See my post in the thread on "the rise and rise of monero".

Crypto has no reason to exist inside a legal system and is even outright dangerous as a tool to oppress people and have governments steal people even more.

There is not a single reason to desire "crypto adoption" in that case.  On the contrary.  If crypto could go away it would be much better in that case.

Sure, but IF any crypto is to make sense, monero is much better placed than the other stuff.  Until better anon tech comes along.

Which doesn't mean that bitcoin isn't going to the moon at a certain point, but it will simply be Chinese fiat, and the "moon" will be for the Chinese government.

If ever crypto "goes mainstream", and is not severely anon protected (and maybe monero doesn't cut it, who knows), it is extremely simple for any conglomeration of states (like "the united nations" or whatever global gov. type of state cartel) to pass an international convention that it is considered illegal to possess secret keys of crypto coin addresses WHICH HAVEN'T BEEN SHARED with a "crypto central bank authority" or something.  Meaning, you're not allowed to have any, say, bitcoin address of which you have the secret key that you didn't give to the crypto central bank.  Each year, on your tax declaration, you declare all crypto coin addresses you possess ; the "authorities" can then verify that you gave the corresponding secret key to the "central bank".

To make this "secure" so that no employee of that central bank can steal your money, it would be easy:  5 (say) different entities ("central banks") have each their master secret key, of which they render their public key, eh, public, say, P1, P2, P3, P4 and P5.  
You encrypt, successively, your wallet keys with P1, P2, P3, P4 and P5, and you sign its hash with your secret wallet keys.  This 5-fold encrypted file, you send to the 5 entities and to your local government ("tax agency").  Nobody can reach your keys unless these 5 entities "conspire": to get to your wallet keys, they have to successively decrypt, using S5, S4, S3, S2, and S1.  It is sufficient that one entity doesn't want to cooperate, and your keys are safe.  

Big gov. services scrutinize the block chain to try to find out if ever you've been using an address you didn't declare: they can check all addresses you declared using the signatures of your declarations.  If ever you're discovered using an address that you didn't declare, you're imprisoned, your children are poisoned, and after being tortured for 10 years, you're thrown to the sharks.

Every so many years, you're invited to "empty" your wallet to a new address, and then the 5 agencies decrypt all the received keys.  They issue of course new public keys for the next round.  They verify that you've sent them the right encrypted wallets.  If ever you didn't, you're also imprisoned, tortured and thrown to the sharks, and your children are poisoned.    So you cannot send them rubbish, because a few years later, they will find out.  The decryption with the old S1, ... S5 keys is not a problem, as these addresses are now empty: they can't steal you, but they can verify that you did declare the right keys and punish you if you didn't.

Whenever there's a financial crisis, there will be an agreement to put the 5 keys together so that the world government can confiscate all crypto money.  But they won't tell you.  As you've given the keys at any moment, and as you're not allowed to have addresses of which you didn't give the keys, they can, at any moment, confiscate whatever they want from anyone.  Crypto is then a dream for stealing governments.  Much easier and automated than with standard banking.  They all have it on a single server.  Crypto is the dictator's dream.

See, it is easy, when there's the law, to make crypto into fiat and confiscate everything, or put you to jail if you don't cooperate.  Like with fiat.

And the "trustless, distributed, unstoppable" silliness of crypto is over, and with it, its entire reason to exist.  Except that states will now impose it upon you.  Worse than fiat.

And the excuse will be "fiscal fraud, and financing terrorism" of course.  

That's simple, no ?  If ever crypto is to have a meaningful future, it will be with monero-like anonymity features that allow/help/... to escape the law, because there's no future for law-abiding crypto.  It just can't win from fiat, which is much less of a hassle when it comes to being law-abiding, and has nothing else to offer.  There's nothing that crypto can offer, within the framework of legality, that fiat can't do better.  So forget about "law-abiding crypto".  It is an oxymoron.  It is like non-hurting weapons.

But I'm not saying that crypto IS going to have a meaningful future.  Only, IF EVER it is to have one, it will be with monero-like properties of anonymity.

Dark markets are not about selling dangerous stuff (it is only part of it).  It is about taking back economic freedom.

My point is: if you think that state and law will prevail in the end, then fiat vs. any crypto, guess who will win ?

Thus, my question: if you think that state and law will prevail in the end, why the hell do you care about crypto in general ?  Crypto is doomed if law and state will prevail, it has no purpose.  Fiat is better if law and state prevail.  Simple as that.

