Been following this thread for a while so I figured it's time to say hello
XC is a very interesting coin because as others has written it resembles a company more than just another cryptocoin.
Others have written their analysis of why this coin has caught their interest and savings I would also like to offer my perspective.
First my view on all cryptocoins and what should be an investors main focus. You wan't a coin with steady high demand, slow and/or fixed supply and a good volume.
Bitcoin has this by being widely accepted and a proven track-record. The demand is also driven by market speculations in future gains.
Many if not all altcoins are technologically superior to Bitcoin but few offer any real competition to Bitcoins market share size by network effect.
Bitcoins core-differentiating factor to other cryptocoins is it's market integration and thus real-world appliance. Another is Bitcoins volume as the volume is part of the service Bitcoin delivers.
You could argue that both these factors merely are compeeting factors rather than differentiating factors but from a service perspective rather than a product comparing perspective Bitcoins simply is unchallenged.
If we look at this new breed of anon cryptocoins like XC and DRK they offer a comparable product to their bigger brother Bitcoin but with a new service differentiator, Anonymity. This differentiating factor could be argued in the grander scheme is compeeting to Bitcoin mixers but let's for now refrain from comparing centralized services to decentralized.
This is the coin perspective but as previously stated XC is more than a coin, it resembles a company so how to analyze it?
The value of a company is the value it brings to it's customers. It is what value you add/deliver to a customer experience. This at a prize determined by supply and demand.
Customer experience can be viewed as something that is being build up. The foundation is Salience between the customer's interpretation of the company's identity. You wouldn't buy pluming from an ice-cream vendor would you?
On top of Saliance there is the customers perceived performance of the products and services of the company but also aestetics. On this level there is also imagery which is the company's projected identity. Going further up it is the feelings the company evokes and the judgement customers do in their evaluation of the company like price to perceived value based on performance, imagery and salience. Feelings can overrule judgments and the other way around.
At the top of this model you will find Resonnance, it is when people don't just buy into being someone that buys this product, this life-style. Think Harley Davidson MC and Apple Computers (for some). It is when you hit the Resonnance level that your customers demand will be the highest and thus when they will pay top dollar for your products and services.
Of what a classic company does only some 20% is value adding to the customer. 80% is strictly supporting and is only perceived as a cost, we call it non-core supporting activities. The easiest example of this to understand is Human Ressource. Of cause good Coorporate Social Responsibility and healthy/happy employees touch over feelings and imagery part of the customer experience but they are a product of good Human Ressource, not Human Ressource itself. For alt-coins supporting activities is mostly coding and testing.
Of the 20%, 5% is Core-Differentiating and 15% is Core-Competing. Because of the Nash equilibrium Core-Differentiating competitive edges, be it product or service will be copied by your competitors making it a core-competing factor within your industry rather than a differentiator. This transition happens quickly in this early stage of the new market of altcoins. It can evoke strong feelings in the community when other coins copy or promise to copy the features of the coin(s) you have invested in especially with all the scam-coins popping up daily. This is the darkside of an unregulated market but in the grander scheme it's a good thing. Competition brings innovation and competitors copying the innovation brings enhancements and flavors. The Scam coins show market trends of what features are popular. They also mature both investors and those coins that are more legit to show additional due diligence, in a sense self-regulating the market.
Anonymity has several flavors, DRK do it one way, XC does it their way. From a customer perspective it can be hard to judge which coin has the superior performance compared to the other. It is therefore mostly left to imagery and feelings, maybe even resonance if you are a hardcore fan of a specific coin. I think this is why many are anticipating Dan writhing the white-paper, they wan't some more tangible information that can help their judgment of this coin, why especially judgement is important for investors I will supply a theory for later.
But first back to XC being more a company than just another alt-coin. The Dev. team is moving towards building a decentralized anonymous platform on which their first product or service if you want will be anon-skype and anon cryptcoin. Devs has hinted that they could even be moving towards a decentralized anon social media platform. The anon-skype feature alone is great for the customer experience but first you have to ask yourself who is the customer of XC?
Everyone who downloads the client is a customer, you don't have to buy XCurrency to be an XChat customer, this is not a bad thing since the XCurrency network security to my understanding strengthens from the additional nodes even if their wallets are empty. XChat is therefore not a differentiator to XCurrency though it might be to the XCplatform. To XCurrency XChat is only a non-core supporting feature, it can affect the XCurrency Imagery but it disturbs the Salience. This is why placing an emphasis on Privacy Platform is important for the XC brand.
But we can't invest in the XCplatform we can only invest in XCurrency. Enter the previous comment about emphasis on the judgement part of the customer experience.
It turns out that experience as a customer varies when you are doing private purchases or when you are doing purchases on behalf of your employeer. B2C vs B2B.
The customer experience for a B2B purchase is again Salience as the foundation, Performance on top, but Imagery is replaced by Reputation. On the next level we again find judgments but with a heightened emphasis!, feelings has been replaced with the perception of the sales force relationships. Rather than resonance at the very top we find Partnership Solutions, basically can you see the two business start a mutual partnership with product service and future support.
I believe that when we are doing investments our applied reasoning is closer to that of the B2B buying process rather than the B2C.
What many in this thread has expressed and what I also believe is that as an investor in XCurrency we are short term judging the dev. team and the partnership of which we are entering into with our savings.
Because those of us who believe in the project and have bought coins are running our wallets to support and further decentralize the network we are intertwined with the XChat functionality. If Dan tomorrow got an offering on his code from Microsoft and rebooted the project it would still not be the same (also I highly doubt that Microsoft would be in the market for anything decentralized and anon). This in a case makes each coin a stock, but in a company with no revenue (for now)
The true profit earning value of XCurrency is still with the functionality means of transferring value + anon transfer of value. Building in a decentralized trading platform that integrates with a local Bitcoin wallet would add XCurrency as an a path of least resistance for Bitcoin mixing. Adding volume and demand for XCurrency. Here anon XChat would also serve a more direct value benefit of arranging the mixing.
We as an investing community has an incentive in ensuring that the dev. team is sufficiently invested in this coin so that they are motivated into figuring out ways to intertwine XCurrency to generate some kind of revenue from the other features of the XCPlatform or enhance XCurrency in a way that brings demand and volume.
If you want to do additional reading on the theories I applied lookup Keller's Customer based brand equity model (pyramid) and Kuhn, Alpert & Pope's work of the pyramid in a B2B context. Also Nash equilibrium.
TLDR: XChat alone doesn't bring much value to XCurrency (yet) but you can't have one without the other so it speaks to the partnership you as an investor are joining into with the dev team.
Thanks for reading. English is not my first language and I CBA to get a forum post proof-read.
