Meanwhile, we have currencies that were criticized and laughed at here, such as DOGE, LTC, or even Monero, which remain at the forefront and do not lose capitalization with respect to BTC, and make their users, investors and supporters feel safer every day with their choice.
The difference is that none of those have 3000-4000 node holders leaching the investment in new supply straight into their own pockets instead of allowing it to pass into the chain in the form of raising the marginal cost of a block.
Remember:
Marginal coin price = marginal cost of block / block reward.
So you can't BOTH be a top 40 capital gain coin AND pay 4000 masternodes rewards that are 98% in excess of their operating costs. Pick one.
If we base ourselves on the fact that the difficulty of obtaining something demanded increases its price, you are absolutely right.
Let's imagine a gold mine where there are miners and mine managers. The former use machinery, fuel, labor to get their golden ounces out of the mine. The mine bosses get 25% of the production just for going to the mine to see how everything is going.
Then at the exit there are a couple of buyers of that gold, but there is not much demand to buy the gold, so they make low offers for the gold.
Who will be the ones who sell the gold and get more profit?
obviously the mine bosses who get their gold by going to look, while the miners cannot sell below their costs, otherwise they will not be able to continue mining and will leave.
That's your version.
But now let's think that the mine bosses have bought the land and they know that if they are not profitable for the miners, nobody will exploit the mine and it will be forgotten and nobody will win in the long term.
What mine managers should do is not sell their ounces of gold below the lowest cost of production.
If for example the miner who obtains the lowest gold spends 1500 dollars per ounce, no ounce should be sold below that price.
does this happen in dash?
obviously not. A lot of dash that goes to nodes, sells out instantly, just like the budget dash. If we add to this the mining dash at current prices, we understand that there is an excess supply of dash that pulls the price down.
Either Dash is added value, or it will not stop going down. And the market equilibrium can be very low, even less than $10.
Let's give Dash an added value like the one that the ETH network has and you will see how the ATHs break in a matter of weeks.
All the best