Bitcoin being mainstream and safe is a very new thing. I remember just a couple years, everyone was freaking out because they were worried that China was going to ban bitcoin.
And years before that, the worry was that the US, or whoever, would try to force AML regulations onto it.
And a couple years before THAT the worry was that the US would do all of that AND arrest everyone involved in the system, and send them to jail for facilitating money laundering.
Being involved in bitcoin was a risk for early adopters, and that risk was rewarded.
The amount of (untaxed!) wealth owned by those early miners would dwarf that of Gates and Buffet. That kind of Ayn Rand level of capitalism doesn't seem to agree with most people — although it does seem palatable amongst Bitcoin aficionados.
1: https://cointelegraph.com/news/who-owns-bitcoin-universe-fro...
As mainstream adoption took place, we've now seen large capital holders acquiring BTC in proportion with their current wealth.
The hodlers play a game of chicken prisoners dilemma, and it's worthwhile to consider what beanie baby they've acquired and how the sausage was made.
If you look at the coin supply minted over time, in the first year ~3,000,000 coins were minted, 1/7th the total supply minted to a very very small group of humans. By 2014 half the entire supply was minted. These coins are now in in the pockets of a very very limited amount of users who spent very little resources to mint these and be granted credits in Satoshi's database. Think about this.
There's no real network effect when migration to any of the other altcoins is just as easy. It becomes incentived more so when actual usage of the BTC network is cumbersome with latency of up to several hours, and or $10-$20 transaction fees.