You are probably right about its eventual irrelevance, but I think it's a simpler story. I've read and heard about the cryptocurrency, and my take is that 2 major things contribute to all this hype, and the speed of transactions is not at the forefront or the reason at all. First, most people have deep disdain for Ripple and everything it stands for, so XRB is being "sold" as the decentralized XRP that happens to be able to also have the speed to make it a player on the tech specs side. Ripple just so happened to have a 10X increase alongside this talk of what XRB is, and it is easy for people to get on board this hype train with those simple concepts. More can be said about what a decentralized XRP would mean in the community of emerging tech to keep the core philosophies of what blockchain is meant to do for freedom and privacy and independence to varying degrees, and with a fear of the evil Ripple money gaining in the crypto world, XRB looks like a good guy protagonist.