This is a brilliant, if sobering, analysis. I believe time will vindicate every descriptive and predictive sentence you've written here. And yet —
The market may be responding rationally to the fundamentals where Bitcoin is concerned, and maybe even a few other coins near the top. However, is it rational to value the Bitcoin currency so much more than other cryptocurrencies? Does it make sense for the entire crypto smorgasbord to follow Bitcoin up and down so closely, as if their fundamentals were aligned with Bitcoin's own?
We don't really know yet if sharding will work, or if DAG ledgers are better than blockchain ledgers, or if DPoS beats ASIC resistant mining, or how soon encryption will face quantum attacks, or whether Turing completeness is an asset on a dapp-supporting platform coin. We don't even know whether more customers want privacy, transactor transparency, or publicity. But we sure as hell know which coinbrands are betting on the rightness of which rival answers — and the market now rarely seems to discern between them.
Why judge the top coins by rational fundamental criteria, if you're going to pretend that so many other coins are just like them?
Thanks for the kind words @custone, you raised a lot of good points here. I believe that as the crypto industry matures and more and more assets are tethered to fiat we'll start to see less an less correlation between assets. Right now though, every altcoin is slave to Bitcoin even those who don't share the same fundamentals (like Ethereum). Are you personally holding some crypto?
Yes! Full disclosure — besides the STEEM and SBD that any Steemian can see in my wallet here, I hold some ETH and some Bitcoin Cash, the latter to commission a composer who wanted to be paid in that currency.
Are you not a fan of Bitcoin Core or are you holding Bitcoin Cash out of fundamentals/technicals?
I am neither an opponent nor a fan of Bitcoin Cash, but I am holding it because I'm commissioning a musical work and the composer wants to be paid in that currency.
fair :)