So here's the thing: Bitcoin has had billions of dollars invested into it over a period of 4+ years. Those who got in early were more or less taking a chance, but Bitcoin was the FIRST EVER CRYPTOCURRENCY. None of us would be here were it not for BTC. The value of BTC lies in the fact that people believe in it, but that belief came slowly and not in a matter of days, weeks, or even months. Hey, if I had believed in BTC properly I would have never sold/traded BTC back when it was in the single digits, and I'd be a freaking millionaire. URO on the other hand is just one more alt-coin among hundreds. Why do we need it?
BTC isn't tied to a commodity or anything, but if nothing else,
it is backed by hundreds of thousands of ASICs that combined produce over 120,000 TH of computational power. Let's just say that everyone is using state-of-the-art 1TH rigs that draw around 1000W each and they cost $2000 each. (This is a low-ball price, of course.) That would mean in hardware alone BTC is backed by at least $240,000,000. But really, most of the hardware backing BTC cost at least 4X as much as what I just quoted, so it would be more like $1 billion. All BTC combined is still worth $8 billion (and change), so the value isn't just in the hardware but in the services and the entire ecosystem.
How much hardware is backing URO currently? By my calculations, it's around 145,000 MH/s, so assuming we go with reasonably fast R9 290 GPUs that will each do 4MH, that would mean 36,250 GPUs worth ~$14,500,000. Not bad, but it's clearly being driven by the current hype and represents a large portion of the GPUs mining right now. And of course the price is crashing. If it goes down too far, all of those GPUs move on to a different coin.
Some questions (that won't really be answered by anyone to my satisfaction, I'm sure):
1) Why was the Twitter account for Green Earth Systems dead (inactive) from Feb 2013 to Feb 2014 where there was one post, then nothing until June 2014 and suddenly it's all about Urea. Only thought: the account was hacked? Company was bought out? I don't know. Oh, and the account is following 1745 people and being followed by 362... odd for a big business Twitter account to be following that many people, no?
2) Green Earth Systems is involved with commodities, IT services, CCTV, renewable energy, and some other items. URO and cryptocurrency seems a very odd fit, but let's run with it. The main site used to link to many other sites (gescommodity.com,
http://greensoil.com.au/,
http://gesrenewable.com/) but doesn't now. Many of the links on the new
http://greenearthsystems.com.au/ are broken -- e.g. browse to Security Systems->Automation. Could be just a major overhaul of the web sites, or it could be that somehow the server got compromised, or the site was purchased and created as one big scam.
3) Still the biggest: who is backing URO that is willing to guarantee 1 MT of Urea for 1 URO? Why would they do this with a new coin, no premine, and basically dump millions into the coin in the hope that it will eventually (within five years) be worth 20% more? We still need documentation, with pictures and major (real) sites talking about URO and not just one specific site. But of course, that can all be forged/faked if needed. Basically, only greenearthsystems.com.au seems to know about the URO/Urea connection. Even the main PR dude isn't divulging anything pertinent, just calling anyone that doubts a "fudder". Yay -- I'm a fudder I guess.
Right now, "we" are generating more than 5760 URO per day. At the current price of 0.025 BTC that's around $90,000 per day in new URO. Compared to the 3600 BTC being created daily ($2,250,000) that might seem like a relatively small amount to absorb. The problem is we still have this claim of 1 URO = 1 MT Urea, which means at some point we're talking about $1,728,000 of URO daily. All for this odd purpose of getting agricultural folks to use cryptocurrency. I just don't buy it, or at least not much of it.
I bought my $5 worth at 0.033 BTC per URO, and I have lost money now (oh noes!), but I'll point a few mining rigs at URO for kicks and just hold. If 1 URO ever equals 1 MT Urea, I've already earned a bunch of money! /fantasyland
