Empirical/mathematical method to choose which cryptocurrency community to supportI've been fascinated by the rise and fall of various cryptocurrencies, and this fascination has lead me to study what it is that gives a coin legitimacy and lasting value. I've concluded that the value of a cryptocurrency is stored in its blockchain ledger by the shared agreement within the community that the ledger is legitimate--"money is memory" in other words. I've concluded that the value of this ledger grows with the coin's user base and economy.
While working on methods to quantify this, I've found some startling relationships. Since bitcoin has the longest history, we can learn a lot from the data we already have. The value
V of bitcoin's ledger appears to follow Metcalfe's Law such that
V is proportional to the square of
N, where
N is what I refer to as the generalized user base. Below is a log chart of bitcoin's Metcalfe Value versus its market cap over its complete price history:
The market price dances about the value trying to predict what will happen next.
Each community member adds a different Δ
N-value to the coin. Someone like Patrick M. Byrne (CEO of Overstock) brings a large Δ
N-value to bitcoin because his involvement has a pronounced effect on the coin's economy. Someone with 0.1 BTC that enjoys gambling at just-dice.com brings a smaller (but still positive) Δ
N-value to the community.
Let's face it, people make decisions based on their enlightened self-interest. All other things being equal, why settle for less when you could have more? The question then is "what community should
you join if you want your contributions to be maximized?"
Since
V =
c N2,
by differentiating we get
Δ
V = 2
c N Δ
N = √(4
c V) Δ
N.
This means that the value you bring to the community (Δ
V) is proportional to how productive
you are (Δ
N) but scaled up by the square root of the value that already resides in the community. In other words, if you know yourself to have positive productivity and
if you want to maximize the value of your contributions, you should join the community that already has the most value.