steep price rises could be dangerous for the coin if it attracts dumpers but there are no new buyers... then price will fall back to the same level, and people who bought will feel at loss...
why should we invest on doubling the price now?
wouldn't this attract multipools to CAT who start dumping?
how would this affect coin survival prospects as there are no users yet outside this community?
Yes, this is a good point. We are not set up to properly handle steep price rises. We should not invite steep and sudden price rises, because right now the coin codebase is designed to quench such an event with a period of massive inflation through rise in profitability, which in turn would lead to a severe further correction down the line. Some proposals for another fork appears to be to extend such an inflationary period to turn a crash from being a high likelyhood into being almost a certainty - in my opinion not an improvement. Eventually we should have the code in such a shape that we can welcome a sharp and sudden rise in value (not that there would be guarantees it would stay high after that, but it helps if the event is not followed by a sudden influx of miner-dumpers who get rewarded immediately upon switching their mining equipment). It would be good to avoid going through yet another rushed fork which is not well thought out, because at some indeterminate number of forks, there is risk of exchanges pulling support due to hassle of repeatedly having to install new versions. Maybe if we we can get CATs going up in value (but gradually!) to where exchanges would put up with occasional fork hassle without considering dropping support, that would be a better time to introduce a fork.
The best thing for now on the technical side is probably to coordinate hashing power to avoid having profitability drop below LTC if we can avoid it, and also, at the same time, have it avoid getting to or near the very top of the profitability charts. There is also a slowly improving ratio of mined coins to max coin supply. This mitigates the potential of massive inflation, by making that inflation a smaller portion of the current coin supply, possibly leading to a less drastic effect. So there is some benefit to biding time.
On the marketing side, it would be nice to leverage the desirable cat meme to get some cat-oriented pet food stores, vets, charities, etc. to accept CATs even if it means they immediately dump it on the market after accepting it (probably a worthwhile tradeoff). This could be as simple as someone calling up the humane society or similar organizations and volunteering to set them up to accept this new type of donations, to be followed up by press releases. I am somewhat leery of press attention for fear the coinbase is not fully up to the task, but DOGE did not die from press attention, so it might be alright. And hope the codebase does not add small, rigid limits to difficulty adjustments, because then it would be less able to handle immediate and sudden press attention.
If we find a major financial support, beyond just buying-and-holding, there is benefit to the market maker function. This means in our case someone (or multiples of someones) keeping a sizable amount of BTC's and CAT's in one or more exchanges, and putting up a large bid offer, and a large ask offer, with a small-ish spread - and adjusting the positioning based on one or the other deteriorating over time. This could be done by coding and exchange API's. As long as this pair is positioned pretty close to where the market has been wanting to be anyway, it has the effect of stabilizing price spikes - and the market maker makes ongoing profits to compensate for risk (because of the closely spaced spread between the buy wall and sell walls). Even a smaller player can try to play market maker, but it's easier for the market to break out of one of the walls, and you end up holding all or all BTC's and you are out of the market making function at least until you can transfer in some more.
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