I'm skeptical of the idea that availability of decentralized services should be dependent on the activity of a market driving it. If for some reason, something unfavorable were to happen with that market, the services tied to it would be in jeopardy.
That seems like a terrifying point of failure to have, unless I'm misunderstanding how it works.
Perhaps a parallel here is: if the fiat markets are struggling, then small businesses may struggle and lack the business they need to sustain themselves due to economic fears and self-preservation, but that business can exist in some form without the market through free trade or other means of currency or agreements to provide products and services, not beholden to the mercy of a volatile, inaccessible digital system that the vast majority of people don't understand very well.
It requires some way to fund it, but that needn't necessarily be ETH. It also well could be, and they have first mover advantage. But, and it's a big but, I think the most important thing people who know much about crypto forget is:
Other people are not like you. Most people have still never even heard of Etherium. Most people won't touch something like that without explicit approval from a government. Which, obviously, is somewhat contrary to the point.
I think the real long term (20+ years) winners in this space will gracefully marry the old world with the new, until society has gotten used to these concepts and we can slowly deprecate some of the centralization.
> Most people have still never even heard of Ethereum
This statement was true in 2016, 2018 and 2021. The difference being the momentum - a LOT more people have heard of Ethereum now than back then. I think you might be underestimating the network effect that Ethereum has in the space. All the tooling, beginner-friendly tutorials/books/blogs, institutions and funds flowing into the projects, the sheer number of people working on projects is super impressive.
For anything else to catch up with Ethereum, it's going to take a lot more than "being better technologically". Ethereum currently does have major scaling issues but the community is converging on the "rollups" Layer-2 solutions [1] as a temporary option until it gets added into Eth2. So I suspect the next few months will be a little rough but things like Matic.network or Optimism will start maturing.
I just think it's similar to some of the earlier internet days like shopping online or sending emails - in its early days most people did not know much about these concepts except for the tech community and early adopters.
