I agree with everything you have said. It was tragic how Betamax was canned when it was by far the better tech and I can see this happening with certain cryptos e.g ethereum (smart contracts) v bitcoin (well supported but comparatively dumb).

I do wonder how increased regulation will play out also. Most of us cryptonerds see it as a threat but I suspect the majority of future newbs might see it as a reassurance e.g. government will guarantee so much of your savings in case of a bank default. Also look at CEO pay and how that has become politicised yet with people expecting government regulation rather than allowing the free market to regulate it. In the crypto universe it would be left for the free market to regulate it as being decentralised. Would people trust this to happen? There clearly are not in the current political arena.

Crypto is trying to rid us of state fiat control which sounds good but at present we seem to be putting ourselves under the control of the hidden whales and coin ico/hypers. Is this necessarily better? At least with the state we know who they are and sometimes have a chance to vote them down. Hopefully this will change slightly with the community voting processes that some crypto chains are developing but then we get into the slowness of non-majority governments where decisions take forever to enact versus winner takes all system of e.g. UK politics.

I also worry about the popularity of privacy coins. I can see a use case for businesses (hiding market sensitive info)and ridiculously rich private individuals (so they do not become targets for violence) but it is keeping the outsider's perspective of crypto as something subversive perhaps, either trying to keep Joe Public out or avoid taxes a la Paradise Papers.

I also worry about valuations as few of these crypto businesses have any history and evidence that they have durable income streams. I like the idea that ICOs bring in a larger community than IPOs and that might offer resilience to the businesses. However a lot of the ICOrs are in it more for the money/short term gains from what I am reading (which is a lot!) and so will probably not necessarily use the product but merely try to maintain the hype and inflate the bubble even more. A lot of the argument against it being a bubble is that it is an adoption curve like the early internet. I can see that argument but again I would repeat that a lot of the current users are probably more financially motivated than they were with using the early internet. I like the tech and I support ethical coins such as SUB, POLL, HST, HMQ, OMG but without the gains from XLM, ETHOS, ENG ETH, QSP would I spend so much time on crypto. Probably not. Was I using early internet projects expecting financial rewards. No.