Yeah - to be honest, I'm not sure what to make of this because I was not able to follow the math.

From what I gathered, the author is making a claim that, based on his mathematical model, the fees required to secure transaction on the bitcoin blockchain (or any POW blockchain for that matter) are so large that they place an limit on the economic value that can be secured by them. For example, he  makes a claim that a $1M transaction would required over $10K in fees to secure, and that because $1M transactions are being secured on the chain at this fee, this is the same fee that would be required of smaller transactions. And because smaller transactions do not work, the chain cannot be used as a store of value. How he justifies that jump isn't clear to me.

It's similar to arguments we've heard from Roger and others that if fees price out small transactions the whole chain isn't valuable. IMO, the vision of lightning is meant to change this and the author does not explore in any detail how layer two technologies impact his conclusions.

I'm left wondering what to make of the paper because I can't tell if i'm just not getting it because I'm not doing the math or because he's looking at Bitcoin wrong, or both.

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eric.budish/research/Economic-Limits-Bitcoin-Blockchain.pdf

I will caveat this by stating that I am not a economist and have not spent time working through the formulas the author proposes to understand Bitcoin's equilibrium states.

TLDR on the article is that bitcoin does not scale because fees required to secure large value transaction, consistent with Bitcoin as a store of value, destroy it's use case for small value payments. The author claims that Bitcoin's economic limit is probably around $1.5-2.0B of value - far far less than the value of digital gold. The author's arguments rely on the potential of a 51% attack to double spend transactions, and the honest income required to offset this risk - the larger the value of the payments, the larger the income required.

At a conceptual level, it makes sense. However, there are developments in Bitcoin, such as layer 2 and sidechains that may solve these issues.

My ask is for a technical/academic person to review this and provide your thoughts so I can more fully understand this paper.

The thing I do not understand about buying ripple is, what is the point of owning ripple?

The partners that Ripple is gaining are using it's technology but not its coin. The coin is also a centrally controlled currency just like the federal reserve and banking system that we tried to get away from.

So, I can't be assured of profits if Ripple continues to find success with banking partners (because the partners aren't going to adopt the currency / take supply off the market), and it's a centralized currency, and i'm pretty sure I can't use it anywhere to buy anything, so what's the point of owning the token?

And i'm not saying that like "oh, I can't use bitcoin in my grocery, why would I buy it." The fact is that my local grocery will eventually adopt bitcoin payments, but I don't think they will adopt ripple payments. I don't even think the Ripple team is working to gain merchant adoption, they seem to be focusing exclusively on banks using their technology.

Help me understand why I should own the currency

A switching pool redirects your hashrate to mine the most profitable coin possible at any given point in time.

I agree that looking at 21/84 = 0.25 is too simplistic and is not likely. I think somewhere around 0.012 is fair market value for Litecoin being valued like the silver to bitcoin's gold.

I also think Litecoin will have use as a real-live testbed for Bitcoin scaling and atomic swaps with litecoin will strengthen bitcoin's capabilities.

But these numbers being thrown out are crazy. Silver is valued at ~$14B vs. Gold which is valued at ~$6T. Theoretically Litecoin could get up to like Paypal or Visa value if it's payment rails become very efficient, but I think we're a long way away from that.

Litecoin above $200 is off the table, and $50-200 is going to need much more than just speculative buying and holding.

Theymos, I see that you put Litecoin in the 0 category since it is a clone of Bitcoin.

I am curious of your thoughts on Litecoin after segwit activation & the work the devs are doing on lightning networks & cross chain swaps.

I'm speculating that you will say that Litecoin is not really "innovative" necessarily because the devs are mostly working on tech that was theorized & proposed for Bitcoin proper, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Litecoin would be my number 2 closely followed by Monero

Merchants are integrating litecoin payments. Even after Bitcoin activates Segwit, Litecoin will still be useful as a blockchained based payment coin.

Plus the LTC foundation just hired a full time developer for Litecoin, with the aim of adding more. There is a small community of volunteers who have been very generous in contributing towards development funds.

How is it dead?

Awesome, thanks.

Hello,

New to the whole ICO world and am interested in this one. When I visited the website, it referenced a Pre-ICO, but the links do not seem to be working.

Is there a Pre-ICO? How does one get into that? Also, on this thread it said that the approx. start date for the ICO was 5/25/2017, but on the website it says that the ICO does not open for another 15 days. I'm not missing the boat here am I?

https://sonm.io/sonm-ico-details/

Thanks