Thanks for your well-written response. I think you understand the macro picture pretty well. Here’s my response to yours:

Even with all of Bitcoin’s current problems, it still has a great value outside of speculation as it is the most secure network for value transfer and is arguably the most decentralized. Whether or not it can scale for global payments via LN is yet to be determined. But I think the security in and of itself makes it the most valuable of all digital assets.

And I believe governments and financial institutions who profit from the current financial system are not going to want to give up their wealth by adopting Bitcoin, but their system is braking and so I believe they saw the adoption as an inevitability and so that’s why they’re reluctantly getting in now before mass adoption.

• I think celebrities who are into cryptocurrency is a reflection of current and future adoption. With the amount of social influence and reach they have, their involvement in the space is bullish in my opinion.
• I would like to see XRP become more decentralized but the fact that it is an extremely fast and inexpensive settlement medium makes me believe it has a big future.
• I think we need more user friendly decentralized exchanges to pop up so we aren’t as reliant on centralized exchanges.
• I disagree with you that Bicoin doesn’t have a meaningful future. Although I don’t believe as many maximalists do that it will adopt all of the best features from other coins, I think that it will continue to be the store of value and perhaps a major means of exchange if LN succeeds. Also, due to the hash rate continuing to go to all time highs, it will only gain in its security. But yes it will go down in history as THE significant stepping stone to the crypto revolution where I believe we will see thousands of different chains supporting millions of tokens.