ITT: People who don't understand economics.
ITT: Vague non-sequitirs.
Maybe I can clarify his point then:
What makes a coin valuable? Supply and demand. How much supply is there already of TOP? Just over 9 billion. How much demand is there for TOP? Not particularly much right now. This isn't food or even electronics. When coins are produced, they generally stay forever. Sure a small amount gets lost from people who lost their wallets etc, but it's not that significant a quantity. Functionally, coins stay forever. What does this mean for TOP? It means that it doesn't particularly matter that it will be really hard to mine more later, there's already so much that the supply is extremely large. In fact, we are already basically at the point that mining barely matters at all. By the next halving, it will be practically pointless to mine without an extreme hash drop.
So why is this unique for TOP? Because it reaches max supply quickly, and effectively stabilizes at that supply. The real question is will demand rise? Because of the stability of supply for TOP, any demand increases will not be diluted by inflation, what you see is effectively what you get in terms of TOP, it's very nature is deflationary if you get in past a certain point. Does price HAVE to rise? Not at all, demand could drop and we could see prices fall to 1 satoshi even or worthless (this will likely happen if hash rate goes too far down, people will have less faith in the security of the coin since 51% attacks will be easier). Could it rise? Sure, if demand rises then prices will go up proportional to demand, since there's no inflationary pressure.
The point is, TOP is designed so that if it gets a lot of hype, prices will rise very quickly. If there is no hype, it will likely die just as quickly because the hash rate will drop below a point where anybody is willing to trust the coin anymore. Effectively, in 1 week we will know what will happen to TOP.
Thank you, you've outlined the situation very succinctly. TopCoin will be made or broken by it's community.
I actually have a huge problem with one of the designs of top. The drop to 1 coin/block makes it so that it's almost guarranteed to die in 2 months time. Lets take a look at what miners expect in a coin to keep mining it:
In general, you are looking at a minimum of $40/day for a 5Mh/S rig. (I'm being conservative, plenty of coins give more than this, but it's what is the reasonable minimum).
So when TOP goes down to 1 coin/block, it generates 1440 coins per day. Lets say we want a network hash of 200Mh/S in order to stay at a level where the coin is still trustworthy (even though that's still quite risky). If that's the case, then 5/200 or 1/40 of 1440 must be worth $40 for people to mine. So each coin will have to be worth $0.9.
Is this possible? No way in hell. That would put the market cap of TOP at 10 Billion USD. Unless top becomes as powerful as bitcoin, it will never reach that price.
Lets look at it from a different angle. What if TOP reaches the market cap of DOGE at $50 million. Then each TOP will be worth roughly 0.45cents. In this case, all the TOP generated per day at 1 coin/block will be worth about $6.5. That means the network hash IN THE EVENT that TOP gets to be as popular as DOGE, is going to be at most 0.8Mh/S, which is obviously disasterous.
Both of these point to the same conclusion. In a couple more block halvings, what we will see is that the dev will choose to hard fork the coin to fix this issue. The current system is a death sentence for the coin no matter what happens.
Edit: Fixed math.
