For instance: Dell, Overstock et al won't be accepting XMR as a payment method. At best it will be used to purchase illegal stuff.
It isn't really clear that Dell, Overstock, etc. have done anything good for BTC. Yes there are some headlines and a tiny amount of transactions, but ultimately does any of that really matter?
I believe it does as even if the price goes down because of it...there is more awareness of bitcoin.
There is transactional demand for moving funds long distances in short amounts of time with low fees.
That has not changed and companies like Western Union will be gone in a few years from now if they do not incorporate bitcoin into their business model some how some way.
My thinking is that Dell and Overstock are just so tiny compared to the overall economy, which makes it not really transactional as much as Dell and Overstock wanting to grab a little piece of early adopters' wealth.
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It's not the direct/immediate economic input that matters; it's the signaling. I don't know how many business leaders and HNW people you talk to from the mainstream economy, but the "legitimization" of Bitcoin provided by these high-profile merchant-acceptance announcements is material. It directly leads to people with money taking investment positions in the currency itself (among other things).
On the whole investor vs. entrepreneur debate I guess I'm leaning toward the investor side these days. The entrepreneur's time will come, but I'm not sure it will come soon.
Agreed (and I say this as a startup founder). A big part of the current gloomy sentiment is due to entrepreneurs' expectations getting wayyy ahead of reality. This isn't Facebook. It's not going to be a ballistic exponential curve ending in >1B users in 5 years. I'd guess crypto becoming mainstream (and/or high market-cap) is going to take ~20years, with long drawn out flat periods, punctuated by some short hyper-growth every now and then. At least in the early half of the process, which we're in, and which is bootstrapped by the investors, eventually leading to fertile ground for the entrepreneurs.