However; the financial connection to bitcoin from it's current users is, in my opinion, the strongest lock in effect you can have in any new technology... Users who hold a certain amount of bitcoin as a long term investment are very much determined to stay and make the technology a success...
I have seen many bitcoin defectors in the phase of the last 6 weeks or so. The process goes as such:
- Realize that the final # of BTC (21M) is about the same as the final number of XMR (18M).
- Realize that by buying equal number of XMR, you are actually slightly ahead if it gains vs. BTC
- Realize that 1 XMR = 0.004 BTC
- Realize that hedge buying costs you essentially nothing except your pride of having never invested in an alt before
- Start to follow community
- Realize that many good guys are there
- Start to participate
- Realize that people there are on average actually cooler than just Bitcoin proponents
- Let that sink in
- Realize that it's possible to increase your financial position in the event that XMR succeeds vs. BTC, by buying more XMR
- Buy more XMR
- Realize that there is nothing BTC does better than XMR (once certain infrastructure is built to the latter)
- Realize things that should not be written in a Bitcoin forum
- Buy more XMR
The defection is completed when you start to feel that the world would be better without Bitcoin, with only XMR. Then you make the commitment to dump your BTC (that is still 50%-95% of your crypto) once the critical moment comes. When it does, XMR may go up 100x-1000x in a single year, and become so big that even BTC's value will be affected.
The defection payoff is currently about 250:1 (the difference in their price). You should understand that you may choose any level of defection, you can even defect with a 2.5:1 payoff by risking only 1% of your BTC, which is no defection at all, rather a hedge as discussed previously. This is starting to look like the similar kind of self-reinforcing mechanism that I posited for Bitcoin in early 2013, and prior to that, silver (which also rose 6x during the time of my all-in investment).
if another coin even gets close (same order of mag) to bitcoin in terms of market cap, it seriously erodes the "scarcity" feature/argument of bitcoin, which is one of the most critical arguments for putting any wealth/mindshare/time/effort into bitcoin (and by extension, any crypto). Guys like Schiff and Rickards would be proven right, and no one would be comfortable putting any wealth into any crypto for a long long time. Thus, everyone would lose. Humanity would not see the benefits that decentralized money can bring for many years/decades longer than if bitcoin simply becomes the obvious-to-everyone non-dethronable crypto store of value.
To be clear, I think there's niche value in some alts, and some of the experimentation is valuable. But you guys who think that many coins can live side by side with similar monetizations are missing the key point that if that happened, we'd all be sitting side-by-side at *trivial* market-caps, not big ones.
To be clear, I think there's niche value in some alts, and some of the experimentation is valuable. But you guys who think that many coins can live side by side with similar monetizations are missing the key point that if that happened, we'd all be sitting side-by-side at *trivial* market-caps, not big ones.
+1 to Melbustus......... Even though stated in the context of another thread, Melbustus makes very decent and well-articulated points.....
In this regard, there is NO real need to defect from BTC or to attempt to defect from BTC because any such defection may cause an undermining of BTC and potentially an undermining of all cryptos - in the sense of undermining confidence and in the sense of creating the impression that all cryptos are pumps and dumps and that we can just continue to wait for the next supposedly "better" crypto to come along..
In that regard, we NEED the strengthening of bitcoin for some time to prevail.. and maybe in 50 or 100 years from now, we can transfer over to something else or consider transferring over to something else or... or maybe it would just be that Bitcoin could be forked.. 50 or 100 years from now... ?
In 50 years many of us will be dead or on our last leg(s), and in 100 years, we will all be dead (except for some rare miracle of life prolongation - which still may cause anyone here still alive to be quite crippled by that time), but surely it is a good thing to have a plan that goes at least 50, 100 or more years into the future - even though today's investment decisions will likely be motivated by shorter time frames that will differ from investor to investor.. such as 1 eek or 6 months or 1 year or 3 years or 5 years or 15 years or 30 years... and probably, no matter which time frame motivates your investment considerations, you are going to need to engage in periodic and/or continuous reassessment(s) of the BTC situation in light of related factors.