Note that I didn't contradict the opinion that law and state might very well prevail.  My only point is that if that's the case, crypto is meaningless, and even dangerous, because it will then be used by  state and law against you.  So if law and state will prevail, you better get far away from the silliness that's called crypto.

Fiat vs bitcoin ?  Guess who will win ?  It might very well be that bitcoin BECOMES a kind of fiat.  And then it is or useless, or extremely dangerous.

The problem with any way of hiding value for a mighty state that wants to take it away is of course that stuff is valuable mainly in interaction with others.   The only value you can truly hide is knowledge, as long as you keep it for yourself.  As most value is created in economic interactions, the weak point of failure is exactly that you have to interact with others, who can betray you.  Most hackers know that "social engineering" is way way more effective and valuable than pouring over thousands of lines of code to find a hole.  

So as long as mighty states want your value, you run a risk if you have to interact with others on that value.  This is a problem that monero cannot solve of course.  If you've sold a service (say, homework help) to someone else who paid you in monero, then that person can always betray you to the state and that state can come after you to take away 2/3 of the value you provided (called "taxes"), with a punishment on top of it because you didn't give it to them right away.

Of course, all bets are off if you use centralized services.  That's a gold mine for states.  

It is only in this (admittedly risky) endeavour to try to hide economic activity from the sticky fingers of the state, that I see any reason for crypto to exist.  I fail to see any other use case that isn't covered better with fiat-like systems.  But, as I said, it remains a risky business, only open for those people who love liberty more than comfort, and willing to take huge risks of others betraying them.  And as we can see, there aren't many around.  So most probably, this project (crypto currencies) failed and is on the verge of becoming a weapon in the hands of big bad evil states instead of a tool to fight them, especially transparent crypto.

Crypto isn't taxed.  The government wants you to pay taxes on it, that's different.  But the idea is that you try to hide it.  You could just as well say that during WW II, it was forbidden to be a rebel fighter by the German authorities in occupied countries.  The rebels didn't obey, right ?  
I consider paying taxes an evil deed, because you make the evil government stronger.  But I admit paying taxes too.  I'm not very proud of this deed, but I'm, indeed, afraid of their violence.  I hope I compensate by consuming more tax payer money than I pay, and by being as unproductive as I can, so that I'm a net waste for the state, hence making it weaker than if I were being productive and paying taxes on it.

But with crypto, if you do not try to hide it, and declare your crypto and pay your taxes, why on earth are you using crypto ?  Why not do everything you did with crypto, with fiat then ?

If that's so, then fiat is better.  That's my point.  Fiat is much better than crypto, because it doesn't need miners, it doesn't need peer to peer networks, there is not a block chain limit, there is no crypto hassle.  It works fast, it can be reversed without problems, the government can control it legally as it wants it to with a simple law (or phone call to the banks...).  fiat is much, much less hassle, much much more efficient, much, much less wasteful on computing and network resources.  There's no point to have crypto then.


Well, one should if one thinks, like I do, that government is evil.  But you are fully right that fighting evil can be dangerous, especially powerful evil like the government.
However, IF one decides to fight it, one should use tools that allow one to hope to fight it, and not tools with holes in it.  Weapons that don't work won't do.  IF YOU DECIDE TO FIGHT, you should use weapons that work.  And if you don't decide to fight, you don't need weapons.  But weapons that do not work, are useless inventions.
Crypto that is transparent, is like a gun that cannot shoot: useless.  But if you do not want to fight the government, you don't need guns AT ALL.  You can use their fiat.  And if you want to fight it, better take guns that can shoot.


Not really.  Of course the state will rule out guns that shoot.  You will be allowed to use guns that don't shoot.  But what's the point ?


Nothing should be taxed.  If you want a road, you pay for the road.  If you don't want one, you shouldn't have to pay for it (as a function of what you produce !).  You don't pay taxes for roads.  They give you roads to have an excuse to take taxes.  In the beginning, the state taxes.  On the sixth day, they decided to make a road, to keep you taxed.  But you're confusing goal and means.  The goal is taxing.  The means is giving you a road.


Indeed.  But apparently, this is not catching on.  In that case, crypto is useless.  This is why I think that crypto failed.  Dark markets are not gaining much in importance, most people are still following the law (or pretending so).  In that case, there's no point for crypto.


