msall

That brings up a good point I should make explicit, which is that I think those two sources of value are separate but not necessarily mutually exclusive. I think you can consider them individually and then add them up. John Pfeffer makes this argument too, that the two sources of value likely don't affect each other too much, allowing you to consider them separately.

It's a good point that the low market cap could lead people to try to buy a controlling supply. I explain in the other comment why I think it wouldn't be profitable on a pump-and-dump basis. On the basis of control and trust, maybe there still needs to be some assumption that at least 51% is being held by various parties, enough so that the market trusts the network to not manipulate. I need to think about that more. I'm really glad you brought it up.

As for network effects, I find that to be a super interesting question. Because you're right, there are definitely certain levels of trust that existing networks have earned, and there's a good argument for why that creates friction and earns those networks the ability to charge a premium. I personally don't think that extra friction is long lasting. I'd expect that if there were indeed a new solution that accomplished the same thing at half the price, it would get attention and the market would gravitate to it fairly quickly (maybe not within weeks or months, but years? maybe it depends on the timeframe you want to consider, and the level of improvement it provides). But it's a really good point, and something I think about a lot.

That's a good point. The main reason for the low price is that velocity is so high — all of the coins are changing hands every 10 seconds in this scenario. So there is still a huge amount of demand for them. If you tried to buy a lot to drive up the price, I think all of that demand would be recalibrating the price so quickly that practically speaking it would be hard to sell them back fast enough at a price any higher than you paid. So I think it would be hard to manipulate the price in a profitable way.

But it's a good point — maybe there's some minimum level of holding that happens (could be high, 99%? 99.9%) that is solely about making it expensive for others to increase the price arbitrarily (even if they can't do so profitably), in order to maintain price stability. But that would be about paying for stability, not for the underlying utility. I need to think about that more.

Hi, I'm on the team at Medium that launched Charted today. No, Charted wasn't built to be used in blog posts. It was built as an internal tool to, among other things, share simple data query results and create ad-hoc dashboards (as part of the general data analysis our Product Science team does).