I know that we want to keep on writing off ETH - but there is continued and ongoing pump..
It's a 90,000 BTC volume digibyte day on Poloniex. If there was ever a sign cryptocurrency has reached peak pump and dump, this is it.
For now, true. People are getting desperate with the cryptocurrencies they pump.
There is no schelling point for any of this crap. There's also no schelling point for bitcoin because it will always be highly constrained by scalability and thus high fees. "Money" that requires some type of fees solely to exist at all (constant payment to miners 24/7) is also the hallmark trait of a debt based currency.
Try transporting a few ingots of gold all the way to the other side of the world safely. I think you'll find that the costs are hundreds of times higher than Bitcoin transaction fees, and it takes many times longer.
Our current debt based US dollar is a rent seeking usury system that requires a constant interest payment for the money to exist. Bitcoin is basically the same thing, just the whole process is obfuscated so that you don't know who the beneficiaries are.
So I guess when transporting that gold, the beneficiaries are the commercial airlines.
There is no way to escape these people via the digital domain. The only way out of the debt based and/or usury system is by physical metals used in native coin form.
I think you're forgetting that there aren't many scarce physical resources to be controlled. With cryptocurrencies there's a theoretically unlimited number, which makes them near impossible to regulate.