Public services are much more expensive than paid-for services.  The people that collect garbage, do it for a wage. This means that with all the collected taxes, this can be done.  But taxes serve especially to make an elite very rich, and to waste a lot of money on lobby programs (nuclear arms that are never used, a lot of silly but expensive military actions that only serve to make arms dealers rich and to keep dictators in place in foreign countries, ...).  So the taxes we pay are LARGELY more than what is to be spend on private services that replace public services, be it roads, garbage collections, or telephone networks (oops, that's private now, isn't it).  


If crypto is taxed, and you follow the law, then there's no point in having crypto.  Fiat is way way better in that case.  Like there's no point in having guns that cannot fire.

This is why I asked you several times, what makes you interested in crypto (apart from a greater-fool game).  I'm interested in it because it held the promise of being a tool to bring down evil government, but it doesn't work out.  Without that, I fail to see a use case.  I cannot think of a single reason why crypto should exist if it is not to bring down evil government by "tax asphyxiation".  I simply fail to see what it is good at, otherwise.

I should have been clearer: miner deciding nodes.  Not "hardware slaves selling hash power to miner nodes (also known as pools)".  Those that decide upon which block to build, which transactions to include etc...

I agree with you, about fractional banking.  But fractional banking is unavoidable, it is a property of any monetary system.  After all, fractional banking is nothing else but the creation of an IOU of the underlying.  It is the creation of a new monetary asset, which includes some vague promise of exchangability with the underlying.  But nothing stops this new asset from becoming a monetary asset in its own right, in which the exchange with the underlying is first not done often, and in the end, not even deemed necessary.  This is how the dollar did fractional banking with gold between 1914 and 1972, after which the link was severed totally.   In fact, exchanges are already doing fractional banking to an extend.  When the hassle of a block chain currency will be so much that nobody's bothering, whatever asset that "represents" such a crypto token will start living its life as his own asset.  And whenever it gets regulated, it becomes an ordinary fiat.

You can also do that with forks from bitcoin.  You can do it by creating altcoins.  This is why the wet dream of the "sound money doctrine" is ridiculous, it assumes a monopoly of one single currency for the currency market. 

So, there's nothing wrong with fractional banking, there's nothing wrong with the creation of new monetary assets, and it are unavoidable phenomena.

It is in any case a nice example how it are THE MINERS who decide upon the protocol, isn't it ?  Not the non-mining nodes or anything.  The miners.

Of course, if you can take advantage of other people through evil authorities, that's what you should do.  I do that too.  Big bad evil authorities are exactly that: a tool to help you rip off others.  It is a good tool if you can get more out of it than you are ripped off by it.  This is why the best thing to do, when there are big bad evil authorities, to live off public money, producing nothing, or almost nothing, and be partisan of more taxes for the productive.  Which is exactly what big bad evil authorities do.  

The problem with that is that you should be crazy to get productive, because you will get ripped off.  The only interesting way there is when there are big bad evil authorities around, is to be fed by taxpayer's money, and try to produce as little as possible.  That's what I do.  But I would prefer to be productive.  Only, if ever I would be, big bad evil authorities will come and take, what, 70% of it.  So no.  I am unproductive, and get paid a lot of taxpayer's money.

I would prefer to live an honest life, where I can spend what I earn by doing stuff for other people who pay me freely for it.  But this is impossible when there are big bad evil authorities around.  They want 70% of my production.   If I produce A value for others, I can only obtain A/3 from others.  The 2/3 A are taken away by big bad evil authorities.  If I would like to swap 10 apples from my apple tree against 10 oranges from you, I can't.  Big bad authorities will take away 7 of my apples, and only let me have 3 oranges for my 10 apples.

Yes, I do get something in return: bad schooling I cannot chose, a lot of unfriendly foreigners without a job but with a lot of uneducated kids and a lot of money from the state, and a few other public services.

So living an honest life is not possible when there are big bad evil authorities around, and you have to choose between being their slave, or joining them.


Fiat is not corrupt.  Fiat is only a tool in big bad evil authorities' hands to pump value from the productive into the hands of the unproductive.  Like all the rest of big bad evil authorities, as it is the reason why they exist in the first place.


But most fiat money is already digital.  And doesn't need miners, PoW, PoS, or any other crypto constructions, needed to be "trustless".


Poloniex is not what crypto is for.  Crypto was to be a currency: an intermediate good, that you obtain when you provide goods and services, and that you can trade against other goods and services, in a peer-to-peer way.  It needed to be anonymous, because big bad evil authorities cannot have it that you exchange goods and services with someone else, without taking 70% of it or so.  Crypto didn't need fiat exchanges.  But it failed at being an intermediate peer-to-peer good.  It became a financial toy in the hands of mostly, establishment.


