You're not anchored to anything.
Let us do some simple accounting. A miner mines 1 Dash. They expend $50 of direct cost doing so. They sell that 1 Dash on an exchange for $55. So the accounts for that "stock" go as follows:
Revenue
============
Sale of 1 Dash: $55
Direct Costs of Sale
============
Electric bills: $50
Gross profit (Loss): $5
So when you account for any mining activity, you are indeed "anchored to something" at least in the sense that you can't take the cost of mining a Peercoin and use that to calculate the profit you made on a Dash. I'll restate what I said above maybe in a more specific way:
the miner makes zero profit on any given mined stock "unless they mined that stock at a lower cost than the revenue they made from its sale".
Following from that we see that:
Mining sales are matched to a buy (plus or minus their gross profit)
Masternode sales are unmatched (because they incur near 100% profit on the sale)
DAO allocations could be considered matched to their contract costs (plus or minus the gross profit)
Conclusion:
The only source that exerts exclusively sell pressure on the market as a whole (at nodecount equilibrium) is...... masternode rewards.
Corollaries:
Increase the proportion of blockchain emission that goes to masternode rewards and you put more chronic downward pressure on price and therefore marketcap relative to fully mined competitors.
Decrease the proportion of blockchain emission that goes to masternode rewards and you'll relieve that downward pressure on price and allow marketcap to grow more competitively.
(And I always emphasise - at
nodecount equilibrium because that's the long-run economic condition).
