I think there must be a misunderstanding. It is transparent, that is why it is not - and cannot be - anonymous.
Well, you may want to google the original claims about Bitcoin. (80% of it turned out to be incorrect) Here is one of the earliest thread on ET about Bitcoin, read the very first post and see what kind of things they claimed: https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/bitcoin-thread-anyone.221836/page-34#post-3772574
I really love the heated debate about Bitcoin & Cryptocurrencies here. Having been one of the hard anti-Bitcoin and anti-Cryptocurrencies myself before changing my point of view to a more moderate one, I can understand both points of view & arguments quite well. You can't fight a global trend. People fought credit cards vs. cash before. They eventually lost. People fought the traditional way of doing things vs. doing them on the internet (Virtually vs. in person or physically), they lost. It's human nature to oppose emerging global trends which threaten to change the way we do things. There will always be countless reasons for each side to prove their point. The bottom line is, are you in the markets to prove/disprove that a certain asset is worth something or worthless or are you in the markets to make returns relative to your base currency, beat your currency inflation & create/accumulate wealth? There is really no point if you are right, yet lose money or vice versa. I guess everyone should be looking at Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies objectively, both sides actually, the lovers and the haters. I mean, I don't like Bitcoin, neither do I hate it. It's a pure investment to me to make money on my base currency. If Bitcoin is perceived by a lot of people (Who has deep pockets) to be a store of value and they are acting on that belief, hell, I want to own as much of it as cheap as possible and hold it. If this changes, I will change my opinion and act accordingly. Why do you buy gold? What makes gold a store of value? It's because it has some physical properties where it can live thousands of years without any chemical changes, so it stays the same, no rust, no oxidation, no changes, nothing. It's not the rarest metal in the world and it doesn't have any other fascinating properties other than the mentioned. The other reason is that there is a consensus among people that gold is a store of value. It's that consensus which matters. If more & more people come to a consensus, it becomes stronger & stronger. Why do you buy shares of Biotech companies who keep losing tons of money with absolutely zero revenue? Because you are buying a future promise of earnings IF the company managed to reach a breakthrough and commercialize a drug which will be patented to them and generate lots of revenue streams in the future.
You wrote a long post and it didn't have much meat, but anyway... People fought 3D TV and won. (my point is that not every technology got completely embraced by the masses.) The same with Segway. On the other hand when the first texting applications came out, I thought that will be a fad, because if you can talk, why would you want to text? Yet people somehow like texting more than talking, maybe it is easier to lie, I don't know. I am the most objective person there is. Bitcoin objectively speaking is shit. As I said, 80% of the original claims from 10 years ago got refuted. It is not scalable, not cheap TX (all the time), not anonymous, not unique, etc. Let's assume you like technology. Wouldn't it be logical that when a new crypto gets introduced to the masses with better features, the adoption would switch to that new crypto and the old technology would be eventually abandoned? It happens all the time. Yet with Bitcoin we (or the holders) are still sticking to this not flexible, not able to adopt and improve old coin when there are much better choices on the market place. Hell even Litecoin was an immediate improvement on Bitcoin, and that is 9 years old already. Not to mention inherent (aka not fixable) problems with cryptos. Currently the biggest problem of Bitcoin is its fast appreciation. It was intended to be a new currency, yet nobody in their right mind is using it as such, because in a week it is going to be worth 10% more, thus you are today overpaying for the product/service. If the masses want to adopt an electronic currency, fine, but how about making one that is stable, easy to improve, cheap TX cost, easy to use, anonymous, etc. You know, everything what Bitcoin claimed to be. At the moment Bitcoin is nothing but a pyramid scheme and people are investing in it because of FOMO, not because it has any kind of advanced feature or value. Last word: In the history of the world, nothing easy to produce and copyable kept going up for an extended period of time. Not one thing and I doubt cryptos will be the first such things... Actually such things get cheaper over time.
Agree to some parts, others I don't. Many things get invented for a reason by the inventor, yet they end up being used by the masses for a totally different thing/reasons. Whatever the creator of Bitcoin claimed, it might not end up there. Agree, but you are discarding the network effect which Bitcoin built because of it's first mover advantage. Again agree, but it takes time & people mindset changes to shift to a another better improved alternative. Disagree, indeed it has created it's own values. It's secure & safe to store offline away from hackers and thiefs. You can store any quantity you like in a small device (Hardware wallet) or in a Paper Wallet which you can keep safely. And most importantly, it provides a very easy & reliable way to move across borders without any hurdles or logistics (Most Cryptos are like this in fact). So until the SHA256 gets officially hacked/broken, Bitcoin holders are considered safe. Even if the SHA256 is broken, this won't really have a material negative effect since you will need to hack all the nodes holding the full blockchain of transactions and alter them all, something which is indeed not reliable. It's true that you can copy the code of Bitcoin and replicate creating infinite ones, but again you can't copy the network. You can create another Facebook, but it will not work because you can't copy their network or get it from them. Google tried and failed despite having a huge network of users already, they simply failed to convince their network to use Google+.
That is kind of beside the point. Whatever you say about Bitcoin as positive, you can say the same about 100s of other cryptos. So only the biggest network effect is a valid argument, but really not such a big value because there are other cryptos with much bigger network today than Bitcoin's was let's say 8 years ago. And if that network was good enough for Bitcoin 8 years ago, it should be good for a new coin today. The point is here, that we shouldn't put such a high valuation on network effect itself. That certainly doesn't justify a 30+K pricetag. And as I said, if people actually value and care about innovation and features, the network should be switching to better coins. Sadly, it is easier to make a new coin with improved feature than to achieve agreement among miners to implement a new feature. So the big network (aka miners) can be a hindrance to improvement. I think banks actually started to use Ripple among each other for fast money transfer, just think about that! Not because its value, but because its speed! Sure things can be used for a different task then what they were invented for, that is why I like to hammer nails with my gold bar!
Only the currency of the area where the hyperinflation exists will collapse. Other currencies will not collapse. The weak currency will collapse because everybody will change their money for a stronger currency.