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Comment by thatguy0900 | Hacker News Reader

As long as drugs stay illegal and some countries have worse money swings than the crypto does I can't see it being zero. It doesn't need to be high for either of those things, of course, and a stableish low price works fine for both. And you don't need a million random shit coins for either of those use cases so those would be worth 0.

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> As long as drugs stay illegal and some countries have worse money swings than the crypto does

These are both problems that hopefully we will get better at solving. I think even if neither of those things quite goes to zero, there is a minimum combined level of both needed to keep the ecosystem running and secure. There needs to be enough economic activity passing through the system to pay enough miners to keep it running.

I also think that if the main usage of crytpocurrencies becomes avoiding unstable currencies, that will itself destablize cryptocurrency prices.

It needs enough diversity of users to be resilient against a 51% attack. If you don't have that, the value is 0. (You lose the benefit of the distributed ledger and may as well be relying on a central party's database at that point.)

Resilience against a 51% attack has nothing to do with a "diversity of users". It simply has to do with the security budget (block rewards and block space fees) being high enough to incentivize honest consensus over reorg attacks.

the "honest consensus" is the "diversity of users"; users doing the validation at least. Your rewards can be as high as you'd like, but if one party is in control of most of the validation, you're screwed. It's not the number of nodes or what you pay them or anything like that that matters. It's the actual people/entities behind them that matter.

This isn't true. One party being in control of most of the validation can't do much beyond performing a DoS attack, but that's not going to make them any money.

So what you actually need is a party who controls most of the validation and is willing to go against their own economic self interests in order to cause damage, that's a much bigger ask.

This is a completely solved problem, Monero is primarily powered by hundreds if not thousands of separate botnets. Mining will always be profitable because electricity costs are paid by someone else.

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