Quote from: aminorex on August 30, 2016, 02:05:47 AM

Quote from: smfuser on August 29, 2016, 10:48:27 PM

Aminorex, can you explain how you determine the rational limit of XMR to own?

I think it's counter-productive to own so much that it threatens the value of the currency you do hold.

My original reasoning was invalid, but I used it for lack of a valid alternative: There are working local currencies in villages as small as ca. 1000 households. Thus the greatest lower bound on the number of nodes in a viable economy is, to first approximation on evidence, ~1000. Therefore, No one should own more than 0.1% of emission in the long-run, or there may not be enough nodes.

Not only is this reasoning invalid, it is also obsolete: There is now a much broader distribution than there was when I formulated the invalid conclusion. Due to divisibility, it doesn't matter what share of the float the nodes have, so long as the share is distributed appropriately amongst the nodes of the (sub-)economy.

There remain two considerations which I now deem relevant:

I exercise some restraint simply because I don't think it's healthy for adoption if there is a single person who you can point at and say: He will benefit disproportionately, if I use this currency. Why should I act to enrich him? (Although, in my own case, I think I could make a pretty good argument that you should. Otherwise I wouldn't bother.) As long as I am among 50 instead of 5, I think I am not doing much positive harm to the economy. The farther up the Gini curve you go, the more self-defeating it becomes. Maybe you can predate upon a well-developed economy, and continuously improve yourself by impoverishing others, but in a nascent start-up economy, I doubt it can be done, practically speaking. You have to contribute as best you can, and help insure a constructive, utile distribution, at least until it bootstraps. My ability to contribute is constrained by available time, so I can't accumulate too much -- otherwise, my harm to distribution will not be adequately offset by my positive contributions in other areas. How do you calibrate this? I haven't tried very hard, but I don't really know how, so I just wing it. Which makes the constraint perhaps a bit too ... flexible ... for perfect, clear (self-interested OR altruistic) rationality.

A separate fuzzy factor which I weigh together with this: If I were to have owned too much Monero when it was declining, my courage might have failed, or my wife might have ditched me. Neither would be an acceptable outcome: I abhor personal cowardice, and I cherish and respect my wife. But those are personal factors, and highly subjective, although you can work with them rationally, within some limited domains.

Thanks for the detailed reply. Am I correctly understanding that you originally thought the limit was ~0.1% of emission, but now you think it's ~2%? What figure do you use for emission? Aside from the limit on % of emission, what do you think should be the limit on % of assets allocated to XMR?