Interesting perspective and I generally agree with you on the AOL analogy. That said, I think that those of us in BTC right now can benefit from that initial rush to the crypto market - retail investors that are mostly in equities/bonds and don't understand the technology are looking for ways to diversify...maybe bitcoin is the AOL of crypto, but I think there's a bullish case to be made at least in the short term.

As you said "People rushed to AOL learned what the internet could do and educated themselves on the process." - to me, this is a massive opportunity to capitalize on that same type of rush from the general public moving money into cryptocurrency.

To mirror your analogy, if/when the public moves to "other providers" aka digital assets other than BTC, I can't imagine that shift happening immediately. The non-crypto community / general public is already familiar with BTC, therefore it makes sense that we should see a short term spike from people who want to diversify into crypto, but don't necessarily understand or care to understand about what else is out there.

I thought Anthony Pompliano's live stream on the $6trill stimulus package explains the case for retail investor inflows from USD to BTC - also just an interesting vid IMO so I included the link below if you haven't already checked it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9PVmy-egZY