Here's what "thin" means in practice. Imagine two different sets of digital objects: AlphaCoins and BetaCoins - they're identical in the say way physics professors say "imagine an infinite frictionless plane".
Both have a 1000 in circulation.
Both are worth $10 each.
Both have a market cap of $10,000 US Dollars.
But the market for AlphaCoins is "thin" (small changes in supply and demand make for really big price swings).
There's a run on the market and everybody wants to sell off their coins.
After a day's trading:
AlphaCoins price is $3 / coin.
BetaCoins price is $9 / coin.
For goods and services you'd call this the price elasticity of demand (You can change the price of medicine and people will keep paying it b/c without it they'd die - it's inelastic - the same can't be said for a snack bag of cheetos).
To me, this is the article's argument. That while these terms describe the same things across markets there are some big differences not captured in simple "market cap" comparisons.
Maybe a better analogy is two all you can eat restaurants (identical, yadda yadda) but at one you can use your full set of dining implements and at the other you can only use a fragile toothpick to eat your food with - and all anyone can write about is how the quantity of food in both places is the same.
Both have a 1000 in circulation.
Both are worth $10 each.
Both have a market cap of $10,000 US Dollars.
But the market for AlphaCoins is "thin" (small changes in supply and demand make for really big price swings).
There's a run on the market and everybody wants to sell off their coins.
After a day's trading:
AlphaCoins price is $3 / coin.
BetaCoins price is $9 / coin.
For goods and services you'd call this the price elasticity of demand (You can change the price of medicine and people will keep paying it b/c without it they'd die - it's inelastic - the same can't be said for a snack bag of cheetos).
To me, this is the article's argument. That while these terms describe the same things across markets there are some big differences not captured in simple "market cap" comparisons.
Maybe a better analogy is two all you can eat restaurants (identical, yadda yadda) but at one you can use your full set of dining implements and at the other you can only use a fragile toothpick to eat your food with - and all anyone can write about is how the quantity of food in both places is the same.