анонимный вопрос
The main factors ensuring Bitcoin’s current dominance:
- Network effect. A huge number of people own Bitcoins, and they didn’t receive them through an airdrop, but incurred costs to acquire them, meaning they value them. Since others value them, one can boldly accept payments in Bitcoins; they are liquid.
- Low emission rates. The Bitcoin mass increases slowly, meaning that in the long term, this money will at least preserve its value. Thus, Bitcoin is suitable as a store of value; there is no need to rush to get rid of it if someone happens to pay you in bits.
- Decentralization. To set up a wallet, you can choose from a multitude of programs or even write one yourself. To transfer money, you don’t need to ask permission from a single transaction verification center—there are several tens of thousands of nodes in the network.
These main factors are enough so that, should you wish, you could easily sell your goods for Bitcoins or, conversely, buy goods with your Bitcoins. Or simply hold bits and enjoy the price growth.
Gram, issued as part of the TON project, will be successful if it can satisfy roughly the same criteria.
- Network effect. This could potentially be very large if nothing more than Telegram is required to use the coins, and a ton of people have Telegram. But the ability to buy Gram quickly and conveniently with fiat will be necessary. If buying Gram requires first buying Bitcoins, then it is completely unclear why it is needed as money, since Bitcoins themselves already exist.
- Low emission rates. I haven’t looked into the creators’ plans regarding this, but if the growth rate of the Gram mass turns out to be higher than Bitcoin’s, then the price will likely decrease relative to Bitcoin in the long run.
- Decentralization. Here, as I understand it, everything is bad. First, to achieve high transaction speeds, it is intended to maintain a very modest number of nodes. Second, if a Telegram account is needed to manage these coins, it means the money is completely centralized: any account can be banned by the Telegram administration at any moment. If these funds can be managed without Telegram, then it’s unclear what Telegram has to do with it.
So I am quite skeptical about TON, but Gram can certainly be used as a speculative asset; hyperinflation definitely does not threaten it.
