RE: Warning: The coming Stellar Lumens (XLM) price collapse (and how to profit from it)
You need to own 10 bitcoins to claim 1,911 lumens, or $72 at today's prices. My guess is bitcoin holders will just hold on to rather than sell, what's the point at that price? This giveaway has been know about for some time. Perhaps it's is already priced in. A similar giveaway was carried out last year between July and October, the price was more or less static during that time. Perhaps some bitcoin holders will not even bother to claim. Things are different this time however. I'm guessing a lot more people know of Stellar now than last year. And that'll mean more people are likely to claim. I foresee a distribution resulting in a rally in price rather than a depression myself, perhaps not unlike the recent rally. The next couple of months will not be boring, that's for sure.
You bring up some good points. The scale of this giveaway is far larger (6x larger) than their last giveaway, though, and it will increase the number of lumens on the market by 200%. That's a huge dilution. Mathematically, we'd need another $1 billion to flow into lumens for the duration of the giveaway in order for the price to stay the same. That's not out of the realm of possibility, but it seems prudent to just lighten your exposure to lumens. Why take the risk when you can hold bitcoin instead and then claim even more lumens?
Forgot to mention that you're right, the price wasn't impacted all that much by the last giveaway... I think it's hard to compare them, though, since Stellar's market cap was around $10 million back then. That's peanuts compared to $438 million today.
Too many unknowns. What if I were to place all Stellar in Bitcoin only to find SegWit for Bitcoin (before September) is not activated in the Stellar giveaway period? But this is short term thinking.
For me Stellar and Ripple are going to compete and there's room for both. Nevertheless, if Stellar is successful if releasing all but 5% of their coinage then they'll effectively become a decentralised version of Ripple. This may well attract banks. For Ripple wants to be the banks partner for as long as the are in control of distribution. I don't think banks would put themselves in that position if they had to.