This is not only the problem, this makes the endeavour useless.  I'm not saying that crypto will die.  On the contrary, it will live.  It will be taken over by big bad evil authorities, even shoved down our throats, and Satoshi has given them the tool they couldn't even dream of having: total transparency of all financial interactions of all citizens the big bad evil authorities are using as their productive slaves.
Next time you give you neighbour's kid some money because he comes and mows your lawn, big bad evil authorities will see it, and want 70% off it.


I told you already a million times, that I don't speculate, I don't trade and I almost don't hold any crypto.  Most of what I have is to use or to experiment.  I think that ripping off others in this zero sum game is shameful even if lucrative.
I am fond of crypto if it is to escape big bad evil authorities, that's all.  It's turning into a nightmare, where big bad evil authorities are going to use this invention to rip us off even more.


But if regulation is coming, then you should avoid crypto totally, or try to use it underground.  There' s strictly no point in using a regulated crypto.  Or you believe in it, and you go outside of the law, or you think you should comply, and you use fiat.  But using regulated crypto is crazy.

I don't contradict this.  You're missing the logic.  I said: "crypto ONLY MAKES SENSE if it is anarchistic and hence necessarily anonymous, in the frame of dark markets and if a serious part of the world economy becomes a dark market".  

You are saying that it is an utopia that a serious part of the world economy becomes a dark market.  This is very well possible, and that doesn't contradict my statement.  It only indicates that crypto, all of crypto, simply doesn't make sense, that's all.

My statement is akin to "building boats only makes sense if the idea is that we will transport people and goods over the oceans and seas".  Your statement is like "it is an utopia to think that we will transport a lot of goods and people over the oceans".  Both statements are not in contradiction.  They simply imply that making boats doesn't make much sense, that's all.

Now, the question is: should we make boats with holes, or boats that float ?  My point is that, given that boats only make sense when they transport people and goods over the oceans, they should float.  If your argument now is that they can just as well contain holes, because they will not go on the ocean, then my point is that that is silly, because the *only sensible use case is when they float*.  If your argument is that this use case is utopia, and will not happen, then we can just as well stop right away, but in any case a boat with holes in it doesn't make sense.  Maybe a boat that floats doesn't make sense either, but at least, it is the only one that can POTENTIALLY make sense.  The one with holes, never.

I hope you see the analogy:
boats are crypto currencies,
transporting goods and services is a good part of the world's economy goes dark,
crypto with holes is crypto that complies to the law,
crypto that floats is crypto that is suited for dark markets (anonymous etc...).


But then crypto is simply a useless concept, that's all.  Use fiat.


Simply because if crypto complies to "police and govs", then it is fiat, and if fiat has problems, that is simply because "police and govs" want it to have problems.  If crypto complies, it should then have exactly the same problems as fiat, because fiat's problems are *organized* and are the *purpose* of "govs and police".  


Satoshi didn't know everything, right.  He's not the author of the Bible or something.  He did something great, but didn't realise exactly what he was doing.  We are allowed to think independently of Satoshi.

You should read two books:
"Debt: the first 5000 years" by David Graeber and
"what has the government done to our money"
https://mises.org/library/what-has-government-done-our-money


On the contrary, I think crypto is exactly over because of this.  It didn't work out.  It is now institutionalized, part of the government and establishment games, and it will simply be integrated as yet another financial toy to rip off people.

Bitcoin is now a Chinese government fiat (or will soon be).  It wouldn't surprise me that the Chinese gov will possess more than 50% of all coins 10 years from now.
If "crypto works out", bitcoin will be China's dollar with which it will dominate the world economy, like the dollar was the US fiat, with which it dominated the world economy for almost a century.  Bitcoin is worse because no freedom is allowed, everything is traceable.

Crypto is just a wasteful way of doing fiat, containing a lot of hassle that isn't necessary when it complies to govs.  There's no need in cryptographic proofs if in the end, the gov decides, no ?

Crypto currencies only make sense in the frame of dark markets.  Or else they become a very wasteful, clumsy form of fiat.
The idea is that most of the world economy becomes a dark market.  Otherwise, all this doesn't make sense.

Altcoins are to bitcoin, what bitcoin is to fiat.

bitcoin was meant to be a currency, used to buy stuff better than fiat and overrule the establishment fiat coins.  But in reality, if you want to buy stuff, fiat is still more useful, and *actually* bitcoin is used in a kind of greater-fool-game betting to *earn fiat* in the end.

altcoins are meant to be a currency, used to buy stuff better than bitcoin, and overrule the bitcoin establishment.  But in reality, if you want to buy stuff with crypto, bitcoin is still more useful, and *actually*, altcoins are used in a kind of greater-fool-game betting to *earn bitcoin* in the end.

