If anything, you can say that the block reward reallocation failed to reverse that down trend, nothing more, but you can't say the recent price action is because of the reallocation, there is simply no evidence of that.
That isn't the point.
The onus was never on me to prove anything. Dash made a very bold claim that it "didn't need all this hashrate", despite being a POW protocol where the critical job of hashrate is to mediate a bidding war which supports the marginal cost of extracting the next block form the chain.
Ryan is wrong that "cost doesn't drive price" because cost
IS price. It's simply not a unit price that's all. What he meant was "price in the primary market doesn't necessarily drive price in the secondary market" (when the coin changes hands for the second time). But as we shall see below, that point is moot anyway.
If you want it formulaically: cost = price x quantity. Re-arrange the equation to solve for price and you get:
price = cost / quantity
In this specific case, (primary price of coin = daily cost of hashrate / coins generated per day).
So there's scarcity defined for you right there. That is formula that defines Dash's "price" in the primary market, the market we're concerned with here. If you reduce a proportion of the "cost" term to zero by donating it to masternodes, bypassing the bidding war then the formula tells you what will happen to price. In anecdotal terms, when a masternode sells a reward coin the $USD revenue from that reward does not find its way into the chain. It goes straight into the masternode operators pocket as unearned income. It does not help to raise the marketcap because whatever price support the coin purchase had on exchanges is cancelled by the deficit in demand at the point of coin extraction from the chain.
This isn't "my theory", it's the fundamental Satoshi principle by which POW coins work and anyone who claims they can bypass it and just "give coins away to holders as a bribe" needs a hell of justification to demonstrate how that can support marketcap. You don't have one, neither does Ryan, neither do the masternodes in general. You've never demonstrated any solid reasoning in capital flow terms that supports this crazy reward split policy, just some general hand waving about not needing hashrate and the odd scrambling for other random footholds like "carbon footprint".
If "your theory" had any basis to it, we'd be seeing Dash EXTREMELY competitive against other mined coins because we have only 50% or less of our supply exposed to the hashrate bidding war. All of the other POW coins above us in marketcap send 100% of the reward to miners. Remember that's a 2-way street, like electrical charge. Positive charge flows in one direction and negative charge in the other. With mining, coins flow in one direction (blockchain --> miner --> secondary buyer) and capital flows in the other direction (secondary buyer --> miner --> blockchain).
This principle does not get acknowledged by Dash community. It's as if it doesn't exist. You do not entertain challenges, discussion about it or present any economic basis on why it doesn't apply to us. Comparison with POS chains is irrelevant because they use a completely different basis to support token value by having on-chain services that consume tokens directly.
Meanwhile, as predicted by the fundamental Satoshi model, we continue to lose ranking against other POW assets that value mining more than we do.