Having carefully studied various aspects of the crypto-markets both recently and over the course of the last few years, I have come to identify one particular feature of it that causes a great amount of disruption and distortion. I suspect that most people looking at the crypto space would not see this issue as a problem; in fact, I’d venture a guess to say most would not even see it as an issue at all. The issue, as the subject might suggest, is the existence of BTC trading pairs with other crypto-currencies (those so-called "alt-coins").
Now – I know what many of you will say, perhaps almost reflexively, dismissingly… that BTC trading pairs are the Crypto-market… that they form the essence of what makes it a thing in the first place. As you no doubt will guess, I strongly disagree with such an opinion, and I believe that the time has come to take a very critical look at the consequences of the existence of these trading pairs.
Contrary to what you might believe or be told by (often self-appointed) crypto-experts – the BTC price is not an impact because of the behavior of traders – it is an impact by default and by design, more often than not the consequence of traders in fact NOT acting at all, affecting the price of alt-coins merely because a BTC trading pair exists. Furthermore, alts falling faster and rising slower than BTC is caused by the Loss-Aversion Bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion), meaning that the impact of BTC is almost invariably negative.
There are very easy ways to see this effect – just look at the few non-trivial alt-coins that do not have a BTC trading pair, like DAO or MASK, and you will see that the value of those assets, though not free from BTC impacts, behave far more “naturally” and less erratic. Though of course there are many factors that impact price, the bottom line is that there is almost no justification for the BTC price being one of them.
At any rate – though I feel that logic alone is sufficient “reason” to understand this problem,
I have gone through the trouble of creating a website dedicated to this specific distortion.
You can find it at: https://delistbitcoin.com
I would kindly like to ask you to note that I am not doing this out of some selfish, greed-driven profit maximizing motive; my first and main concern is increasing the likelihood that a crypto-based economy can be created successfully. An economy, that is as free from centralized governmental and/or corporate influence and control as possible.
The greatly distorting and detrimental impact of the effect of BTC price on almost all alt-coins greatly impedes crypto-solutions being taken seriously, makes it harder to attract long-term pragmatic investment, and it significantly decreases the chances that such assets can be mature enough to form a serious alternative to Central-Bank issued crypto currencies, a development which might mean the end of liberties and freedom in any form you or our parents would recognize as such.
I hope that my efforts can form the starting point of a substantive and significant debate, and may lead to at least some experimentation and innovation to test my theory and provide empirical data that may prove its validity, or disprove it as misguided. I believe it so obvious that even suspending all BTC trading pairs for a couple of $50M/volume per day alt-coins for a period of 2-3 weeks would provide sufficient data see the difference, and would clearly show that BTC trading pairs are a major stumbling block in the evolution of the crypto space.
I thank you for reading, wish to invite you to take a look at the website, and to feel free and encouraged to discuss this idea and the solutions proposed. The site contains zero trackers, no downloads, just more TL;DR and a bunch of graphs