I've said this already many times, and I will repeat it here.  Crypto currencies are an anarchist concept, simply because their basis is trustlessness, which is incompatible with central authority (which imposes that one trusts it).

If one wants to comply to central authority (that is, law and state), then crypto currencies are a waste of effort, because all the hassle of trying to establish trustless consensus (proof of work, distributedness, no single point of failure, openness, ....) is not needed, as a central authority can take on all these functions without the slightest problem (and actually has already such a system in place).

And if one wants a trustless distributed system, then this will of course be incompatible with whatever legislation that a central authority will impose.  Every centralized entity working in such a system will be a point of failure.  We see this with centralized exchanges in China, and you will see that with centralized tumblers, masternodes, whatever, in crypto land.  In other words, you can only hope to use a trustless decentralized system away and hidden from law and state ; or it will just become a centralized tool that will comply and ressemble the centralized systems that states have already put in place, but with a handicap: all the (needless) hassle of wanting to be trustless and hence distributed in that case.

As such, the only crypto currencies that make any sense in the long term, are anonymous, dark-market style, totally distributed systems, that do not betray (or try not to betray) their (evidently illegal) users and supporters.  All others will have centralized points of failure, and/or become "compliant", and hence useless and wasteful as compared to the centralized systems that are already put in place by authorities.

Bitcoin and a few other transparent ledgers are probably going the "compliant" way, to be just as integrated, traced, manipulated and "big banked" as the classical systems ; for the others, who would want to keep the distributed trustlessness alive, only the underground is possible.  In the mean time, you can Ponzi a lot, and if you do it right, you can get out a lot of wealth from the belief of others.

In the beginning, it was because of anarchist ideology, and that was good.  Now, bitcoin is essentially indeed over.  It is just a token used in a greedy greater-fool game, and it may even turn in a centralized government thing to control people.  So to me, if bitcoin is not dead, it is almost dead.  Yes, it has a high gamblers market cap.  That's always so with greater fool games. And this one can still last quite a while, and go very high, there are still loads of greater fools possible.  But bitcoin is essentially dead, in the sense of a free alternative to fiat.  It didn't get nowhere.  8 years, and I can still not go to the supermarket and pay my groceries with bitcoin ; I still do not get my salary in bitcoin.  And the day I will (if ever), it will be worse than fiat, because it will be totally state-controlled.  As of now, fiat has a better outlook than bitcoin.  Apart for gamblers.


Of course not.  That's part of the freedom game.  Because if you care about your monetary freedom, you don't hold your stuff on a centralized thing, do you ?  And if you get ripped off, that's perfectly normal, and it is a pity it doesn't happen more often.  You have given away your coins, and you got an IOU on a strange web site in return.  Of course at a certain point, the web site closes.  Who wouldn't do that with people giving you their money in return for something you put up on a web site ?  What was the core idea of bitcoin ?  Trustlessness, right ?  What else than applying trustlessness did these exchanges do ?  They were in the core activity of bitcoin.  Why do you think that there are moderator multi-sig wallets on openbazaar ?  Cryptsy and GOX were simply gambler's houses.  And that's about all that's left of bitcoin.  Gamblers' stuff and greater-fool stuff.  "investment" and "ROI" on a currency.  I'm always amazed that people complain about exchanges "scamming" them.  Hell, what did they do ?  Did they, or didn't they, use their private key to do a transaction ?  Once that's done, they don't OWN their coins any more, right.  That was the basic principle: ownership is knowledge of the private key.  If you have transacted your coins, you don't own them any more.  It is not because you can log on to a website that tells you that "you have 20 bitcoin in your account" that you own them: you don't have the key.  You simply have something that a strange web site is telling you.  *if you believe that*, that's your affair.  In true trustless systems, you shouldn't believe anything.  If things don't turn out as you believed, that's perfectly normal, and the basis of trustlessness, no ?  So why complaining about something that puts the basic principle at work ?  If the majority of bitcoin users complain about the application of the core principle of bitcoin, namely that ownership comes with knowledge of a secret key, and wants centralized justice to take care of that, then I call bitcoin dead.  What's left is zombiecoin, a kind of fake fiat stuff looked after by the People's Bank of China.

