If you had bought gold from 1978 to 1982 you would have lost a whopping +84% of your money on gold, that's how volatile historically gold is,
Yet we're frequently told the world is coming to an end, that BTC is too volatile, yet on the other hand, we're told that GOLD is 'virgin marry herself' of perfection in a real asset.
BTC has many shortcomings, but it was 'FIRST' and that means a lot in the world of TECH, it always has and always will.
Let's look at the historical thing on 'First', back in 1984 there was Lotus 123, a spreadsheet for IBM pc's, it was the holy-grail of software, they were 'first', yet there was also visicalc on the early apples years earlier, so they really weren't first, but Mitch Kapor founder of Lotus said "If you want to be rich in the PC biz, you just need a garage, a computer and $5 million bucks" [ The joke here is the the $5M was for marketing, as that is secret-sauce of 'success' ]
The world of BTC isn't much different than early 1980's, today if you want to be rich in BTC, you need a garage, and mining racks and of course 'free electricity'. China isn't giving electricity away for free anymore so lots of miners have had to pull the plug, everywhere including Canada, and USA, even I have pulled the plug for time being, given that power cost/profit parity is now zero-gain, even in the GPU world for alt's. It doesn't pay to mine, the only thing that I see that pay's is running super-servers for alt-coins that pay you to run secure transaction servers.
Another thing said about 'TECH' is ...
1.) You got to be first
2.) You got to be the BEST
3.) You got to be the fastest
Well BTC was the first and it ain't the best, and it sure is HELL is not the fastest, thus there is lots of room for improvement, if your 3 of 3, then you become a billionaire, if your one of the three then its easy to make millions.
Today we're not even close to a "BEST" bitcoin clone, and we don't even have anything to consider as the 'fastest'
ETHEREUM is a fucking DOG, forget about it,
99% of all the shit, is a BTC clone, with virtually no added value to the software, a complete re-write, once the problems are well known will be required, to establish 2 or 3 above
I think in this area of "BEST", privacy/security should be considered as the TEST, as BTC is NOT private, it ain't secure, and it sure as hell ain't fast.
My personal favorite is ZEN/ZCASH world with maximum security, and especially the fact that they have 1,000's of secure & super-servers all over the world completely detached and encrypted, and the people hosting these servers get paid in crypto so there is an incentive, in BTC there is no incentive as mining is the incentive, but it doesn't pay to mine, so eventually the servers for transactions have no incentive to stay on the grid.
Everything is FINE folks, BTC is going to be just fine, but remember BTC is the end-all, be-all it was just first, and PEOPLE really need to be working on the next generation shit, and forget about putting band-aides on the geriatric dinosuar,