I do believe I get it, I might just be bad at expressing myself in words :D

as the video explains there is little practical value (at the current time) in a feature that increases transaction limits

I realize this was one of the points that the video made, and while I don't agree with it, I choose not to focus on that singular point. My takeaway from the video was primarily that adoption is more important than scalability - however my take is that they are directly related to one another.

You can't drive adoption without scalability and in reality, most startups (and even blockchains) will be failures if they can't scale to meet demand.

If it doesn't provide a market advantage that can entrench it for the long haul it's nothing but a fanciful distraction until the next contender comes along incorporating the very same ideas but with more whistles.

If you don't believe high throughput is a market advantage, then what is? No advantage I can possibly come up with would be effective without the underlying capacity to support it.

There's an alt-coin singularity event on the horizon - maybe 2-5 years out - where big problems will have been solved and all of the best-of-breed approaches will have amalgamated into the surviving protocols (just as has happened with every single software platform in history, laying waste to the competition).

Looking at history though - you can't find many examples where the first was actually the surviving protocol/platform.

Nokia/Blackberry? AltaVista? AOL? MySpace? Yahoo?

These were all massive in their day and then were crushed because something better came along. They didn't keep up with the rate of innovation and suffered from their own complacency. You're absolutely right that consolidation will occur, but it's not always the incumbent that comes out on top.

If the history of software shows us anything - it's that disruption is king and the product "that just works" is going to be the one that wins over consumers.

My bet is with cryptovestor on this one - for better or for worse it will be successive versions of ethereum and bitcoin that are left standing, the rest is just a game of musical chairs.

As much as I'd love to believe this (because it'd be a lot easier to hold BTC/ETH than continually research new technology), understanding the technical aspects of these products and their limitations leads me to believe otherwise. This is fundamentally where you and I differ, and only time will tell which one of us is right.

My stance right now is that Bitcoin is the AOL of blockchains. It's about to get disrupted, maybe not by RaiBlocks specifically, but by a new generation of software that fundamentally alters how it works. Bitcoin is too complacent and lacks any innovation over the past 5 years to indicate otherwise.