DASH with a huge percentage of its coins locked away in masternodes
They are not locked away any more than any other coin where people keep them in their own wallets i.e. not on an exchange. Should cold wallets be banned in your opinion before a coin's market cap is meaningful, because it's far more difficult to spend from a cold wallet than from a masternode? Or only the coins in exchanges be counted in the market cap? Or only the coins on asks, because if you can't buy them they are not liquid?
For a currency to be truly fungible every coin needs to be treated equally and be available for spending at all times. That simply is not the case for masternodes where coins cannot be spent. At roughly 2000 masternoes, (1000 coins each) supply is restricted by 2 million DASH!
No. "Masternode coins" are coins just like any other coins and are available to be spent any time immediately. The 1000 coin outputs are just as much part of the total supply and spendable as any other outputs.
I agree with illodin.
The reason the market cap is suspect is that the distribution is also suspect, and if it is tightly controlled the market cap becomes non-meaningful. For example, we know a large portion of the coins (masternodes) are held by Otoh and that he obtained those coins directly from the instamine or from someone who instamined them. We don't know the disposition of the rest of the instamine coins and whether they remain tightly controlled by insiders. This includes, by the way, coins that Otoh has sold in large blocks, since we don't know the relationship between buyer and seller, or between the buyer and other insiders.
Still, my overall
opinion is that Dash's market cap is
largely a valid market phenomenon, unlike some other coins. It is also somewhat incomparable to non-proof-of-stake coins that don't pay interest in more coins, but that's another issue.