I completely agree with this part. The bitcoin you think you own through the stock my vaporize in an instant. Perhaps because there is no bitcoin ETF in the US, this was the next best thing, so I can see it from that perspective, but then you're missing the whole point of bitcoin. Of course if you're only interesting in trading it, then fine, but the counter party risk is just too large.
just a food for thought on the network effect:
Google supplanted yahoo
Apple supplanted blackberry
Tesla supplanted chevy (getting there)
Amazon supplanted Walmart
And there are many other examples.
In a world where the base technology and applications are still being developed; bitcoin is by no means a sure thing.
I used to wonder about this as well. In many ways, its almost too simple, and unprepared to handle mass adoption at the base layer.
But you know, just like Trump couldn't build a new Twitter, and Elon also had to pretend to purchase it versus starting his own (which would be so much cheaper than spending 44 billion, there is a lot to be said about first mover advantage.
If the idea is to create a blockchain that cannot be hacked or attacked, you need it to have a certain amount of adoption, a certain size, a minimum threshold of computing power that renders attacks unprofitable. How do you do this, for it be decentralized enough, but start from nothing? If you want a create a better bitcoin, but keep all the positives of bitcoin, you simply can't do it anymore. It will fail spectacularly in some area and you would have to leave out some of the critical benefits of bitcoin as a store of value and medium of exchange. It is already so robust and decentralized that you just end up coming back to "lets just use bitcoin" and build on top of it.
Look at the English language. Some argue that its difficult to learn because it has too many rules that don't make sense. Some words sound the same but are spelled different and have different meanings. Some letters appear similar when you write them, so that can get confusing. (hence why some letters are even skipped once you go past base 10 for math stuff) Even pronunciation is difficult, so I'm sure a new language could perfect on this to make use of sounds that are easier to say for the vast majority. So it would almost make sense to create a new universal language that would be easy to learn and have better universal rules. But we clearly know that this makes no sense as English is already the accepted world language and we simply add to it what we need to. At this stage of human and cultural development, we can start language all over again. And likewise, I don't think we can start a truly decentralized and super secure blockchain all over again.