Snow: “The token supply can grow (if speculators drive up the price) until the price stabilizes. And the token supply can fall (if speculators drive the price down) until the price stabilizes. But in both cases, the stable price is when the value of the token matches the money real applications are spending to buy Entry Credits in order to put data into the protocol. That is because the 73K factoids generated each year naturally trends to the value of the factoids drained from the supply to write into the protocol. If people are spending 1 million dollars to put data into factom per year, then 73K factoids should be worth 1 million dollars.”
Can you link to where this quote is please?
It's from an AMA:
https://forum.bitcoin.com/ama-ask-me-anything/i-am-paul-snow-the-architect-of-factom-and-chair-of-the-texas-bitcoin-conference-ask-me-anything-t4026.htmlActually this is an interesting quote to zero in on. We've been discussing off-and-on what a "natural" or fair price for FCT would be in the future, and this quote seems to provide a strong clue. Given the price-stabilization that Paul Snow mentions, it should, I believe, be possible to deduce a FCT price based on various level of system-use. Fsr I'm having a tough time wrapping my mind around how exactly to do this ... but if someone could provide test examples of moderate/reasonable Factom use in the future—based on current usage trends, etc.—it should be possible to reverse-engineer what the prices of FCT would be in order to maintain the price stability Snow mentions. So with light / medium / heavy use over the next, say 5-10 years, FCT should be worth X / Y / or Z. Thanks to anyone able to give this calculation a crack.
I just see that P. Snow made a mistake there: "73K factoids generated each year" - it's per month. Or I'm wrong and that would be very good news. ;-)
What you say is interesting, but it's not really possible. It would be not much more than guessing, because we have too many unknown quantities:
We can't know how many and "who" (which companies) will use it - and if: when and how.
Plus: I'm not sure if that is still the plan, but it's possible that the federated server will set the price for EC's. I hope that will happen, because they will be paid with Factoids, so they have incentive to do it for a high value of FCT's the best they can. A high price would burn more Factoids per Entry, but the demand would decrease. A too high price would make some use-cases too expensive. And the other way around. So, I believe they will react on how Factom will be used.
Besides all what we can't know, that's an additional unknown quantity.
My personal calculation is very simple:
We already have proof that companies and institutions are already interested, even before the system is totally finished. We know that the team is very professional, skilled and also experienced, diligent and honest. We also know that they are well funded. We know that institutional Investors already tripled the value of Factom-Inc. to about $30 Mio.
What I expect is not just a continuing tendency of what we've seen since launch or at least January.
I believe the more objective parts will:
- continue
- increase
- accelerate
.....if there won't be a "black-swan-event".
In general I don't think much about objective prices, but about impact on the market (what I've often called psychological market). Or more precise: Even objective informations, like "partnership with x and demand of y", will only move the price because of impact on the market.
That's why we have to think about:
- attention (quantity)
- knowledge (quality: how informations are interpreted)
- identification
- image
- etc.
...but also: irrationality.
And there is one fact: Buying and selling and demand will always be under the control of humans. Buying and selling will always be based on decisions based on interpretations. That's true for EC-demand, and that's true for the price of Factoids. And that would even be true if we would exclude speculation on exchanges because if we think about Factoids it will be always about a Factoid-market. Objectivity is in fact an illusion and will always be.
That's why I play this game more with a focus on "humans". Teams on one side, their ideas, how they act, how they communicate etc. On the other side reactions of "the market" (we all). And one thing is safe: The team won't stop. Factom won't fall asleep. Attention will increase and knowledge will increase. And that will happen in a general growing market.
My simple conclusion is: Only a catastrophic event could prevent higher prices. The rest is about time.