Quote from: heratys111 on January 30, 2018, 09:06:12 AM

A couple quibbles...

Quote from: djpitagora on January 29, 2018, 09:01:43 AM

I am staking, however I find all this "hodling" and staking attitude really selfish. I'd like to keep my eyes on the prize. The prize being real market usage. A coin is not meant to be hold but to be spent. As a derivate trader would say, "the price is backed by the cash flow".

You may characterize accumulating a position and staking it as "selfish" -- with an implied normative judgment (I prefer to frame things using the "enlightened self-interest" model myself [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_self-interest]). Something to consider too is that hoarding (or maintaining a reserve) also reduces the supply and increases the buying power for those looking to spend it.

However, consider that it's an individual's right to hold or spend as he or she chooses (as with any other form of private property that extends beyond simple habeas corpus [traditions justified and articulated at least as far back as John Locke -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_property#History -- with fundamental property-rights also evident in earlier legal codes such as the Code of Hammurabi, Roman Law, and Old Norse legal proceedings http://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/society/text/laws.htm ]).

Your "prize" doesn't necessarily need to enter into the picture for everyone... the classical definitions of money include the three aspects of: store of value, unit of account, and means of exchange. People are or should be free to keep some portion of XSPEC with the first mode even if the second and third is most meaningful to you (the second view in that list deals with the pricing mechanism between the monetary base [XSPEC or any other] and any other thing that can be voluntarily exchanged).

Also you misstated/oversimplified things in your derivatives example; something is a derivative based on an underlying object (you are actually referring to a second-order derivative [a derivative of a derivative]). A stock option or a warrant, for instance, is based on the underlying stock price (although the option's price is usually determined from the more complicated Black-Scholes Equation). The stock price itself is said to in the long run parallel the cash-flow of the underlying business (but take, for instance, Tesla's chart [or say a call-option on that stock]. Both the stock chart and a call-option on it during upswings have had phenomenal runs in recent years although there is no free cash flow from that business -- see the bottom line of the chart here: http://financials.morningstar.com/cash-flow/cf.html?t=TSLA®ion=usa&culture=en-US ). Amazon would have been a similar example for many years, as would many of the Nasdaq tech-stocks in the late 90s, or many biotech stocks a few years ago. Price, in fact, is the aggregate of all the individual estimations of value of the given thing (sometimes based on cash flow -- if it's a business being referred to -- but, even then, not always). Moreover, the distortion of prices through the fiat/credit system misprices things significantly in both the boom and the bust that this system induces. (The theory is described more fully in the writings of economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Jesus Huerta de Soto, and Friedrich Bastiat.)

true, there are some good points here. I'd give some merit+ if I had any to give. I don't understand how that crappy system works.