I find I have a natural fondness for anything that threatens to replace the global banking system.
There's so much myopia around this. You don't regulate something you're afraid of. You regulate something you expect to be a part of society for the foreseeable future. Earlier this week my state legislature passed a bill that says dispensaries can offer a free joint to anyone with proof of vaccination. Our state regulates marijuana. This is after decades of marijuana being criminalized, of course - at which point (1) it didn't go away (2) it didn't increase crime. So we've skipped that whole "I don't understand it ban it" mentality, at least in the G7. We also regulate the shit out of cheese. That's primarily because active cultures done badly lead to listeria. We regulate alcohol - so it doesn't make you blind and so we can tax it. See also: tobacco. There are more stringent controls over who can buy and sell alcohol and tobacco because kids shouldn't have it and taxes should be paid, which we realized back when we tried to ban alcohol (didn't go away, crime skyrocketed). There's a whole lot of "...well it's not illegal" in crypto that tends to lead to front-running, scamming and fraud. Regulation clears that shit right up. If you wanna play with the stock market you need to come correct in the state of NY anyway, which Coinbase and Gemini both meet. Binance doesn't and lo and behold. There's also a whole lot of FUD about what you can and can't do under the IRS and take it from a guy who bought ETHE in 30 seconds in a Simple IRA, that's because people would rather have opinions than facts. I mean, yeah - crypto "threatens to replace the global banking system" if by "banking system" you mean "that thing between the government and its taxes." El Salvador didn't replace their currency - which was USD anyway - they said "and also Bitcoin" which basically incentivizes crypto companies to figure out how to transact in BTC on their own dime. This is like Clear at the airport. TSA is still there, there's just a subcontractor trying to skim the efficiencies. My entire crypto universe has been "heavily regulated" for about six years now. That means there are only thirty or so shitcoins I can waste my money on. I only recognize... most of that list? And on a fundamental basis, most of them are better investments than, say, AMC.I find I have a natural fondness for anything that threatens to replace the global banking system.
While that's true in the long term for ETH I can still see room for somebody else in the nation-state-scale-crypto space until the change gets made, which I understand won't be for a year or two. And the smaller, more agile actors are preferentially positioned to profit, in my opinion.
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has issued an opinion saying settlements layers have to be public blockchains. So someone would need to stand up a nonprofit AND beat the first movers. AND beat a dedicated pack of self-motivated researchers who have been grappling with this problem for five years.
Unless things go awry after the London hardfork next month, the plan is all-hands-on-deck will be working on the Merge, which AFAIK is actually not as complex as it sounds. I expect February or March 2022, although it could be sooner. It is very likely to happen within the next year.