Peercoin is more then money...
...but my impression is that the perceived success of a crypto currency is intrinsically tied to the price. Peercoin has had a pretty dull life, free of from community drama (at least it seems so judging by a quick look back on this forum) and has, more importantly, never been failed technically either. Successful forks such as NuBits also proves that the technology is solid and that Proof-of-Stake works.
Key pieces of the puzzle that is still missing, is arguably: mass adoption and higher trending prices. Well, Bitcoin has yet to succeed in achieving mass adoption and price been going down for a long, long time now. In "Bitcoin time" price have been going down "forever". Blockchain proponents in the banking industry think that Bitcoin is not interesting. Basically, if you would ask my friends or people in the know about Bitcoin, they write off either as a failure or at best an interesting experiment but nothing more then that.
Would you agree with their sentiment? Then perhaps also Peercoin should be written off as an interesting experiment that is doomed to fail?
I look at it differently.
We are right now more then 7 billion people on earth, on track to 8 billion 2024. A quick google search reveals that 2 billion adults are unbanked. By 2018, more then 50% of mobile phones will be smart phones and two year later, a projected 6.1 billion smartphone users globally.
I think it's safe to say that if billions of people are turned onto Bitcoin, the price of bitcoins will be trading higher then $400. I'm perfectly confident that peercoins will be worth more then $1 which is something like x3 from spot right now, if there is a influx of new users.
But will they use it? Is there anything preventing it, technically speaking?
No. The crypto currency space is fertile ground for innovation and there are now several very smart ways of doing trustless off-blockchain transaction in development. Thanks to innovations such as these, I think its fair to say that crypto currencies can scale up. In a big way. This is also perfectly aligned with how Satoshi reasoned about the future of crypto in his white paper.
But even if they can use it, will they choose to use it?
This is where it gets interesting. I've hears somewhere that money was one of our first inventions and actually debt goes pretty far back too. Even future contracts were used ages ago. Aristotle came up with a definition of money, but in truth people have over the centuries been using types of money that does NOT fit Aristotles definition. There is this one thing though, there has to be a prevailing and ubiquitous confidence in the money. If there is no confidence, whatever the current money is, it will stop serving the function of money. Something else will replace it.
Right now neither bitcoins or peercoins are money. I don't think it's digital gold either. There is not a prevailing and ubiquitous confidence in these technologies. Save for purchases of illicit stuff, the only reason people are buying into it, is because they think there is a way to make capital gains. It is, generally, speculators speculating on price as if it was a commodity or a share in a start-up or something like that.
I also don't agree with the notion of peercoins being "digital gold", because I my opinion it's closer to "algorithmic" or even "mathematical" gold, the later especially true for primecoins. Arguably an even more accurate definition would be "protocol gold". But I don't like the gold metaphor either, because it doesn't capture even 10% of the true potential of this technology. Gold is tangible and its properties were set by the laws of nature. Peercoin is another thing entirely. The protocol isn't written in stone, it is made up of information and its properties can change. As long as there is a feedback loop (a community or otherwise) it can adapt to a changing environment and be molded into pretty much what ever it is best used for. It is not a dumb metal. It's kind of a smart information material. Simply put Peercoin is "smart value".
For all of the reasons I've outlined above, it is way, way to early to know the true price of a peercoin, what Peercoin is, who will use it and what for.
Actually I would like to challenge everyone to think of Peercoin not of what it is today, but what it could be tomorrow and what kids all over the world growing up today, will use it when they are adults.
