One cannot just expect the future to be like the past, based on a statistical sample size of just 1.
BTC may very well be a one-off phenomenon, never to be repeated again.
I've always felt you need a critical mass of distribution for this to occur. A mining bubble that's still going to be widespread after it deflates. It doesn't really feel like we'll ever see this again as we saw with the first wave of BTC, LTC, and Doge. All the BTC believers already built huge GPU farms and sold them. If Monero goes up, it's the equivalent of existing BTC users proof of burning their coins to another chain. Normal consumers really have no incentive to particpate in CPU mined coins in the first place.
If a Monero mining bubble happened, the second it became extremely profitable, some ass that works at Dell or somewhere would turn his entire building into an after hours mining farm and completely destroy the marginal cost structure. Same thing with botnets. But the majority of distribution is already done, so looking for a Monero mining bubble to pop up out of nowhere doesn't seem that likely. For Monero to go somewhere, there would either need to be a huge cannibalization of BTC userbase, or huge BTC bubble that just indirectly raises Monero.
The fact that neither Monero or Darkcoin seems to be catching on with dark markets makes me feel like BTC is a one-off black swan, never to be replicated in upward momentum again. But, it's possible Monero can't gain any retail use solely due to lack of wallet, so I guess we'll see after that happens.
You strengthen the case of why XMR likely will never hit it big.
The only solution is to attract new users, and therefore, new fiat inflows into XMR.
This will expand the overall pie.
XMR cannot just pull in existing BTC owners, otherwise XMR will forever be inversely correlated with BTC.
XMR needs to stand on its own two feet, to depeg and decouple itself from all *coins.
Just like how BTC broke past US$1,000 after the Chinese bought BTC en masse, so does XMR need to attract new fund inflows.
Otherwise all we are doing is merely rotating ownership of coins from the same group of players, over and over again.
A lot of great points made in these posts. Existing BTC owners have demonstrated that they are not willing to turn their BTCs into XMR, unless they actually multiply their BTC holdings in the process. It is just dumping (rotating?) into each other for last several months, utilizing this thread as a tool. Why will anyone new play this game of sharks is beyond belief. It is too late for GUI wallets to make any impact anymore.
Well, count me in as an audience. Would love to read this analogy