Valuing systems — the margin of substitute goods
In order to value a cryptocurrency, we need to start with what it really is and what a substitute good will be. This is important as all things, including money, have alternatives.
- BTC — 1 MB (simple transactions)
- BCH — 8 MB (16-MB burst)
- BSV — 64 MB (today, and 512 MB within 6 months, 2 GB in a year)
No, the value of the transactions as they are, as a potential, are in the order of $0.005 USD a transaction as they stand. Other uses (such as EDI) would be more, but only BSV is set for these.
Let us look at this in terms of processing capacity:
- BTC — 4,000 simple transactions — $20 a block
- BCH — 32,000–35,000 transactions — $160 a block
- BSV — 200,000–300,000 transactions a block now, and getting close to 1 million in the next 6 months — $1,500–$8,000 a block
These are the miner rewards for use.
All of these systems have a reward subsidy of 12.5 bitcoin (in the various respective forms) a block, and all will halve in 2020 to a lower subsidy of 6.25. So, a base idea of value will come from use. At worst, you could expect (excluding the impact of the better system wiping out the worst ones altogether) the minimum coin value at market to be the block earnings divided by the utility as capacity.
In the next year, nChain intends to ensure that we are packing blocks with paid data (and no, we will not call it spam).
The simple answer is: Bitcoin as SV will have miners earning over $8,000 a block based on use alone. That equates to $640 a bitcoin on exchanges, and we have not factored in the gambling price of bitcoin, just what miners will earn as a service.
This is the issue. Some think that you cannot value cryptocurrency, and to an extent this is correct. In the past, you could not value bitcoin as it was a mere speculative guess as to the future. The reality is that you can always value a product based on the closest alternative goods and services and the substitutes on market. For Bitcoin, this is as a commodity ledger.
Not the hype. Not the global-money argument. These ONLY come when bitcoin is a commodity money, and the ledger is the commodity.
With the Teranode project nChain will be scaling Bitcoin SV to handle over 1.0 TB within the next 3 years (aiming for 2) and growing sizes from there. At that level, miners will earn over $600,000 for each Terabyte block, and this is every 10 minutes on average.
In 2 to 3 years we expect to be at a capacity of 2 to 4 billion (with a b) transactions a block, that is 6.5 million transactions a second. This is also Visa, MasterCard, banking in SWIFT, and ALL global currencies (not just crypto) in under 15% of a block. And this is the start.
The simple answer is: we can do secure, permanent transactions and ledger entries that are set privately for each party at a global scale, and as we scale, the cost for each transaction will only get less.
I expect that you will see Visa using Bitcoin (SV) as its backbone and plumbing within the next 4 years, as we can provide them with a means to transact that is both more secure and faster… and more, it will cost less.
