it comes from the pockets of the 1% or the 99%. More fiat capital trusting Bitcoin as money is exactly how it grows until it consumes all of wealth in the world.

Users, transactions are secondary. They will follow the money because like any thing worth a lot in this world people will want a piece of it. Velocity of transactions will pickup once an actual Bitcoin economy develops. Meanwhile people will hoard Bitcoin and get rid of fiat. Some might not agree but this is pretty much Gresham's law in action.

While you may not consider them "panacea to be pursued at all costs", others have outright stated this is the ONLY goal to be pursuing and that it should be done as quickly as possible. They would like to run Bitcoin like a startup. This is IMO the wrong way to go about it.

You say I mischaracterize the importance of market cap growth, I say I simply try to describe some of the forces behind market cap. Do you see a scenario where market cap goes up while the number of users, transactions, applications, and merchants... goes down?

I did not say anything about your characterization of market cap but of growth. Or more precisely, the driver of growth.

No I don't see a scenario where that happens. What I am observing though is market cap going up and users, transactions and merchants following.

So AAPL's market cap growth is a feedback loop in which it ultimately consumes the entirety of global wealth... before bitcoin! Yikes!

Is AAPL competing with fiat as money?

Sorry but that's such a stupid thing to say. I'm sure you can do better than this...

Let me ask you. Did the current 1B$ ecosystem investment, equivalent billion dollar mining infrastructure, incremental userbase and increasing transactions come about before or after the price increase? You wouldn't argue the other way around would you?

Just so you know brg444 the market cap is not a valid metric, its a shortcut to understanding the value stored in bitcoin, its not a leading metric but a wagging tail, here oda.krell illustrates the point nicely. unfortunately the real insight was only intended for those who pay attention it's been deleted on porous :-( .

While that is a perfectly valid observation. Market cap is at least the most precise indicator of historic growth in the value of network we have at hand.

Not users, ~~not nodes~~, not transactions.

your 66% wrong but I'm unwilling to prove it and so are all the other hoarders, but to help you understand, if Satoshy had to sell 20% of his bitcoin holdings, that's roughly 1% of the market cap (an estimates 1,000,000 BTC belonging to Satoshi) the total market cap would drop from about $3.8Bto a generous guesstimate of $140M at around $10 per BTC.

So as you can see selling 1% of Bitcoin has a distorting ability to reduce the market cap by a whopping 96.23% (and this is the metric you feel is the most accurate metric to measure bitcoin's value and growth?)

So in other words if Satoshi tried to liquidate 20% of his holdings he would reduce the value of the remaining 80% by about 99.62%. the reason big holders are holding is because of game theory, market cap is not the metric invested interests are watching, its a mirage.

For how long?

From what I understand the issue you are describing is a lack of liquidity in the market and poor information on actual trades. With time this supply will be absorbed by the market until equilibrium is reached again.

I do appreciate the point you are making and it is true that as it stands the price signal is not necessarily clear enough to make it a valid indicator of the network value. Price discovery still?

I'm not sure why your ~~strokethrough~~ "nodes" though. I don't see any way you could suggest they are somewhat an indicator of network growth...