All of the above arguments could also be applied to dot-coms when they were in their early stages. I'm sure early adopters were as ecstatic as BTC early adopters. So it must not be a surprise when bubble crashes sooner or later, before cryptocurrencies become as usual as Internet.
But the dot-coms were companies not the technology. The success of the internet itself never faltered, it's just that people scrambled to speculate on companies to capitalise on it, and some terrible or highly risky companies got too much money. It's easier to say Bitcoin itself will succeed than it is to say that blockchain.info or coinbase will be the next google. [...]
The dot-com-comparison is very interesting as it exposes a totally unique property of Bitcoin. It has always been possible to invest into companies that utilize a new technology in some way, but this is the first time ever that you can invest into the
technology itself. This doesn't necessarily make Bitcoin a good investment, the decision is still up to anyone, but IF you expect mainstream success of this technology, it's extremely easy and safe to take part in it.
Imagine you were back in the 90s, the WWW is starting to gain traction, you're convinced of its golden future, and you are able to buy shares of the HTTP. You don't even need a brokerage account or anything, you can do it in any amount, by cash, anonymously, on the street. That's pretty amazing.
People are arguing that only crypto-currency as a concept can be considered analog to HTTP, not the concrete Bitcoin implementation, which is more similar to things like Facebook. But what has survived the dot-com-bubble is not a multitude of viewable-content transfer-protocols, but HTTP. Complementary blockchain-based protocols for special applications will probably exist, too, like there are protocols for video streaming, filesharing and so on, but the network effect is too strong for payment-altcoins.
Every time I reflect about the basics I am more convinced that mainstream adoption of Bitcoin is unavoidable. Printed-page-style information has been transferred by third parties in a slow and cumbersome way for ages until the Web took over in an instant (historically seen). The Bitcoin protocol opens a similar evolutionary path for money transfers. We're still at an early stage and I'm sure the next decade or so will become increasingly interesting.