One of the questions I've been chewing on is whether the supply of *coins is effectively infinite. (If it is, that means substantial downward pressure on prices, as available speculative capital gets smeared out over the various options.) This seems like a pretty clear limitation: if a bad actor can crush a small currency, then we should see a lot fewer small currencies.
Do you (or others) have a sense of where the equilibrium might be? Clearly if an attack can be mounted for a few hundred bucks, jerks will do it just for the lulz, which suggests that there won't be a long tail of cryptocurrencies. But is it also plausible that a major Bitcoin player might try to smash something like Bitcoin Cash just to drive activity back to a more major currency, thereby benefiting their holdings?
Supply in token count is effectively infinite, yes. But what's the supply in VALUABLE tokens?
The availability of gold in the galaxy Andromeda doesn't affect gold prices on earth. Not equivalent analogy, but related - your market will only be hurt if there's economically accessible supply of equivalent or competing assets that fulfills the same need.
The page mentioned lists 79 tokens with a nominal value, 65 of them over $1m. All of these tokens were valueless at one point. Another site lists 862 coins with nominal values of over $1m: https://coinmarketcap.com/
This suggests there's no obvious limitation on the creation of economically unproductive speculative instruments. Even though they all start at $0, any new token has an unknown upside, as the price can only go up. For some that's apparently a compelling bet.
Will this process only stop when people stop looking for the next Bitcoin? Because for them, a valueless token definitely fills a "get in on the ground floor" need. And there are a lot of people doing that right now: https://www.google.com/search?q="the+next+bitcoin"
One of the questions I've been chewing on is whether the supply of *coins is effectively infinite. (If it is, that means substantial downward pressure on prices, as available speculative capital gets smeared out over the various options.) This seems like a pretty clear limitation: if a bad actor can crush a small currency, then we should see a lot fewer small currencies.
Do you (or others) have a sense of where the equilibrium might be? Clearly if an attack can be mounted for a few hundred bucks, jerks will do it just for the lulz, which suggests that there won't be a long tail of cryptocurrencies. But is it also plausible that a major Bitcoin player might try to smash something like Bitcoin Cash just to drive activity back to a more major currency, thereby benefiting their holdings?