“There is absolutely a reason to have bitcoin on one hand, and to have an asset to track the dollar on the other. One of them provides more stability in terms of value, and one of them has this huge network effect”.
To my knowledge, this is the first time a bitcoiner of that “level” acknowledges the existence of NuBits.
He regards it as a niche.
I have the feeling that later on, in the near future he would have to acknowledge the superiority of NuBits as a transactional value transfer instrument, i.e as money, surpassing bitcoin and making it not anymore a niche.
great news!
on the other hand, i don’t believe that btc should or could be replaced by another coin anytime soon or ever!
just think of btc like the mother of all coins, if mother will not survive then it is possible the faith for digital economy to go away as well.
btc’s promotion and community is so large that i believe it is the only best chance for digital economy to go mainstream and along with the mother coin all the other worthy child coins like nubits
after mainstream, the mother can easily passed away (if ever) and leave her legacy to her children!
[quote=“cryptog, post:1, topic:1443”]
“There is absolutely a reason to have bitcoin on one hand, and to have an asset to track the dollar on the other. One of them provides more stability in terms of value, and one of them has this huge network effect”.
[/quote] “and developers working on all these things”
Note that the latter is (much) more vague than the former. I see Bitcoin as advertising focal point so that cryptos are publicized enough and get mainstream. I believe much of the Bitcoin money is, in essence, Ad money.
“There is absolutely a reason to have bitcoin on one hand, and to have an asset to track the dollar on the other. One of them provides more stability in terms of value, and one of them has this huge network effect”.
If the only barrier to NuBits adoption is overcoming a “network effect”, we’re in great shape. There seems to be a myth that Bitcoin has achieved an insurmountable critical mass based on its achievements so far. That’s a flawed way of thinking about blockchain technology. Network effects are possible with physical goods (like iPhones, or video game systems) when the value of owning that particular good is enhanced simply by others owning it. For example, if ten of your friends own a Playstation and only one of your friends owns an XBox, you may gain more utility by purchasing a Playstation because you will be able to play with your friends, trade games, discuss gaming experiences, etc, even if an XBox would be a superior individual choice.
With Bitcoin very little of that additional utility is present. There are services like ShapeShift Lens that allow other currencies like NuBits to be accepted everywhere that Bitcoin is. As well, there are almost no switching costs between different digital currencies - aside from an exchange trading fee in some cases - to move to better products. In short, my utility from using Bitcoin is not enhanced to any great degree by others using Bitcoin. With my previous example, if Playstation games could be played on an XBox and vice versa, neither system would gain a network effect on the basis of existing user adoption. The winning game system would be the one with the best secondary attributes (cost and controller design for example). The winning attributes for digital currencies will eventually be price stability (where NBT is superior to BTC) and transaction costs (where PoS is superior to PoW).
The network effect exists for Bitcoin in relation to its forks and clones, but does not exist in relation to improved designs like NuBits. The network effect would only persist should Bitcoin decide to adopt improvements like Nu’s separation of fungible units, which seems unlikely given the current misalignment of incentives between miners and users. And in that sense, Nu has a structural competitive advantage over Bitcoin.
On a secondary tangent, it’s nice to see us being mentioned by Erik. A decision was made very early on to market a product (NuBits) over the equity in the network (NuShares), even though the more profitable short-term decision would have been to focus on the equity portion, as BitShares has done. Most digital currency users are in the business of speculation and it’s likely that the value of NuShares would be higher if www.nushares.com was our main portal and marketing focus. However, the cost of doing that approach is that your products (like BitUSD) stand out less. NuBits is positioned well as a brand to dominate discussion of stable-value digital currencies in 2015.
I thought he would at least say something about how a volatile asset like Bitcoin may have some use, but it seems the only thing that puts Bitcoin ahead of us is because its more well known. That’s not exactly giving Bitcoin a lot of confidence in my opinion. It’s just a matter of time and effort before NuBits are well known and even more useful to people than using bitcoins.
As Tim Swanson mentioned, for example, google was certainly not the first engine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_search_engines
In software, it is difficult to create a network effect.
Bitcoin is certainly a first mover as was Infoseek but as long as it does not create a network effect it is not an advantage per se.
So the first mover advantage for bitcoin is a myth.
As you said, it s extremely easy to shift from bitcoin to another Satoshi-based software.
So Nu has strong chances to replace bitcoin as the most adopted cryptocurrency in the world provided that the strategy of expansion is executed carefully.
[quote=“tomjoad, post:8, topic:1443, full:true”]
The winning attributes for digital currencies will eventually be price stability (where NBT is superior to BTC) and transaction costs (where PoS is superior to PoW).[/quote]
In addition to price stability and low transaction costs, I think we should include high liquidity in here as well. Jordan seems convinced that surpassing Bitcoin’s liquidity is a major key to success.
Yes absolutely, my list was by no means exhaustive. Liquidity will be very important for our design. I’m interested to see how our liquidity operations will continue to evolve, as well as how Jordan’s recent suggestion of an upcoming motion will affect liquidity and peg support.
