Monero, Price speculation and Conspiracy Theories

I have been lurking this sub and /r/monero for a while and have seen a lot of people throwing out these theories about why the price is not moving, such as "exchanges selling fake xmr", "price manipulation", or "evil entities are shorting". Personally I think all of these theories are very far fetched and just sound like textbook conspiracy theories, which usually are created by people who don't want to face reality/truth and just want a more simplified explanation for why things are the way they are. In this case, XMR holders are disappointed about the PA and therefore create these theories as a coping response. I also think that many of the people who buy Monero probably fall into the category of people who believe in conspiracy theories, I know I have this tendency myself.

In my opinion there are much more realistic reasons why XMR has not performed as well as some people have wished for.

Here are some more valid explainations I believe in:

• Monero is private and fungible money, but it is not very practical for most people and it could be that the true need for something like Monero is very niche. Most people don't see a reason to use Monero for payments over something convenient like Paypal.
• Most people who use Bitcoin don't actually use it, they just hold it as a store of value. Moreover, I would guess that most people also hold it on centralized exchanges such as Coinbase or Binance and don't want the responsibility of holding their own keys. Therefore the need for privacy is not that big.
• People are scared of possible delistings & regulations. Also, when they read it is mostly used on the dark net it scares people away from it.
• The technical knowledge & curiosity needed to understand the value of Monero is very high and therefore only very few understand it. Most people don't realize the problems with Central Banks and even less so the privacy & fungibility aspect. It's also hard for regular people to understand why a second layer privacy solution for Bitcoin is not enough. When the iPhone was invented, most people could instantly see the value in it and wanted to have one. With Monero, it's much harder for regular people to get it.

Don't get me wrong, I am bullish on xmr and hold it, but I just think it's going to take a long time before it gets adopted (if ever).

Here's my bullish case for XMR:

• The use of XMR in DNMs will continue to increase.
• Bitcoin will start to get used as an actual currency and not just for value storage and speculation. We see this already with for example El Salvador. Who knows, in 5 years there may be 10 more countries that have adopted it as legal tender. Only then will Bitoin's privacy & fungibility flaws truly become apparent and people will discover Monero. But even then, people may not care about it. Remember, people still use Google, Facebook and other "Surveillence Tech" apps.
• More tax regulations will come, for example unrealized capital gains taxes which will cause more XMR boating accidents.
• It's possible that privacy in general will become more trendy, perhaps because of some major data leakage or privacy disaster event. We see this already happening with people moving from Facebook messenger, to Whatsapp, to Signal for example.

I'm of course not saying any of these things have to play out. It could be that Monero never gains adoption. I believe that most people value convenience / ease of use over privacy so I think a big cultural shift has to occur for the Average Joe to realize the value of Monero over Bitcoin.

I'm sorry if this post made you offended, I just want us to be more realistic about things.