I'm going to take a moment to briefly whine/vent/pontificate.
I'm still a little disheartened by Monero's performance this year. In BTC terms, we're still down 50% from Oct. 2020. We're still down ~85% from the 2017-2018 peaks. Meanwhile, I'm seeing shitcoins hit new USD ATHs, though not against BTC.
However, I'm optimistic in that Monero seems to be on it's own cycle, loosely correlated with the cycles of BTC and altcoins. 2017 was a good example of this, with Moreno pumps largely unaligned with ETH and other alt pumps. Also, from a TA perspective, the long term cup pattern seems to be continuing nicely. Finally, we may be on the cusp of a broader market focus shift to "privacy" coins, with the specter of totalitarianism haunting the globe, and the recent market successes of newer "privacy" coins like Pirate Chain and Mobile[scam]Coin, and older ones like Horizen, ZEC, etc.
Yes. This has been the curse of Monero from fairly early on.
I am pretty much one step down from a BTC maximalist. I see virtually NO REASON for the existence of almost all alts.
Smart Contract coins - ETH LINK TRON EOS etc etc etc - These coins are making a fundamental design mistake. It is the "cram everything onto the base chain" mistake. There is no reason to use the base monetary chain to record "all the things". Smart contracts can be done on layers, or sidechains. And I believe they will be.
Big Block chains - we all know this one, and have our own opinions. You can always spot a Monero big-blocker because they like to work the "peer to peer cash" angle. In fact Monero does this one of the best ways so far. But the big block coins make the same fundamental mistake as the smart contract coins.
Copy-pastas. LTC DOGE etc. Why? "Well fees are cheaper!! blocks are faster!! Etc." Fees will stop being cheap when these coins begin to be seriously used, and the friction of going from BTC to LTC is a non-starter. In tghe end these projects have an existential problem. The only reasn they are useful, is they are not used. *POOF* vanishes their purpose in a small puff of logic.
Loyalty/Purpose tokens BNB STX and so on. Now we get to see something useful. Centralized. Often built on top of one of the smart contract mistakes. These coins have value because they have a unique purpose. That value is kind of dubious, and I think most of them are unnecessary, but some will survive. They are the "green stamps" or coupons of crypto. Eventually these will be built on a sidechain of whatever chain is strongest (umm BITCOIN). Liquid is a good bet here. Because again. Why build this on one of the gargantuan monstrosities like ETH in the longrun?
Stable Coins Much like the above. These are serving an actual purpose and therefore will attract value. But it is temporary, and trades crypto-stability for SIGNIFICANT counter party risk. These too will most likely be built on a BTC sidechain like Liquid, until the die off from lack of use.
Privacy coins And actual iron clad use case for crypto that the BTC base layer will never do. A tradeoff that has a STRONG use case argument. And as we here know, nearly ALL of them are scams. Pre-mines, not 'always on' privacy, or privacy theater. Trusted setups, founder's rewards, and so on. Some projects try to combine privacy with one of the above mistakes.
Monero is WAY out in front of that pack, and will be for the forseeable future. The market has SOLIDLY integrated Monero into real world battle scenarios.
I would love to see some data, but I think it is arguable that Monero is at LEAST in the top 3 crypto assets if you were to measure REAL non-speculative transactions. Yes BSV has a LOT of transactions going on. But what coin is ACTUALLY being used more in real commerce. I would say only a handful, and NONE of them has Monero's privacy guarantees.
So why the hell is it not more expensive?
Three reasons, and one nightmare
1. It is, and always has been difficult to use. It has a weighty blockchain and lack of very many wallets etc are a serious barrier. Drug addicts are incentivized to go through a lot of trouble to make it work , but the average joe, less so. Just look at hardware wallets. Getting monero to work with those is pretty damn hard still.
2. It might be one of the least hyped projects in the entire space. For the longest time it's 'official' marketing was "Don't buy Monero". So not hyped that a lot of idiots (that weatherman jackass for example) figure that whole thing was reverse psychology. Which would be the second stupidest way to market it. There are no glossy claims. There is no "founders reward" to pay exchanges to list it, ad so on. It has just quietly been staying on the razors edge
3. The bad boy angle. Monero is one of the riskiest crypto projects to hold value in. I sort of assume that at some points governments will most likely clamp down on it. Or at least they could. So that makes it risky. To be honest I do not think this is a major factor.
Nightmare. Inflation bug. If that exists that would most definitely be having a dampening effect on the price of Monero. I think this is the least likely.
All that said... As the world wakes up to why Bitcoin is important, the smarter ones are going to realize why monero is important, just as we did, but earlier. It's like every halving cycle a new crew comes in... and they fall for all the same scams, and always a percentage of them end up realizing why Monero is important.
That number will be very big this time around.
