The majority of the value in any coin/token is derived from pure speculation and with good reason. Any crypto that achieves or even comes close to mass adoption will make holders multi-millionaires at the very least...
Adoption for what ?
Most people that have adopted Dash, including most of those holders posting in this thread, have done so for store of value. The objective behind the recent protocol proposals and the split reward is to enhance Dash's store of value performance. That was categorically stated by the DCG announcement and original presentation back in December.
There's nothing inherently valuable with mining beyond protecting it from 51% attacks.
Believe this at your own risk I'd say.
For a start, this argument is completely disproved by market observations. I don't know why anybody even tries to promote it anymore. If you really think that investors are buying network security rather than token scarcity then the most cheaply secured mined blockchains would rise to the top of the rankings. But they don't, the ones with the biggest hashrates do - not because they expend the most energy but because they're demonstrably the most scarce.
Scarcity is not a numerical concept (i.e. you can't create scarcity simply by issuing a small number of anything), it's a reflection of the amount of effort required to acquire the thing. In blockchains, the cost of that effort puts an initial price on the next block. It is not a "speculative" value, it's real, based on the level of prevailing competition in effect at the point of mining the block.
A masternode reward coin is obtained at zero effort and zero cost. I can then theoretically pass that on to another holder for free without incurring a loss, and that user can and so on.
On the other hand, the next block reward in a mined coin cannot be obtained by ANYBODY for less than mining cost (dictated by the prevailing level of competition). Even if I held a million bitcoin like the Winklevosses I couldn't. It's therefore far more scarce by definition and a higher valuation follows. This is what we see in markets. It's what differentiates a supply that's 100% competitively mined and one that's inflated on a purely numerical basis since, in the latter case, we're talking ICO premine or fiat type monetary models which are a whole different ball game.
I don't know how this idea that securing the network cheaply leads lead to a high coin value took hold. It is such a bogus concept and embody's such a mis-understanding of how the market values mined digital assets that I didn't really think it would have legs but some people seem to buy it. Even Ryan didn't explain any mechanism by which a reduction in hashrate feeds through to a higher or more stable coin value. "Saving on hashrate" to boost store of value has about as much logic to it as making diamonds out of glass because they're cheaper to produce and thinking there's a market for them IMO.
Now, let's try to measure 'competitiveness' by taking snapshots of the marketcap from the beginning of the year until now
That is not a measure of competitiveness. By that measure you could demonstrate that a coin ranked at 200 position is "more competitive" than Bitcoin or Ethereum. The point to address is Dash's valuation against competing mined assets that do not have split reward ratios.
There's a
very simple reason we're less competitive than them: we have to collect far more fiat from markets than they do, proportionally for each block mined. We need to collect the mining cost PLUS whatever proportion of the masternode reward is sold. As the masternode network gets larger, that overhead gets larger. Our competitors only have to collect the mining cost.
Mostly at near 100% margin ?