I'm still not sure what you think you are going to buy in terms of influence for 10 grand. That just doesn't make you a big shot anywhere.
I don't think it ought to make you a big shot. There's a whole bunch of real estate between five cents and a big shot. I don't know exactly where on that rather large tract I think it ought to be, but somewhere. The reason i use 10 grand as an example its that its typically as high as many people will go on a brand new investment. Off hand, i would guess a fair valuation would be somewhere in the neighborhood of a 10-20 million marketcap.
Bitcoin's gains in value are not speculative, they're based on utility. Specifically, they have been based on the DNM economy (early on) then investments from people in places like china, where money in a bank account isn't really safe (check abits most recent witness report for how we're doing with the Chinese).
There is really not a good example of a crypto (at least not that I know of) that has achieved long-term market cap growth just on the basis of price speculation (of course, there aren't many cryptos that have a long term history to look at).
I'd argue that it did, and it still has a lot of that value. It traded for months at a fraction of the current price, with not really much less utility (if any).
I don't know... the 1000% price increase in early July, I'm sure some of it was pure price speculation. But to my way of thinking, a lot of that was about utility, or at least the perception of future utility. Making first real payout (which was the July 4th I guess) was a really really big deal in terms of the perception of the utility (or future utility) of the coin. I realize that's a sort of speculation, but its not pure price speculation. If speculation about future utility is what fuels an increase in market value, then there has to be a delivery on that promised utility at some point in the future, or the gains will be lost.
incidentally, on some level i think we agree. the following quote from your comment above is 100% on point:
Investors don't want to buy in given they are entirely overshadowed and can be heavily dumped on in the future by one or a few whales even if not now, users complain about voting being too concentrated, etc. Literally everything is harmful and destructive about 1% of the accounts (<1% of the people) owning 95% of the stake and nothing about it is helpful. Wishing that away won't make it so.
Also, i think the new initiatives in the release candidate (besides the 5 vote thing, which is awful) like escrow and multisig are helpful with regard to utility. How helpful will depend largely on how easy they are to use.