As of now there is no "cryptocurrency" that is more online payment than online gambling. I'd say at best 10% make even a, hmm, token effort to become a payment system.
About half are, well, hodling on to the belief that their coin provides a non-payment service. The rest has basically said fuck it, let's keep plausible deniability and focus on the gambling. About 10% are straight-out scams.
Since it's Monday, let's focus on the 10% who are actually trying to build a payment system. And also since it's Monday, let's talk about the drabbest but most crucial of functions, the unit of account. Or, as the accountants call it: the unit of measurement.
There's many ways to model an economy, but let's focus on four activities: extraction, transformation, exchange and consumption. Especially the first two require a mix of investment, competence, effort, time, and good luck to succeed.
From an entrepreneurial perspective, the failure of a venture is likely due to lack of "runway" (investment vs effort vs time) or luck. But from an investor's perspective, the key metric is competence. The art of investing is to separate competence from all intervening factors.
Whether the success of a venture was driven by competence or luck might not matter so much in an "endgame" scenario: in this case only performance matters. but it matters in all intervening decisions on whether to allocate investment, time, or monitoring of effort to the venture.
If that's all too abstract: almost every SV startup receives follow-on funding even though it is underperforming as an enterprise, mostly due to "not enough time", "not enough investment" or "not enough luck" reasoning. Even underperforming VCs usually manage to set up new funds.
The tool to monitor effort is, ta-daa, Accounting (in conjunction with financial planning). Effort is of course only a proxy for competence but if you ignore luck, effort without competence will lead to nothing, and competence without effort will not attract investors. Hopefully.
Accounting tries to capture plan fulfillment under the caveat that at any point of time in any complex organization many transactions are in a state of partial fulfillment. One of many reasons why accounting converts all assets into a single unit, the unit of measurement.
The golden rule of measurement is that if your measuring instrument isn't at least an order of magnitude, or better a few, more precise than the thing you want to measure, you're fucked. Especially if you want to measure competent effort vs luck or any other extraneous influences
This is why within the trifecta, unit of account puts the highest premium on stability/predictability, to allow the most precise estimation whether performance was the result of competent effort or luck, which in an economy translates to "macroeconomic conditions"...
As a side note, pick up a few annual reports of companies with underwhelming results and see how often the tl;dr is basically "We worked our asses off, but macroeconomic conditions were against us."
There is not much competition in units of account since every economic area has a strong incentive to standardize economic interaction, but we could look at multinationals and how they pick a global unit among the ones they have on offer.
Not to get too deep into international macro territory, economic policy has to juggle a bunch of goals but will ultimately steer towards "price stability". Equally enterprises will probably prefer "stable" over "strong" currencies for pure accounting reasons.
This is also the gist of Hayek's denationalized money argument where private institutional currencies compete over providing the most price stability to facilitate the efficient supply of investment to entrepreneurs.
This is where people like Burniske get confused. Of course there is a way for non-productive items to appreciate in value, and even spectacularly so if they are scarce. You can buy valuation with a smart issuance scheme, but you cannot buy stability.
