How to measure success of cryptocurrencies

Many discussions of cryptocurrencies are focusing mainly on the price chart against Fiat. I think it is dangerous to look at the price only as it reduces the coins to be a „get-rich-quick“ scheme and fuels greed.

Looking at the price might not always be the right measure as it can be very volatile and includes a lot of speculation.
Can we measure the value of a cryptocurrency without looking at the price?

Measure success

I remember Andreas Antonopoulos saying in one of his talks that the value of a cryptocurrency is being created when people use it, i.e. do transactions.

Let me extend this definition a little bit:

1. How actively is it used?
2. How secure / manipulation resistant is it?

How actively is it used?

• Transactions on blockchain last 24h
  How actively ist he network used?
• Active adresses
  How many people use the network?

How secure / manipulation resistant is it?

• Wealth distribution (wealth of top 100 adresses compared to rest)
  The more equal the coins are distributed, the less price manipulation can happen
• Hashrate
  The more hashrate, the more secure against 51% attacks.
• Hashrate distribution
  An equal distribution is more secure against 51% attacks.
• Number of full nodes
  The more full nodes, the more likely the network cannot be shut down

There are certainly many more criterias which should be considered (Dev team, community, roadmap). But these four measures give a quick overview.

Results

I’ve only picked large currencies which I know and for which data was available and looked at the time range from september 2017 to january 2018.

How actively is it used?

• Transactions on blockchain last 24h (90 day average, bitinfocharts.com)

• Active adresses (90 day average, bitinfocharts.com)

How secure / manipulation resistant is it?

• Wealth distribution (wealth of top 100 adresses compared to rest, 90 day average, bitinfocharts.com)

• Hashrate (90 day average, bitinfocharts.com)

• Hashrate distribution

• Number of full nodes

Summary

Summarizing the results the coins with most green and least red are BTC, BCH and ETH.

VTC and LTC showed an amazing performance since BTC transaction fees got very expensive. However they distribution is not quite unequal.

DASH shows a good overall performance with only hash power distribution as drawback.

XMR looks good for the known criterias, but I could not find active adresses and top 100.