People always ask me some derivative of this question, so let's set the record straight.  Bitcoin was never the future or a sure thing to me.  I always saw it for exactly what it was, a sort of experimental contraption with extremely questionable "decentralization" and poor options for scalability due to the inherent extreme overhead of anything using a blockchain.  Nevertheless, the so called value prospect of Bitcoin was NEVER what it currently is *right now*, it's value proposition was always what it could possibly be some other day in the future.

Where the problem with this arises is, although digital shitcoins are composed of completely arbitrary variables, the number of ways you can create a digital shitcoin are actually very finite; finite enough where anyone with sufficient economic, technical, and even physics knowledge already knows all the possibilities at this point for variables such as 'focal points'.  Once you know all these possibilities, you know it was never even possible to create a decentralized digital currency in the first place - not now, not in the future.

The summary of these focal point systems is that they're mostly just a rehash of governance systems that have already existed for thousands of years.  Hence the existence of things like the 51% attack - it's not an 'attack', it's just a stupid form of democracy.  Why would anyone ever submit their personal finances to be governed by some unaccountable, faceless bureaucracy when you don't even know who the owners are.  And yes, they all turn into a centralized, unelected slum lord govt because proof of work isn't actually 'work'.  No 'work' is being done, all you're doing is putting an ASIC on cruise control and collecting interest then parlaying the profits into more interest generating ASICs, so it's just like any exponential interest system - complete centralization.

If you wanted digital shitcoins to actually be valid and not a retarded exponential interest system that completely centralizes, you would need to create a digital shitcoin that requires humans to physically solve some sort of captcha in a race for blocks.  In that manner you're not generating work-free interest because you can't parallelize your brain to solve thousands of captchas at the same time.  It's inherently restricted to one man, one vote such as the Bitcoin whitepaper fraudulently claims but fails to deliver.

Such a system would just be gamed by weak AI, so it's also completely useless.  Not to mention the fact there's STILL no point whatsoever in submitting your personal finances to an outside governance system by using imaginary, valueless, digital shitcoins with built-in rent seeking middlemen when you don't have to and can just use physical metals instead.