Yes, for someone whose prior has been: “The price will crater and most people will lose interest”, I think that the thousands of hours of developer time and institutional interest is probably starting to pay of in terms of more mature markets.

I still have problems with the idea that people are able to pick the correct winners. When the blockchain finally gets its killer mainstream app, why not do a new ICO on a restarted blockchain instead of a billion dollar wealth transfer to early adopters?

Because all of the money and users that you hope use your killer mainstream app have to come from somewhere - a brand new blockchain makes your app that much harder to launch.

In addition, your killer mainstream app may only be useful inside of an existing ecosystem. Ex: Uniswap is pretty useless if you don't have any assets that people want to trade.

I think Bitcoin’s biggest strength (and weakness) is hype and FOMO. If another coin comes along that gets more attention (see Dogecoin), you’ll see the Bitcoin community try to discredit for the same reasons that Bitcoin is currently dissed for right now.

You're assuming that there actually was $8B in transactions. It's possible that there was $800M in transactions and $7.2B in tape painting.

Alternatively it could be as simple as lots of people having a crap execution strategy. I’m sure there are thousands of people who just have orders in the book that got swept and others with simple python scripts that “buy the dip” with no concept of risk or stop loss. The question is whether those people need to get out of their positions in the next few days causing a further drop or whether they can hold in which case the price will stabilise and eventually continue to run up.

Or look at it this way, 8 billion gives you a lot of buying power if you're going 10x+ long. How much of this market is propped up by these speculators

I think these were futures contracts?