When editing this episode, I noticed a few points where I’d wished I’d asked followup questions. I sent them to Charlie via email, and he graciously responded. My questions and his answers are below. — Laura
When you said that Litecoin had been hugely successful because it had a market cap of $5 billion, couldn’t the same logic be used to say Ripple and Bitcoin Cash and EOS have been hugely successful? For Ripple and Litecoin, can’t it be argued that they have large market caps simply because of their age?
It all depends on what you consider success is. Litecoin was created as a fun side project for me. So to me, it’s a success because Litecoin’s market cap is 50x what Bitcoin’s market cap was when Litecoin launched.
Age is not the reason why Litecoin has a large market cap. There are dozens of coins as old or even older than Litecoin that have a small marketcap today.
And does the $5 billion market cap make sense when Litecoin is only doing 25,000 transactions a day, which is .01% the number of transactions Visa does per day, whereas Litecoin’s market cap is 1% of Visa’s?
Litecoin is both a store of value and a payment method. So you can’t compare that to Visa, which is not a store of value. Plus, you can’t compare cryptocurrency marektcaps with businesses.
When you said that when crypto is widely used, people won’t even know that they’re using it, to me, that sounds like people won’t be aware of crypto assets as an asset class. Meaning, that they’ll be using blockchains without assets involved. Is that what you mean? If so, then who will decide when any one chain gets used vs. another? And will there be more centralized services involved than P2P networks?
Cryptocurrency is both a store of value and a means of exchange. I think people will know which assets they store their money in, but when they use it, they will not need to know what happens to that asset to get it to the recipient. Could be Lightning. Could be atomic swapped for other assets like Litecoin. Or it it could something totally new.
