Regarding the altcoin article: The underlying premise of liquidity is ok, but the altcoins are already dead in terms of marketcap. Their market cap is so tiny that it's not even funny - with the exception of Litecoin. So it is already factored into their price, it's not some kind of revelation.

Another issue is that he supposes all altcoins will act in the same liquid way and that they are competing in the same "there can be only one" space. An anonymous coin for example does not "go" in the same category for it serves a different purpose that the transparent coins cannot handle.

When you have an anonymous coin, the monopoly of the transparent market is broken and a new option is presented to the people on how to conduct their payments. Do you want to pay with your visa (so that the government can see what you bought) or use cash? So there are two different needs, covered by two different types of coins.

Supposing a 10bn BTC market cap, if just 1% of the transparent market chooses the emerging option of anonymity => that could translate to 100mn market cap. There is serious potential there. Will Bitcoin cover the anonymity/privacy needs of its user base? Nope because they want government approval. And the government needs Bitcoin's cooperation to tax the hell out of owners.

If the government requests, say, 30% of capital gains, then by the very mechanism of taxation, people will need to liquidate their BTCs to pay the government. So they create a destructive loop for the price of BTC where people need to cash it all the time, pressuring the price downwards. They can't do that with an anonymous coin that they can't control.