Part of the problem is Bitcoin was initially developed anonymously, aka: reasonably possible for bdfl then tapped anon handoff situation... but was instead handed off to real-worlders (not least of which then thus subject to govts), aka: fatal mistake against initial ethos. Anything non anon will dall and fail due to external demand. Even the Z coins will and have already failed from this. Bitcoin is still worthy, in the fiat cartel sort of way, even of very nice investment payoffs, even if buying in right now today. But its "ideals" appear to have been compromised. Blockchain is done, and fiat and fiat regulated blockchain is done. The only valid next coin will be one that truly scales to "credit card" tx / market feasible rates and beyond,\ or at least real p2p, person to person, phone to phone, neighbor to neighbor, job to job rates, while being... 1) developed and forever maintained, longest chain advantage, under strong anonymity and 2) provides cryptographically strong anonymity to users Govts, being corrupt people, should naturally respect and flock to such an impenetrable. Bitcoin is now not impenetrable, so it will eventually fall to history as some other same old has been seen currency before. Still money to be made with it for now though.
the idea is to act as a middle man, doing big transactions in bulk, or a series of middle men, who clear out their ledgers with one another at the end of the day in bulk.
This is scary to hodlers, as if it's reduced to a clearing network, you don't need to fight (pay) for BTC, just enough to run a tx every night that carries some signed statement, even an integer number of BTC equal to all your possible SWIFT institution payees matrix today suffices for that (plus some bs self cabal party borne mining fees). Public bitcoin price collapses under that since they're all 1:n zero sum matrix every night. The first digital currency that has hundreds of millions of people sleeping overnight with it in their wallets... moon. Whether that'll be Bitcoin... hard to tell. Blockstream representing BTC seems to be having issues reaching that. In particular since original focus growing on retail / end user seems vanished lately.