To answer your last, people working on something out of passion and/or belief in its future carries zero correlation about how exciting (or good) the thing is.

To answer your last, people working on something out of passion and/or belief in its future carries zero correlation about how exciting (or good) the thing is. I've known my fair share of programmers that make me look like a blabbering cretin. I still don't think what they worked on was something special though. So this line of argumentation IMO leads to nowhere [productive]. Sure there are extremely smart people working on BTC. But the same could be said in literally any area, right?