Maybe I must put it differently: if genuine demand for Bitcoin by "ordinary" people (ie. not speculators) was the sole price driver, what would Bitcoin's price be? $1 - $3 maybe? (I have no idea, I'm thumb-sucking here) Either way, the gap between that and the current price means that speculators are propping the balance of the price up. What we are hoping to achieve with Monero (in particular with the infinite tail emission) is to reduce that gap so that the price of Monero in the far future more closely reflects the actual demand than any artificial demand. Who knows if we're on the right path or not, but I do sincerely believe it's a better path than just cloning Bitcoin;)
You're right. Bitcoin's market cap without speculation is probably not much. But I don't think that infinite tail emission changes this in XMR at all. Predictable changes in supply will constantly be factored into speculation. DOGE's value went down during halvings. People knew the changes in supply were coming. The majority of XMR's value will always be based on speculation. It's inescapable, sorry to say.
Just as the price of gold is mostly because of hoarding and speculating. It's "utility only" (electronics and jewelry lets say) value is so much lower.
I enjoy this debate, and obviously I don't know the future - maybe the decisions we've made are unsubstantiated right now, and maybe they're wrong, so of course I stand to be completely wrong and only find out in future:-P
That said, I do think infinite tail emission changes things substantially - once we hit minsubsidy it makes trading based on a microcosmic timeline (ie. demand for the Monero that is emitted over, say, a month) vs. the view a speculator would take of a deflationary currency where supply is fixed. You, for instance, indicated you want to own "0.1% of all XMR". Tail emission makes this a moving target - you'd only ever be able to fulfil that for a snapshot in time (ie. "of all XMR currently emitted").
I'm also not arguing that there will be
no speculation, clearly that's never going to be the case. However, I do think that most speculators don't have a very high risk tolerance, and thus there will be enough of a fundamental difference (vis-à-vis Monero's slightly inflationary nature when contrasted with Bitcoin's deflationary nature) that there will be less
"hoarding" for the sole purpose of becoming overnight millionaires.
The decisions that core team have made here are fundamentally sound. In fact the tail emission idea makes XMR far more closer to gold than XBT will ever be. That is not the issue.
The real problem here is that these decisions are not being communicated in a clear and concise manner so that proper due diligence can be made. Try to reconcile the above post with the following from the OP.
...
- PoW algorithm: CryptoNight [1]
- Max supply: ~18.4 million [2]
- Block reward: Smoothly varying [3]
- Block time: 60 seconds
- Difficulty: Retargets at every block
[1] CPU + GPU mining (about 1:1 performance for now). Memory-bound by design using AES encryption and several SHA-3 candidates.
[2] Actual number of atomic units is M = 2
64 - 1. A minimum subsidy may be implemented in the future with <1% annual inflation to preserve mining incentives.
[3] Uses a recurrence relation. Block reward = (M - A) * 2
-20 * 10
-12, where A = current circulation. Roughly 86% mined in 4 years (see
graph).
...
I suspect that one of the reasons for current market behaviour is that the market simply cannot reconcile "Max supply: ~18.4 million" and "Roughly 86% mined in 4 years" with a tail emission. After all 14% of infinity is still infinity and infinity is >> 18.4 million. Making the OP actually reflect the consensus reached by the core team will go a long way toward calming the market jitters. Furthermore the sooner the tail emission amount is set the better.