Quote from: Sephire on February 25, 2018, 05:13:21 PM

Going by Callisto whitepaper, the supply is many billions so is huge so do not have high expectations from that.

TLDR: Two significant advantages of a large coin supply are improved price granularity and reduced psychological transaction costs relative to coins with a lower emission and/or higher value.

I heard the same "supply is many billions so is huge so do not have high expectations" naysaying when Cardano was 300 sats.

Instead of listening to the FUD, I listened to my FOMO and backed the truck up. Cool

More people need to understand the interplay of "round number bias" and the psychological costs (IE market friction induced by high cognitive load) of using high priced/low emission coins for small transactions.

Quote from: https://dqydj.com/round-number-bias-psychological-pricing-charm-pricing/

How Round Number Bias and Psychological Pricing Affect Your Gains and Spending

You may have partied like it was 1999, but the big celebration was in 2000. Your shopping cart is consistently full of products with prices ending in .99. Your last salary negotiation involved numbers rounded off to the nearest $5,000 or $10,000.

All of these examples arent coincidence it turns out that there is a round number bias in humans. Closely related to that, pricing strategies known as psychological pricing or charm pricing have evolved to exploit your penchant for round numbers.

Round Number Bias: Your Brain Likes the 0s

Humans have a round number bias. Its been passed onto us by socialization.

Think about it picking a Base-10 number system was an arbitrary choice. It was probably an anthropomorphic choice based on the number of fingers the average (fine, modal) human possesses.

However, something in our upbringing or a combination of numbers and an evolved trait means were just more comfortable with numbers ending with zero.

A large community of people enjoy being able to be Dogecoin millionaires and how much more fun it is tipping each other many 1000s of Doge rather than an equivalent value expressed as a tiny portion of a Bitcoin or Dash.

The objective value transferred is equivalent but the human psychology involved is nothing alike, because giving/receiving a 10,000 Doge tip is a subjectively more satisfying experience than using the equivalent 0.0001 Bitcoin or 0.001 Dash.

These kinds of cognitive artifacts result from brain structures relating to the human mind's sense of numeracy and its subitization engine.

Quote from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing

Subitizing is the rapid, accurate, and confident judgments of numbers performed for small numbers of items. The term was coined in 1949 by E.L. Kaufman et al.,[1] and is derived from the Latin adjective subitus (meaning "sudden") and captures a feeling of immediately knowing how many items lie within the visual scene, when the number of items present falls within the subitizing range.[1] Number judgments for larger set-sizes are referred to either as estimating if insufficient time is available for observers to accurately count all the items present, or counting otherwise.

The accuracy, speed, and confidence with which observers make judgments of the number of items are critically dependent on the number of elements to be enumerated. Judgments made for displays composed of around one to four items are rapid,[2] accurate[3] and confident.[4] However, as the number of items to be enumerated increases beyond this amount, judgments are made with decreasing accuracy and confidence.[1] In addition, response times rise in a dramatic fashion, with an extra 250350 ms added for each additional item within the display beyond about four.[5]

The best work in this space has been done our revered Professor Szabo.

His conclusion is neatly summarized by one of our favorite Bitcoin memes:

One source of objection to high emission coins comes from reckoning using the metaphor of a publicly traded company's stock share structure. Stocks with a very high number of shares are considered diluted, usually due to having many rounds of share issuance to raise capital after several unprofitable quarters/years.

The market sees stock buybacks and corresponding share issuance reduction as a sign of a strong company; investors like there to be fewer shares because the stock price may move up more easily due to reduced liquidity (recall that prices are set on the margin).

This metaphor may be of some use when considering coins that actually behave with shared characteristics comparable to a publicly traded company's stock, where 1 coin and 1 share equal 1 vote, such as Decred and Cardano.

But the metaphor breaks down when it's taken into account that the number of coins in a cryptocurrency's present/total emission is arbitrary. IE, a Bitcoin is just an arbitrary number of satoshis and the number of atomic units may be limited artificially or as a result of the fundamental capacity of the 64-bit memory address space.

A coin's architect must make these design decisions despite the fact they are somewhat akin to picking magic numbers and after launch fairly 'set in stone' because of social contract considerations.

The coin's architect is thus faced with picking these magic numbers based on what has/hasn't worked for previous coins and their own taste (IE intuition). The market then decides if the architect has good or bad taste in magic numbers (IE fundamental parameters).

The market's decision doesn't happen in a vacuum and depends on if the coin's emission/nomenclature parameters are a good fit for its intended/actual use cases.

Thus for Bitcoin, which is destined to become high-powered super money, a relatively low total emission of 21e6 is perfect.

But for other coins, which naturally fulfill lessor/supporting roles as mere mediums of exchange, a far lower per-unit value is desirable as a way to leverage our visually oriented brains' (and resultant cultures') highly optimized, low cognitive load pathways for subitization and mental calculation.