Problems with crypto market capitalization metric and potential solutions | Hacker News Reader

Problems with crypto market capitalization metric and potential solutions

medium.com

8 pointsarbitcoin4 comments

This is a poor quality article with lots of weird assertions.

> "All new forks initially inherit their parent blockchain’s market cap, regardless of their own merit, value, utility, initial uptake, use, liquidity, etc."

Forking a coin in no way assigns any monetary value to it. It can't even have a real market cap until it's price is set by market demands. The only part of market cap that gets carried over is the supply.

"...anyone who can trivially fork Bitcoin (and get their shiny new shitcoin listed on an exchange) to create an alt-coin with apparently equal valuation to BTC. This works at least for a time, until other longer-term market forces inevitably act to bring the new asset into a more realistic valuation"

Weird to mention that forking is trivial in the same sentence (and condition) as getting it listed on an exchange. Getting a coin listed on a legitimate exchange is extremely non-trivial. And again it would not have equal valuation. It has no valuation until the market demands it.

I stopped reading after this section. It's clear that none of the Bitcoin forks have nearly the market cap of Bitcoin itself. The article might have some interesting ideas, but when you get the basic facts entirely wrong, it's hard for me to want to invest the time to read it.

I have updated the wording of the original article to further clarify the nature of coin inheritance as it pertains to market cap.

The remainder of the article remains largely unaffected by the original poor choice of words regarding market cap inheritance.

As for the quality of the article, I beg to differ. Alot of time went into its research and presentation. Additionally, it was reviewed by a number of active crypto-researchers (as well as yourselves) and revised according to feedback.

Thank you for taking the time to read and leave comments, which have led to improvements to the ideas expressed in the article.

Thanks arbitcoin! Refreshing to see feedback taken to improve content even though I was a bit harsh. That's a great personal attribute that leads to growth and mastery, I wish most people were like that.

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