A few points. You're right about Ripple's position - putting it simply, the banks will have their own solution, while Stellar Lumens might turn into the Western Union of the future because it's so easy-going.
I think that nations will also have their own solutions , and that many people will (have to) go along with these... and that investment in crypto will be extremely regulated soon, and tech stolen.
Everybody who can afford it will have their own solutions. Blockchain !
As to Technical Analysis, tried lots of that lately and at time it's just beautiful - at others it's useless abracadabra.
Remember that it only tries to depict or foresee the normal human psychology at work, and that therefore the term"technical" may not be so ideal. It's nice to know a lot about it while staring at the charts - resistance levels do mostly work, and the most effective ones for some reason are round numbers. I certainly wouldn't go as far as Haejin does when he says that "news are what happens to confirm Elliott Waves after the fact," which isn't working so well in our momentary market situation... where it's typically "it's either up or down from here and my guess is that up is more likely."
So I'm frequently day-trading or in fiat these days, watching, and I prefer euros as fiat as the dollar isn't exactly climbing either.
My impression s that many people are now in fiat, and we may see better days soon as monthly pay days are coming up.
As I think I said once before, video quality doesn't concern me as long as I can understand what's being said, I rarely watch youtube videos fullscreen, and I have doubts the smartphone crowd ever will ;)
I also think nation states will create their own crypto.
the writing is on the wall. After Telegram and Facebook crypto that will bring even more awareness to the mainstream, nations and central banks will be forced to jump in.
Also, more diversification and that means the market will be less transparent for rookies, more like the normal stock market. It will in fact be part of the normal asset market... that factor will easen the volatility we were used to, and which was a motivator for so many new people coming in in the first place.
Once crypto stops having the nimbus of being a "get rich quick lambo" sort of thing, the general interest will come down and everything will be back to normal, banks will be banks and sheeple will stay sheeple. Looking at what's going on at the social networks, people are still trying hard to get used to animated cat gifs, trying to avoid politics as if ignoring would make the problems go away, and generally preferring to be humans.
Most want to avoid 'complicated' at all cost, therefore the crypto growth potential may work itself into a stasis in 2018.
From then on, institutions will have the say, most cryptos will be marginalized and likely soon forgotten, or used for special projects only, remember the dotcom boom - but here, we have finance industry direct concerns taking over.
Thinking along these lines and watching the fickle psyche of the momentary investors, who run scared at every hint of a government official thinking aloud about remote measures of regulation, I start getting doubts about Bitcoin ever reaching a level of $ 50k at all. There's no reason why it should before 2020, or at all. I just looked at the BTC chart again, which I haven't been doing a lot lately, and it's at exactly the same price it was about a week ago, when I last had a closer look.
Meanwhile, we heard several pundits constantly change their minds about what will happen, while nothing really does ;)
Trying to get over the cognitive dissonance is the major challenge here.
Be alert for a wave of cash possibly flowing into the market when people get paid these two coming weeks... and think about what YOU would invest in if you were inserting new money.