I've come to the conclusion that Golos
http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/golos/ is massively undervalued. For this reason I've decided to sell all my other alt coins and put everything into Golos. Here's why:
BackgroundGolos is a fork of Steem
http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/ but for Russian users (Steem is targetted at English speakers).
Its basically a social media platform where you earn Golos (money) for either writing articles or curating articles (upvoting etc). This is explained here
https://steemit.com/faq.html#How_does_Steemit_workSteem also has a large Wikipedia page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteemitMy calculationsThere are about 500 million native English speakers in the word, with another 510 million people speaking English as a second language - source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers (total of 1.01 billion speakers).
There are about 150 million native Russian speakers, with another 115 million speaking it as a second languge (total of 265 million speakers).
So there are roughly 3.8 times more English speakers than Russian speakers.
The market cap of Steem is currently about $212 million
The market cap of Golos is currently about $4 million
So the market cap of Golos is about 53 times smaller than Steem, but there are only 3.8 more English speakers than Russian speakers. All other things being equal the market cap of Golos should be 3.8 times smaller than Steem, so $56 million (instead of the current $4 million)
Steem is about 13 months old
Golos is about 4 months old
Obviously we need to consider the current number of users on both platforms when comparing price
https://golos.io/ and
https://steem.ioIts an approximate calculation, but it appears currently Steem has about 5-10 times more posts, votes etc than Golos. So say an average of 7.5 more traction. So based on these numbers Golos should have a market cap 7.5 times less than Steem - so $28 million (instead of the current $4 million)
Recent Steem performance vs Golos vs altsGolos launched on January 19 2017. Since this date, Steem has increased its market cap by 473%. However Golos has decreased its market cap by 7%. And since the same date, alt coins have increased 1262%
So basically Steem has underperformed the alt coin market, and Golos has totally underperformed the alt coin market since it launched.
The Ripple and Stellar effectThis is where it gets more interesting. Ripple shot up in value by more than 6000% between March and now.
Stellar Lumens are a fork of Ripple. Despite Ripple exploding, the price of Stellar barely changed until May 4. Between May 4 and May 18 it increased about 750%
Despite most alt coins exploding January-May, the Steem price didnt move much. Then between May 5 and today May 18 Steem has gone up 177%. Golos may well shoot up in value any time soon.
The Russian language opportunityA possible reason why Golos has lagged the market is its an entirely Russian crypto. The majority of crypto investors (like you and me) don't speak Russian.
So when we visit a crypto coin website like Golos
https://golos.io/ and see a bunch of Russian we pretty much rule out investing in it. We don't understand it!!
However think about it from a Russian crypto investors perspective. Most Russians don't speak English, certainly most don't speak it well enough to read/analyse English language focused crypto coin websites (basically most cryptos). NB think how hard it is to understand much crypto info when its written in your native language, never mind your second language.
Golos would be a much easier investment for Russians to make. They don't need to try and use Google translate etc to understand the offering.
Other factorsI first read about Steem about 6 months ago. I had a look, but to me the quality of the content was really poor and it didnt seem to have much traction.
However this is changing fast. For example this article
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@jrcornel/is-this-the-beginning-of-cryptocurrency-mass-adoption has earned more than $400 despite only being 1 day old! If this article was published 1 month ago (before Steemit shot up in value) it would only have earned about $100 in 1 day. Steem and Golos have an ingenius network effect.
Further, the main social media platforms like Youtube and Facebook have started trying to ban anti establishment content like
https://steemit.com/money/@sgtreport/end-of-the-empire-bill-holter How dare anyone suggest the USD has problems, despite there being so much evidence that the USD as a world reserve currency is failing! This kind of big brother censorship on Facebook, Youtube etc is only going to make sites like Steem and Golos far more popular.
So in summary thats why I'm going to sell all my alt holdings and put them into Golos. I think its going to explode in value really soon.
Let me know you're thoughts. If you think I'm an idiot then please back up your viewpoint with data