With the long-term bitcoin price decline, which doesn’t look like it’s stopping anytime now, I think it would be wise for Safecoin and not only to trade for USD rather than BTC. It annoys me to see the value of different altcoins going down proportionally with BTC just because most exchanges don’t offer the fiat alternative.
Anyone else sharing the same opinion?
As if that would make a difference?
Don’t you think that if a decline in bitcoin was irrelevant to the value of Safecoin and other cryptocurrencies, people would have set up their trading strategies to make fat profits from the arbitrage?
This is a linked ecosystem and if bitcoin is deemed less valuable, whether you and I agree or not with the market, it has an impact of other crypto currencies, including Safecoin.
Providing direct fiat exchange would not change this, it would lessen the opportunities for artibtrage and make trading between fiat and Safecoin simpler. However, clearly the cost of doing so does not seem likely to be worthwhile, or it would be happening. For now bitcoin is a kind of “reserve currency” for cryptocurrency, and until that changes, this is going to continue.
The value of all cryptocurrencies is an illusion, until they are providing something more than just being a currency. You could argue they are providing atm an idea rather than a currency but those ideas are bound to Bitcoin BTC. Safecoin will become different and I expect could be the first ‘alt-coin’ to truely uncouple from other bitcoins but it’ll only do that at beta… and having an ability to swap into BTC will be as useful as any fiat option. Hold your breath for six months and see the difference!
I think it’s prematurely to think so, but the whole altcoin industry must give up on always pegging their value to BTC .
Each coin with its own performance and adoption would be more beneficial in my opinion.
Bitcoin is starting to find its true value and that is somewhere a lot lower from where we are now. If Maidsafe would’ve raised their money when bitcoin was >1000$ then they(we) would’ve incurred even greater losses than now and same applies for Maidsafecoin and Safecoin later on.
My point is, let bitcoin find its true adoption and utility in fiat value but don’t force whole alternative coin industries down. Survival is about competition and success of the fittest and these values must be more relevant and easier to implement in decentralized systems
Neither altcoins nor Safecoin are “pegged” to BTC. It is merely the most widespread and supported cryptocurrency, and so the easiest way to trade between different coins is to go through BTC. This is part of the “value” of bitcoin, and what makes it act like a reserve currency. This means that the value of bitcoin disproportionately affects the value of all coins, and most of all those whose value is largely speculative (as Safecoin).
As any coin gains intrinsic value it will become less influenced by bitcoin, and in Safecoin’s case we can look to the period post-launch for that to start to be evident (along with a lot of noise from speculation and other effects!).
[I see @happybeing said part of this while I was writing and otherwise distracted, but here it is anyway.]
I think it’s not that anybody pegs altcoin values to bitcoin, it’s that bitcoin is the key gateway to trading in them, so that’s where the price discovery is most broad. One can always figure the momentary conversion all the way to any fiat currency or altcoin you want, it’s just not convenient or stable because there aren’t enough direct official/public interfaces to make broadly agreed-upon price discovery directly.
The hurdles are high enough for bitcoin/fiat conversions; it isn’t too worth it to jump them for all the various altcoins. But Shapeshift is leveling that field by making trading pairs of most any altcoin/bitcoin or altcoin/altcoin easy and fast. Altcoin values are always shifting in relation to each other, as well as to bitcoin, and thus fiat.
Maidsafecoin fits the same parameters as other altcoins, but safecoin will rather certainly break the mold. The granularity of distribution is going to be very different from any altcoin, and especially different from bitcoin. Because anyone who wants to run a vault (easy and cheap) to have access to the network (which is the real prize, not safecoin), I think that very quickly we’ll see a lot of commerce being done directly in safecoin, bypassing the chokepoint of currency exchanges.
Almost all the action in the altcoin/bitcoin trading sphere is a speculation game, loosely related to what people think might have value in the future, as compared to fiat, which is all they know. That’s also true of Maidsafecoin currently. All that has almost nothing to do with actual use, either as currencies or other functions. Just speculation. Can’t really be otherwise.
Bitcoin itself is slowly starting to climb out of that gravity well as its utility is recognized and spread through improved usability and understanding (PR), as well as adoption by more major institutions. It’s relationship to fiat currencies is really the only one that is important right now, because it is starting to gain value as real money. (Don’t know how close to bottom it might be, but eventually it will end up going way up, I think.)
Again, safecoin is quite certain to take a really different arc due to what I said above. Almost anyone will be able to get access to it, either by running a vault and starting to get some, or acquiring it from friends or acquaintances who get it. It has a real and tangible tie to real value because of its utility on the network for network resources, so it doesn’t have to get all of its value from somewhere else. Even bitcoin is just starting to be recognized for value other than transactions.
So if the SAFE network works, safecoin will have a value quite aside from its superior currency properties.
Sorry, I can’t help but roll once I’m faced downhill. 
You were talking earlier about arbitration between the price of BTC going down and the preservation of one’s MAID assets calculated in fiat.
As I am looking on coinmarketcap, leaving aside short periods of time when price spiked (pump in anticipation of a launch), the mean price of MAID in USD has been preserved. Hope the whales keep it this way 
Probably not the correct thread to continue with this post, but I wanna share with you guys how excited I am to be a part of this project, even only as an IPO investor and side witness forum commentator 
I’ve been waiting for a couple of years for a solution to the safe cloud storing problem and if I realize how much this project means for me, how much good it will bring in my life, a lot of like-minded people will realize the same thing without a doubt.
Agreeing with @fergish here, the SAFE network will be leaps and bounds in term of usefulness above bitcoin and the adoption will make sense for the masses. Heck, even my mom and dad realized how good this idea of safe, decentralized, spying-proof storage is and they are still struggling to understand that Internet is not only Facebook and Google.
Good luck team!
Exactly, the value of MaidSafecoin is not pegged or tied to bitcoin, it has fluctuated due to speculation but found a solid floor at the IPO price. This is what we would hope really. At this point there is no way to value Safecoin, so the only metric really is the IPO price - and for those who used money not already within the cryptocurrency markets, that is a fiat price, and for most probably a USD price.