I have been trying to find info on this on the syscoin.org website and in past blog post posts but I could not find a satisfactory explanation, so I am asking it here:
Apart from simple speculation by uninformed people like me, what should cause the price of Syscoin to materially increase?
In the past when I asked these questions I received 1 of 3 answers
1) When Blockmarket becomes mainstream, Sys will be used to pay for goods and pay fees on BM, so the value will go up.
--> I may be dumb, but this does not make sense to me. Why would regular people (not the die hard crypto fans like yourselves) go out of their way to exchange their fiat and bitcoin for sys to buy something? Sounds very complicated and honestly I do not see anyone doing it. At least not to the extent that it could materially drive up demand. Also both the receiver of the Sys, as well as the receiver of the Sys fees (which are way too small to play a role to begin with, even at millions of transactions per day) will go back to the market and exchange the Sys back to Bitcoin and Fiat. So considering that the net effect is close to zero, I do not see how this would cause the Sys price to go up
2) Sys will have Masternodes which will lock up Sys, hence decrease supply and drive up the price. Look at what happened to Dash.
--> This makes even less sense to me. First of all, forget Dash. The Dash price is whatever the Dash team wants the price to be, given the coin`s highly centralized and pre-mined nature. Any comparison of the two coins is simply foolish. Second of all, the people who would run masternodes likely have their coins already. It is people who know about the project and have been following it for a long time, who are "fans" and who have their SYS sitting some where in cold storage and dont currently trade with it anyhow. So I very much doubt that suddenly tons of people will buy Sys to run masternodes. Especially since it does not make sense from a financial perspective unless you believe that SYS will outperform bitcoin (which is the main question of this entire post: why should this happen?). In my eyes it does not make sense to answer a question such as "Why should Sys go up in value?" with "Because people will want to run Masternodes for 15% ROI per year, which is a better investment than simply holding bitcoin, as SYS will increase in value with Bitcoin and you get the 15% on top". I hope everyone realizes that this answer does not make sense.
3) Sys will have all this other stuff going on, sidechains and what not. Blockmarket is only 5% of Sys.
--> Maybe in 2-3 years, yes. But right now, this is clearly not true?! Or am I grossly misinformed?
////
In summary, I would be very very thankful if anyone were to take some time and explain the SYS investment thesis to me. I believe SYS has an excellent team and is one of the best projects out there. I believe BM will be a huge success. But I absolutely fail to see a causal relationship between the success of Blockmarket and the appreciation of the SYS token. In my understanding, Blockmarket success does not mean that SYS price will go up. The way I see it, Blockmarket can work in a hugely successful manner in a world where 1 SYS = 1 cent.
Please correct any false statements I may have made. And please explain to me why and how the price of SYS is tied to the success of Blockmarket or the Sys team. Where is the causal relationship which I am missing?
Again, don`t get me wrong. I am not trying to piss on SYS or all you die hard SYS fans. I believe SYS is awesome personally. I just want to understand whether the success of the SYS team is really, causally tied to the price of the SYS token. If it is not, i.e. if there are scenarios possible where SYS becomes very successful as a company without Syscoin appreciating in price, then it may not be a good investment despite it being a great project. (What I mean by "causal relationship" is for example what you have with traditional stocks: if I hold an Apple share, I own a part of Apple and am entitled to a proportional part of the profits. So if Apple becomes more successful, a proportional amount of this success flows into my pocket. With SYS (and most cryptos) this is not the case, and I am wondering whether there is a different mechanism at play (hence the post), or if a Syscoin really is just air fuelled by speculation of ignorant people like me)
I see nobody answers on your thoughts. I found that market can react on even the most dumb projects. Just tell "Masternodes" and everyone runs there. Tell "coin burn" - all coins are x5. Tell "hard fork, token swap and ... " - that coin jumps in top 50. Honestly I am on SYS ONLY because I used to see good results from predictions of dbt1033 guy. And he was very bullish about that coin. And I heard "Masternodes" which sounded not so bad. That's why I am here. Also the chance that this project will be used for trades and etc.
You may not be aware of our play, but it is currently difficult for mainstream users to purchase Bitcoin/Alts. In creating a web-based marketplace which is unencumbered by skill requirements, we open the world of cryptocurrency to everyone. Instead of finding out how to buy bitcoin, then finding out how to buy altcoins, they can simply snap a photo of stuff they already own, or items they currently make, and sell them on blockmarket to get their first cryptocurrency. This turns the barrier to entry completely upside down.
Once Blockmarket Web is released, Syscoin will be the perfect training-wheels coin for those who don't have the time to research cryptocurrencies, or who don't want to risk their money on exchanging their "good" money to crypto. They can freely join up with nothing but a username and password and start selling stuff to a global market without all the interference and gouging that other platforms plague us with, all verified and secured by the most powerful network on Earth (we are merge-mined with Bitcoin).
This also greatly empowers the unbanked. There are dozens of countries in the world whose government-backed currencies and banking infrastructures are in ruins, corrupt, or predatory. Imagine a country where it takes months to get a bank account, where you have to grease the hands of corruption to obtain one - and even then you're paying ridiculous fees to the bank - all of that just so that you can sell your wares to make a living. Syscoin can change all that. Everyone has a bank account in their hands and access to a global marketplace completely free of political meddling or permission.
Currently all Amazon and eBay users pay not only a 15% fee whenever they sell products, but oftentimes there is a 3% Paypal or other money mover fee on top of that. Syscoin's Blockmarket eliminates this, which will attract (and has already attracted) many disgruntled legacy ecommerce merchants.
You're also thinking short-term. In the future, there will be no reason to go from Crypto back to Fiat. Fiat will go the way of cassette tapes and fax machines.
All Syscoin transactions require Syscoin. So that answers Question #1
BLOCKMARKET IS ONLY THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG
Masternodes begins the transformation of Syscoin from JUST a marketplace coin, to a COMPLETELY utilitarian coin. The Masternode infrastructure is the first step in a new platform allows us to add decentralized databases and file storage, increase transaction speed to POS/Visa/Mastercard capabilities, true Turing complete smart contract capabilities for unlimited business logic, sidechains, application layers and our Identity layer. This will all be accessible through an API, rather than a new language, enabling nearly any developer to create any blockchain application they can dream up. All these pieces are required to usher in the next generation of blockchain applications - made for new or existing businesses - and offering everything available from the blockchain space today. Easier to use, and more powerful than Ethereum.
Everything we learned making Blockmarket, we realized can be used for ANY business. In some cases blockchain is simply not necessary, but we aim to be the #2 choice for when it is. Our design is completely different than Ethereum, Lisk, Rootstock etc. in that we will be enabling existing businesses and mid-level developers or even web developers to implement the power of the blockchain into their project. All based on the Syscoin Blockchain.