Not shallow enough for them not to account for an equivalent ratio in trading volume - nearly half bitcoin's. Also, bitcoin accounts for only 7% of the transaction count in the top 15 chains alone.

So most of that trading "depth" doesn't even manifest on a blockchain but in a security that inherits its value and trades off-chain. So bitcoin is very much not seeing any use case, at least as far as its design case is concerned. That is one of the reasons an alt market exists.

Meanwhile blockchains exist that no only trade on-chain but also host other markets on chain. Those are use cases that are direct, not "store of value".

Like I say, I'm not knocking bitcoin - I own it. But the maximalist cool-aid is well flat and it's time people realised where their bread is actually buttered IMO.

No. That isn't what I'm arguing as you'll see if you care to go back and re-read my long post. I'm making the point that reserve assets are not wealth creators, they're wealth maintainers, and that there is a hierarchy of monetary functions and assets that are shorter term and more utilitarian in nature which serve to feed value into those reserve assets. By analogy, bitcoin needs such an ecosystem to survive and grow long term and it needs it specifically in the form of a diversity of trustless blockchain assets as we're seeing emerge.

I'm also making the point that most bitcoin "maximalists" have a flawed appraisal of the "bitcoin dominance" metric. They think it's good when bitcoin dominance is high and rising when in fact it's bad - a bit like a tree loosing all its branches and leaves and having only the trunk sticking out of the ground is bad.

LoL. Do you actually see how hilarious that sounds coming from a bitcoin promoter ?

You think that bitcoin has any more of a "use case" or is being used for its "intended use case" ? We're 10 years in. What's the Whitepaper called ? "A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System" ?

Look around you. What did you use the last time you went to the supermarket ? Bought something on Amazon ? Made a withdrawal from the bank ?

Get real. Altcoins are an $80 Billion market - that's quite a lot of "no value". The words pot and kettle spring to mind when people from either camp accuse the other of "not having any value". Most alts are doing what they were designed to do which is more than can be said for bitcoin. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a role, but everything in this entire sector is far more mutually dependent than many of their respective fanboys give credit for.

What exactly do you mean by "value" ? Value to you ? Value to the market ? Productivity value ?

More importantly...does it matter ? These discussions inevitably end up like an order book = there's somebody parked at every level from zero to infinity. Commentators in the "fiat world" argue bitcoin is useless and valueless just as many bitcoin holders argue altcoins are. Moon Coin from way back in 2014 has no current value. All its value is now in bitcoin because that was the only pairing it ever had. But it was where the "value" went first. Those people bought mooncoin, not bitcoin because many of them would have far less bitcoin today if they'd bought bitcoin first.

Similarly, stocks in typewriter manufacturers from the 1960's have zero value. Their value moved into more permanent vehicles whether that be the next short-lived stock, cash or gold. It doesn't matter because the value was captured and eventually moved down Exter's pyramid.

My point is that all this talk of "alts have no value" is pointless. You might as well say bitcoin has no value because if someone puts their money in Moon Coin first rather then bitcoin, it doesn't. Most people want to earn money quickly, not slowly and reserve assets have never been - nor ever will be - the front door to wealth.

They're where wealth ends up when it matures to a certain stage. That's why most people invest in companies rather than gold and it's why bitcoin needs a healthy altcoin market that's - ideally - multiples of its own size to grow long term.

Those are features of a blockchain, not monetary-economic roles.

Bitcoin is a reserve asset (relatively speaking in the blockchain space). As such its job is to collect and provide continuity to long term capital that's not deployed in some kind of active economic role. In any monetary system you always have a layered structure of diverse assets - always. Thats because there are so many distinct priorities that may be in conflict for a given requirement.

For example, say you're a saver. You want to maximise return on your savings and don't care how they are denominated. You may or may not need regular "income" from your capital, or just protection against goods price inflation long term. That would be one set of priorities which may be met by - whatever: sovereign bonds, equities, indexed funds, gold, silver, bitcoin.



On the other hand, say you're a car manufacturer. You have a 6 month budgeting cycle during which the price of labour, raw materials and plant can go all over the place. On top of that you're exposed to potentially unfavourable currency volatility in foreign markets. Here, you're not interested in maximising return on capital, but rather running your production costs on budget and preserving the margin on future sales. So you invest in a completely different type of money - one that preserves your planning priorities and hedges your risks.



Contrary to the tunnel visioned mono-culture you've been promoting in this discussion, the crypto economy is no different. There will be and IS already a demand for a diversity of trustless monetary blockchains that address specific priorities ranging from realtime trading performance, through various hedging protocols such as stablecoins or commodity pegs, the whole smartcontract sector and crypto-derivative platforms, trustless auction exchanges, invoice factoring platforms, bitcoin clones that prioritise alternative aspects of the protocol, trustless hedging protocols for merchants such as Bitshares.

Bitcoin cannot do all this and was never designed or intended to. If you think one blockchain can run a whole crypto economy you're deluded. Also you can forget any "side chain" or "piggy back" nonsense as well because if there's one thing that's been learned from the old gold standard or trans-national currencies like the Euro, it's that single currencies are a disaster for diverse economies. They transmit all the rot from where the problem is to where it isn't. (Though that doesn't mean that we can't have world reserve asset bases like bitcoin but they are horizontal, not vertical).

