Okay let's do Nano today!
Let's break down the three major crypto token roles (gas, investment, product) as they apply to Nano, and explore why it would make sense to buy the token. If you haven't read it yet, read this article first:
@thedessertlinux/stop-hoarding-gas-tokens-crypto-investing-for-the-modern-age-8ga
Here we go:
🪙GAS TOKEN: Nano (or N/A)
Nano is a feeless system, so technically speaking, there is no gas token. Practically speaking, however, Nano has a bucketing system for ordering transaction priority. Individual accounts can do a certain number of transactions in a given timeframe, but also certain balance categories (i.e. 1-10 XNO, 10-100, etc.). This is to ensure no one games the system to spam at others' expense.
While this is designed to fully democratize access to the network, it's undeniable that having more Nano gives you more options for various account balances, and therefore more capacity during congestion periods. In this way Nano does act as a gas token at high scale.
You would buy Nano as a gas token if you have high-volume payment needs and want to make sure your transactions will always go through quickly, even in times of very high congestion.
🪙INVESTMENT TOKEN: N/A
There really is no investment token. If Nano does really well and starts processing billions of transactions, there's no direct correlation to the price of the token.
You should only buy Nano as an investment if you anticipate shortages and high demand for it as a gas or product token. But really, you shouldn't buy Nano as an investment, unless it's purely speculative.
Again, this is by design.
🪙PRODUCT TOKEN: Nano
Even more than in virtually every other cryptocurrency (because of strict data limits in transactions), you can do just one thing with Nano: send Nano.
You should buy Nano as a product token if you want to hold and send Nano.
This is all by design!
Nano's not really a good investment, but it was explicitly designed that way. At all levels, every aspect of its design was engineered to make it the opposite of an investment, to make it hard to make money out of the system.
I rant about "stop hoarding gas tokens" a lot, but with Nano it's even more acute. Plain and simple, in almost any case other than the shortages I described above, you should not invest in Nano. Period.
I predict some people will get mad at me for saying this, because they very well did buy Nano as an investment. They really shouldn't have. I repeat again: everything about its design was created to make it an anti-investment.
The Nano community should be perfectly happy if the token price stays exactly the same as it is today, for all eternity.
Businesses are Nano's "investment token"
If you want to profit off of Nano's success, build a business. Build a wallet or service that charges a fee in times of high congestion for priority transactions. Build a remittance business. Start an exchange. And so on.
I repeat myself, but Nano was designed to remove all direct profit incentives from the protocol itself. If you want a return on investment, do a business that makes money in part because of its ability to use Nano's network and capabilities.
This is true with all cryptocurrencies, and as I've pointed out before, the richest people in crypto are exchange founders. But with Nano it's even more focused in this direction.
In general, I don't think Nano will achieve a lot of business use cases, purely because of how (intentionally!) limited it is: you can't send any other data, you can't program it, you can't use it privately, and so on. It just sends the token.
But Nano does work really well at what it was designed to do. As long as there's people who want to send and receive an instant crypto for free, it has its place.