You really need to distinguish a variety of cases and phases of development in order to apply that reasoning suitably.  

Firstly, we should distinguish application tokens and financial engineering vehicles from cash money.  The end-game for cash money has a well-defined fundamental valuation, with low model risk (Fisher quantity theory), whereas the model risk for app tokens and ponzis is vast, and the best case upside potential is much curtailed relative to cash money.  All crypto is now primarily a speculative vehicle, but BTC at least has a fundamental economy of some size, and that won't change suddenly.

Secondly, we should distinguish the various levels of maturity of cash money.  Gold is mature.  Debt-based national currency under centralized management is experimental, but ubiquitous.  Bitcoin is unknown to 99.95% of the potential user base, and lacks essential features, and development is stagnating.  Monero is unknown to 99.9999% of the potential user base, and lacks essential features, but development velocity is quite respectable.  Clearly the growth potential of XMR is much greater than any other instrument in operation today, if you consider the prospect of becoming the primary international medium of financial exchange to be within the realm of possibility.

The best example of crypto achieving bitcoin mcap is bitcoin, and that took 5 years.  It takes time for money to flow, and the pipes are narrow enough so that back-pressure prevents too rapid a rise in mcap for XMR.  It would take perhaps $200mm influx to bring XMR to parity with BTC.  Poloniex can handle perhaps 20000BTC/diem, max, so it would take at least two months for parity to be achieved, if everyone decided today that BTC was utterly uninteresting, and only XMR mattered.  So, if XMR will be successful similarly to BTC, with no less speed, it will take between 2 months and 3 years to get there.  Meanwhile, there is no particular reason for BTC to decline while XMR ascends.  Quite the contrary, in fact, as buying XMR requires first buying BTC.  By the time XMR reaches USD 420, BTC will almost certainly pass $1k - unless a reliable and accessible fiat exchange or three opens meanwhile.

Bitcoin development is stagnating.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
Latest commit 5131005 3 hours ago @laanwj laanwj Merge #7723: build: python 3 compatibility

Without opening the bitcoin maximalist dam please, what makes you measure the community support for this or that, to the point of being affirmative and general as you do here?

The smartest speculators will recognize the fallacy that will haunt the space, namely: A coin can easily be replaced with a little improvement in technology with no ill effects on the economy.

It's not the number of commits that matters, it's the merit demonstrated by their utility that matters.

I'm not sure how I could have made that any more clear.  I guess "number of commits" is just a trigger for some people, no matter how many layers of disclaimers its embedded context.   

I don't care how many extra commits Hearn and Toomin added to XT and Classic, because they were all BS like checkpoints and blacklists.  OTOH, LN and SEGWIT are high on my DO WANT list.

The users of the network are those who own coins.

You have an influence, yes. So what is on your DO WANT list, matters, but you are only one among many. And merit certainly has a role in influence, though people can disagree on what constitutes merit.


Not entirely. Economic influence is more complicated than that. For example, value depends entirely on willingness to accept (aka buy) coins, whether the person buying already happens to own coins or not.

Sure they are, or at least can be. Immediately prior to acquiring their first coins they have launched and wallet and synced it, possibly synced up their own economically-independent full node if they want to have maximum confidence the coins they are about to acquire are actually real.

Other users who may not own coins or whose influence is not measured in coins owned include those with a large flow-through (services highly valued by their use, with such use not measured well by the coin ownership of their operator).


And yet, this general and complicated topic is what actually decides which software runs the network. Coin voting means nothing, other than yet another way to spin politics.

If we extend the time period it takes for most people to lose interest in BTC to something longer like 2 months you'll still have early speculators dumping BTC to preserve their wealth. Some will dump for USD and some will dump for XMR. But a few enlightened speculators would likely be enough to cause major panic and havoc to the cryptocurrency space. The smartest speculators will recognize the fallacy that will haunt the space, namely: A coin can easily be replaced with a little improvement in technology with no ill effects on the economy. This is a fallacy because if that is the case there will be a race to the bottom in every following coin in the dawn of a new one. Competition will drive the time it takes to replace a coin down from perhaps 3 years today to 1 year, 6 months, 3 months, 1 month, 2 weeks, 1 week, 1 day... At some point coins are replaced so often that they can no longer hold any value. What is the properties of money? One is store of value. Which will be no more. Without store of value we can't have a medium of exchange. Without that, there is no currency.