Isn't there a self-reinforcing positive cycle that can be manipulated here, i.e. large bcash holders manipulate the price up, making it more profitable to mine, attracting more press (like this article), attracting more miners, making it seem like a more popular network, attracting more speculators, driving the price up, making it more profitable to mine, etc...
Yes. If I had a lot, I would be scheming about how to cash out the loser at its price peak. And maybe buy more of the winner on its way up. But I don't, so I'll probably just ride it out, and trust that at least one of them will retain value.
Your post should win some kind of award for how confusing it is. Can't tell, when you say bcash, whether you mean bcash the term, or bcash the thing. I'm not asking though. Moving on...
My hunch is that BCH is being artificially pumped by the small group that created and backed it. The fact that they have "Bitcoin" in their name makes me think they are delusional and willing to bet hard on their leap of faith. It's also strange to me that each BTC grew a BCH with a high fiat value, like value just appeared out of nowhere.
Volume spoofing? Big players like Ver making it look less lonely to entice people over since transaction fees are so low right now that they can afford to pay them for the sake of spoofing volume.
Similar to how Jihan and friends spammed (currently spamming?) Bitcoin with empty blocks to take advantage of a weird loophole for the sake of the block mining reward and to increase the mempool volume to raise fees to miners.
So volume spoofing is you and me sending 100 BCH back and forth, but its undetectable because we're smart enough to use a different address each time...
Something like that. Was mostly speculation (ba dum, tisch!), but thinking about it further, it seems like the transaction fee is too high for it being high volumes of individual transactions. Looking up the number of transactions on BCH, it seems like the volume per transaction must be much higher to get this overall volume, because the number of transactions is an order of magnitude smaller than bitcoin (~10%) [1]
David Sacks said in an int that crypto is at da Internet's 1999 prices w/ the tech of 1995. Bunch to build. Best to invest in durable shit. Not hype coins or vapourware white papers, IMHO.
How much of all crypto currency transactions is speculation, and how much is actually used as currency? It seems as if all I ever hear about various crypto currencies these days is how much they're worth and how profitable it is, never how practical it is to buy stuff with.
In the near term, it's a horrible decision to buy anything that doesn't appreciate in value at a similar rate as your cryptocurrency of choice if you can possibly avoid it.
That doesn't mean Bitcoin doesn't have value.
Bitcoin is useful if you need to move financial amounts across borders.
Bitcoin is useful if your own fiat currency is about to take a bath.
Bitcoin is useful if you'd like to transact for something anonymously (there are good and bad reasons for this)
Complaining that Bitcoin isn't also a thing you can buy coffee with has never made sense to me.
