Bitcoin is facing the wall with its saturated mempool and high transaction fees. There is even the threat of a hardfork happening this year. There is division in the community about the solutions to be implemented, whether it is Segwit, Lightning network, Bitcoin Unlimited or simply doing nothing.
While many are pondering about which form will take the new Bitcoin, the solution already exists and is there. The new, better Bitcoin is called Bitcoin Plus. Many are now realizing this including me, that's why moving from BTC into XBC is a logical step, at least for me.
I do not think Bitcoinplus is a realistic alternative for bitcoin because the user base is not global and it is not distributed evenly enough.Also it is not like bitcoin really because it is not forked directly from bitcoin code.Too many bagholders with big coin amounts dumping constantly will not allow price to remain high and in the end it will remain here or go back to only a few cents value but only time will tell as only 10% of total coins are mined so far.Developers can only do so much but if bagholders and community do nothing I can not see anything big in the future as there are many coins to choose from.
BitcoinPlus Market Cap remains around $6,500,000 which is superb. It has natural ups and downs. It has minimal coin supply so yes it can be easily manipulated by a relatively small amount of capital. See the last couple of pumps beginning and end of July for instance. Every coin goes through these cycles. There is nothing that XBC Team can do to stop that. Outside of these pumps I don't see bagholders dumping. Liquidity isn't great on the XBC Market on Poloniex which makes the price extremely volatile and over reacts to even a few XBC being traded.
Other than the top coins, all markets on Poloniex have less BTC then a year ago due to the decline in Poloniex Trust from Market Makers. Every person I know, has drastically reduced their exposure to Poloniex and moved to other exchanges. Total Poloniex Volume is massively down compared to a year ago. However, overtime as Poloniex reputation improves again, market makers should come back to Poloniex and liquidity on the smaller coins (such as XBC) should increase. Manipulating prices or fake volume is absolutely something XBC Project will NOT entertain and be a part of.
You are absolutely right in that the XBC user base is small compared to the larger coins and prior to the Current Development this was the Number 1 priority for the XBC Project.
However, as the priority is now updating the XBC Code base so that it is on a par with BTC so that we can actually piggyback developing technology and even develop our own, all funds are diverted into that. In the background you can see our Freelance Dev updating the entire BitcoinPlus code base so that we will be based on Bitcoin but Proof of Stake. The intention at the moment is to also keep the TOR feature and our encrypted messaging feature. These are big differences. Once the updates are complete the XBC Project will start the Marketing side of BitcoinPlus again.
It is not simple process. We are trying to avoid any hard forks and we are trying to make everything as seamless as possible. It may take many months to get to where we want to be but we WILL get there.
XBC has made good progress but only the rich get richer and those who have the most money to buy coins and accumulate large bags can do no work and get the most returned due to proof of stake concept.Of course large mining farms can do this with bitcoin but bitcoin is better distributed.Bitcoinplus can only hope to fill some niche use case such as some type of settlement layer with easy privacy and security,efficiency improvements but why bother when we can already use bitcoin segwit for this?There are many better options than XBC where one or two large bagholders do not dominate the staking process and price is stable exchange rate.