Is the biggest risk to xmr a community launched zcash clone without the premine and founder tax, like how xmr began?
If I am honest, not many here are interested into Zcash so I do not see it even competing with XMR. Bear in mind, in order to succeed a coin needs network effect which is created by the community willing to buy and hodl - tech is not sufficient enough (we saw this from btc's first generation shitcoin alternatives).
So far Monero has a community that is willing to buy and hodl, and if the community keeps buying and holding, more people will join into the party and that will accelerate the network effect and price surge to the Moon
TM.
If success = price being really high then sure your model works.
Personally it may be fairer to say that price play a part of success. To me it shouldn't play a large part of the "success" definition.
Success doesn't only mean people willing to buy and hold a crypto. Usage/utility and transactional/speculative
volume needs to be a factor.
If people are just buying and holding then it is essentially an example of the greater fool theory. Granted that is such a broad spectrum of things that is described as markets go up and down, but I personally would like it if people bought XMR if they need to, not want to just because of hoping the price goes higher.
Then again speculators gonna spec...cu....late.
Success may also involve a threshold of users/nodes that a crypto surpasses. Hitting critical mass is on the road to success, but is it success? I don't think so.
If it holds its adoption over long periods of time then yes it would be successful. But this is 2.5 years into the coin's life, kind of early to call monero successful...yet.
Price doesn't imply success but success implies high price (the deduction goes only one way here).
I agree with you that volume also is a factor. However, you can have large volume in dumps (like ETH had in DAO incident).
To buy and hold a currency is not an example of greater fool theory but I agree it could be. For instance, people hold gold bullion because they know the supply is limited (which is not true - an asteoroid full of gold can hit to my garden etc).
Therefore, gold serves as a store of value, and it is not considered as an example of greater fool is it.
Monero indeed is not yet successful despite my investment is still up 1000 %. I call it a success when people are making lines to my backdoor and sleeping in tents so that they can buy some fractions of Monero from me.
Still Monero community (as well as the crypto in general) is kind of niche market Monero being a niche inside of the niche and thus far away from being mainstream.
Personally I view a successful Monero having ever increasing price trend - by buying any point of time some Moneros and holding it xyz period a buyer should have increased their purchasing power. At least a little bit.