The way that all these "alternative classes" create growth in bitcoin is that the monetary systems are layered on top of each other so that the utility assets are near the top and reserve assets at the bottom. One way that this is often expressed is in a metaphor known as "Exter's Pyramid". What happens is that most of the utility capital is deployed and recycled in the utility layers (such as short term business deposit accounts in the classic economy for cash flow). But some of these activities make "excess money" - i.e. profits - which have to be "parked" somewhere as they are excess to requirements. That's how capital starts to drift down through the pyramid and into the successive reserve layers below, adding long term value to them.



So be careful what you wish for. If you really want your BTC to grow, in my opinion you'd better hope the whole economy grows around crypto and that ain't gonna happen with one blockchain - albeit a reserve asset one. Trees have leaves for a reason, the bark on the trunk isn't too great at collecting light for photosynthesis since it's busy doing another job protecting it from reindeer sharpening their antlers. Similarly, altcoins will be the "collectors" of revenue and ultimately capital from a myriad of business sectors that bitcoin would simply never have found its way into on its own. Why do you think the Lightning Network is needed for example ? Because bitcoin can't even adequately fulfill the most basic of trading performance priorities and there are plenty more where that one came from.

What you want for bitcoin growth is LOW relative market dominance, not high dominance. That's also why you see jumps in bitcoin value taking place after a period of decline in dominance - because the high "capital collector" altcoin layers of crypto's "Exter's pyramid" have become saturated, get squeezed, and the excess capital moves to reserve storage in bitcoin.

Finally, I'm not the only one to have made this appraisal of the future structure of the crypto eco-system. Others have taken it much further, such as Tom Luongo who actually posted a version of the pyramid adapted to crypto. This is from a couple of years ago.

What "use case" do you think bitcoin solves out of interest ? (Apart from making coin-grabbing early adopters rich)

By the logic of some of the idiotic maximalist comments in this thread, once gold nuggets were dug out of the ground there was no further need for diversification - not minted coins, not account based trading, not paper notes and not lightweight metals. Popular music need not have bothered itself further after the Beatles. The sovereign bond didn't need to be hedged by equities, commodities nor currencies, Fine Art investments were all "scams" after Da Vinci.

Don't you nuttheads get markets or what ? The whole point of them is that they're not tyrannies. There is diversity to address everything from taste to hedging requirements to technical deficiencies and vertical sectors.

Without diversification in the crypto-asset market bitcoin would still be in 3 digits.

Are you serious ?

The only one which HASN'T done anything is bitcoin. Why t.f. do you think it has a community on a near permanent war footing with itself arguing about technical priorities and forking the chain to Kingdom Come.

Dumperoo. I must have been right about Barry Silvert's oven chips.

Right then, has Satoshi been announced yet ? I didn't sign up for the "unveiling" but the countdown is at zero I think.

Is it actually Barry Silbert promoting a new brand of honey coated oven chips ?

Did you by any chance go to guy's school ?

If you say so.

No need to wait 10 years thanks. In case you weren't aware we already tested the scenario where bitcoin had a monopoly on digital assets.

An $80 Billion altcoin market was the result.

Although I appreciate the value of tribalism in a competitive environment, that is a very stupid comment if I may say so.

Bitcoin would be nowhere without "sh*coins" because they are the buttressing by which it survives. That "buttressing" provides hedging support, diversification, optimal access for new market participants and generally all round builds an industry in which bitcoin can consolidate roots.

Not least, alts are also a far more effective way of accumulating bitcoin than just buying bitcoin because at any given moment there's always one or more of them outperforming it for gain.

So all in all I wouldn't p*ss on the potato patch that you're growing in if I were you. (I also make the same case in reverse to sh*coin maximalists by the way - for the same reasons).

Feel free to make your case here.

That chart has had bitcoin at 8k for a couple of months. Well before any Youtuber pundit predicted it.

The rally may be about to move out of BTC and into alts. BTC is finally trading above its fairvalue price after being undervalued for months.

Meanwhile alts (apart from Litecoin) remain well below their's on market price:

FTFY.

You're confusing corrections in RSI with corrections in spot price. When the RSI hits the overbought region the price can keep on hiking for as long as it likes till there's a correction. However the base of the correction can quite easily occur ABOVE the point at which the RSI entered the overbought range. After a spell in the overbought region and a peak the RSI will generally decline to more "buyable" levels. But the price doesn't always correlate.

For example on the 3-day chart between the peaks in June 2017 and August 2017, RSI declined from 91 to 75 but price increased from $2800 to $4900. In fact by the time the price hit $5800 RSI was still at 68.

All I'm saying is that your "rule" is largely arbitrary and based on cherry picking ranges. The RSI itself retraces but not necessarily the price from the level it's at at the time. All depends on what happens next.

In February 2017 1-week RSI hit 90. There was no "major retrace" ever following that level other than a minor correction on the way to the moon.

In August 2017 RSI hit 89 with price around 2k. There was no "major retrace" ever following that level, in fact there was barely even a correction.

In October 2015 RSI hit 80 with price range 300-400. It retested the base of that range for a day or two and never saw that level ever again.

In 2013 just prior to the "Cyprus" spike, RSI reached NEARLY 100 in March with price rangebound at $48-$70 for the week. Apart from a momentary capitulation to $64, it traded above $80-$90 forever since then.

Not saying that we can't expect a correction from this rise - it's obvious that there has to be at some point.

Long range RSI was above 77 for most of the year prior to the December 2017 top. It was also above it back in June 2016 and in fact only dipped below 70 from July to October 2016.

It was at 90 when the bitcoin price was still below $1000.

Depends what chart range you look at. Quoting any indicator is meaningless without a qualifying chart range - it can show one trend at one range and a completely different value (and trend) at another.