I read through your entire post, and as a newbie to all of this, I find myself eager to understand and frustrated at having to google search basic terms. Yet your interesting thoughts about the idiocy of the crowd, and predicting crowd behavior is insightful for me, as im still trying to put a clear picture on this whole new world of cryptocurrency. As I learn more I start to feel we are at the beginning of some major shift that will go down in history right now, that this cryptocurrency is gonna change absolutely everything. The angst of the crowd hasnt come close in my opinion to hitting its max, there are still a lot of people out there who have no clue what any of this is yet. I think we are in a long stretch phase of growth that will be overall consistent for both bitcoin and ethereum and I think even steem, as steemit will be the easiest way for people to earn and also beg to understand, steemit has become a major teaching tool for cryptocurrency, and blockchain. For this reason, I think it is unique enough from the others to really rise to path all of its own, or I should say be the beginning of a branch out to other similar platforms. Steem has put some emotion over the crowd and be it foolish or driven by our human urge to manifest , passion is very powerful, mixing that passion with a changing economic system and cryptocurrency is a recipe for great things. I think its very possible to see bitcoin and ethereum go to incredible heights, I hear people talking about 10000 100000 and I actually think its possible and thats whats crazy, that fact that it feels possible, and then a driving passionate crowd behind it trying to manifest it. WOW what are we in for?? this is just the beginning still ;)