If you can go crying at the police and at centralized justice, why on earth would you need a thing that implements, with a lot of waste heat, "trustlessness" ?   Fiat works better in that case.

Bitcoin's "community" wants centralized justice so that their mutual rip-off game is "fair" and in doing so, it killed bitcoin.  And the rest of crypto.

Without trustlessness, which is the basis of anarchy, crypto has no sense.  This is like implementing digital signatures that are verified by a notary.  If a notary has to verify it, there's no need for digital signatures.  If there's a need for centralized regulation on bookkeeping, there's no need for trustless protocols.  In the first case, you can do it with a paper contract.  In the second case, you can do it with fiat and controlled banks.  That's why bitcoin is dead.  Even though its market cap can still increase orders of magnitude.  There's no point.

I can relate to that.  The idea to have a "community of anarchists" sounds odd, no ?  You can have common opinions and so on, but a "community" points to something of a form of internal solidarity, "us against them", "Ubermensch", "nation", "family", ....
Of course, if you understand by "community", people that have some properties in common, for instance, an intellectual interest in anarchy, trustlessness, economical relationships, fundamental freedom, etc.... then yes, I belong to that community, like 5 belongs to the "community" of prime numbers.  But whether 5 has some affinity for 7, and not for 9, is another question.

Yes, I'm very interested in crypto, for its anarchist principles on the societal side, and for its technological and systemic aspects on the other hand.  But do I feel any "affinity" with other such human entities, beyond the fact that we have something in common to talk and think about ?  Not really.

Especially because crypto is mainly populated by people wanting to rip one another off (they call it "investing" and "trading").

This is clearly not the case for fiat.  Fiat's price is mainly sustained by demand for usage.  It are not the forex markets that determine the price of a fiat currency, it is the economy that uses it, that determines the bulk of its usage and also its market cap.


I would gladly see something about that in fact.  I had seen some (somewhat old) estimates of usage of bitcoin to buy stuff, and that was pretty small compared to the trading volumes on exchanges.  
This is the difference with fiat: the volumes in the economy are way larger than the volumes on speculative exchanges.  People don't buy fiat and hoard it with the sole expectation that it will "raise in value" (it won't).  They "hoard" it only if it has its function as a currency, between earning and spending, and not for expected speculative returns.

For sure, true bitcoin usage already has to be on the block chain.  Most transaction volume today is not even on chain, but between accounts on exchanges.  

If you look at https://blockchain.info/en/charts/trade-volume
you see that the daily *block chain* volume is of the order, roughly, of $20 million per day.
On coinmarketcap.com, the indicated volume is more than $100 million a day.  This means that the off-chain trading is already 5 times higher than what is on the block chain, and what is on the block chain is also not entirely (far from it!) "currency adoption".

If you look at bitpay, a year ago they were around a volume of about $1 million a day (and they are normally the biggest).  Cashila in Europe has, all included, processed about 12 million Euro.  The "biggest European bitcoin payment processor", Conify, I don't know how much they handle, you can't find it on their website.

As bitcoin's economy is not closed, bitcoin payment processors are an indication of the actual "currency" volume in bitcoin.  It will not be more than a few million $ a day.  That's A FEW PERCENT of the trading volumes for speculative purposes.

As such, the actual market cap sustained by "adoption" (that is, currency usage), should also not be much more than a few percent of the actual market cap.  Which brings bitcoin's actual adopted price in the range of a few tens of dollars.

Bitcoin has almost no adoption either.  The $1000,- like price comes from greater-fool-game players, but that is not adoption, simply a speculative bubble.  For how much goods and services do you buy in bitcoin every month ?  That's adoption.  There's almost none.  The "adoption" price of bitcoin must be at most a few tens of $.

But you are right about the distribution.  That is because bitcoin was not serious and a toy thing for the first few years, and it got distributed as it wasn't worth anything.  This is why alts should fork off bitcoin instead of making a new genesis block.

I agree with you.  If crypto were dominated by real usage, that is, by usage as a currency to buy stuff, then actual features such as speed would matter.  But they don't, because real usage is such a tiny part of crypto that it is essentially negligible at this point.  The stuff that supports market caps, volume and so on is "trying to make profit in a greater-fool game" with exchange-IOU, not even with genuine crypto coins.  As such, technical improvements have almost no impact, apart from the fact that they can be used to hype one coin over another.  Crypto is in a sad state, it is mainly a gambler's token, where fools try to get money out of eachother's pockets and call that "investing" or "trading", by buying and selling IOU on exchanges, and its actual usage is almost zilch.