I never said anything about a "moral responsibility" to uphold bitcoin, nor what you put inside quotation marks. Please do not misrepresent what I actually said.
Sorry, I thought the "quote" feature (used above with author=XX) is to be used when indicating the source, the use of quotation marks may indicate quoting anyone or for making a point, as was the case here.
A possibility that you seem to ignore. I respect Smooth's response to ack the theory but disagree on the probabilities. I think you too should consider the probabilities, or at least articulate your analysis of them better if you are indeed taking that line of thought.
The thing never was a scenario analysis, and I needed to compose a reply in the original thread already for outlining this very point. I am one of the people here doing scenario analyses, and they are easily distinguishable. The crux of the "OP" was to bring into attention that in practice it is not needed to get the approval of all BTC holders to migrate to a new coin. If enough of them do it, they destroy the value of the ones left behind, and create an equivalent value to themselves as the wealth effect in the new blockchain.
Now you are bringing into attention that it is not necessarily equivalent. Of course it may not be exactly the same, but it is anyway higher than the value they left behind, meaning that they benefit of the migration regardless of how sad the others are or whether they quit entirely or not. The (bulk of the) value already migrated so it's no use to cry. (Cf. no matter what the LTC bagholders think now, they are not getting their value back, and it does not matter much in the grand scheme of things what they decide to do or not.)
This is coming from several years worth of discussions with various people, many of whom are sophisticated investors, execs at successful companies, etc, etc. Many have been tip-toeing in to Bitcoin one way or another, and I think a flip right now in where the value store is in the ecosystem would cause many of them to basically say: "eh, too chaotic right now. I'll wait a while until taking another look." That's problematic for me, in that I think the ecosystem as a whole needs to contain far more value in terms of fiat-market-cap in order to even begin to scratch the surface of the real benefits of the technology for the world. Thus, I consider Bitcoin remaining #1 for the foreseeable future, in order to thus yield the highest chance of more cryptocapitalization in general, as optimal right now.
Yeah, an ecosys with 3-5 strongish coins is fine. Buy them all, done. The problem, as you touch on, is if that 3-5 is under constant flux; eg, for a few years, it's coins A,B,C,D,E, and then a few years later, it's F,G,H,I,J, etc... Most investors with significant capital would probably just look at it all as a toy.
We might hope that BTC stays alive, because that would be good for us and good for everyone. Doing even a small investment decision based on hope is, however, foolish. If there is doubt if BTC can make it with regards to the impaired fungibility and regulation, the hopers will be left holding the bag, based on the mathematical fact that only 10-25% need to leave in order to complete the value transfer of 75-90% of the value.
Similarly, it would be nice if the coins stayed the same, but hoping as such does not affect reality. In this case I believe that other factors will take care of it though.
Yes, of course. My post yesterday was triggered by Risto's lack of accounting for the possibility that Monero could end up the dominant coin, but in an ecosystem with vastly reduced overall purchasing power. Was more of a "be careful what you wish for" point, I suppose.
I did the math, and there is no scenario that would make Monero the dominant coin, yet cause an individual XMR-holder to suffer a loss. For this to happen, XMR purchasing power would need to
decrease, which is not compatible with the premise. I left this without mention as I have the feeling that I am spoonfeeding enough already, anyway it's nice to hear that it's not the case here