I respect fully disagree wit many of your statements. From my experience I've seen these kind of schemes comes and go:
* Coins can't be faked or duplicated - YET - If you get a bot net arguing other the same coin either someone is going to get the coin or the coin is going to get lost.
It kinda like the Captain Midnight and HBO. If you haven't heard about HBO and some other TV networks has launched a communication satellite and professed no one could take it over. Some guy said they were wrong but no one listen to him. Then HBO started raising fees. So the guy overrode their satellite with narrow, focused a pirate signal. Today that would be less then $1,000 of equipment he had for his business.
* No one can create them at will - Except the bank. Someone is issuing those coins to begin with. What is stopping them from 'printing more money?' After all coins are going to get lost over over time. You'll need to replace them. People are going to exchange their currency from X currency to Y currency. Then what happens when someone finds a huge missing wallet?
Both cases are going cause an inflation / deflation cycle. During the inflation cycle this will drive the value up to where no one but the richest people can afford to use it because transaction fees cost too much. The deflation cycle are ruin entire fortunes.
* They can be transmitted quickly/globally with low fees (excluding bitcoin of course) - Won't Ripple and other cryptocurrencies eventually succumb to the same issue over time? You can make shard server but then you're centralizing the network and you get back to where you started.
* You can store them yourself, no bank needed - True enough. Just don't lose that digital wallet.
* Sending huge sums of money is no problem - That getting harder in certain countries as regulations are cracking down. Plus you need access to a terminal. In some areas that's just not practical.
* Relatively simple design, 8 page white paper - but how many other white papers do you need to understand to understand those 8 pages.
* Has worked as designed for almost a decade - And the current banking systems have been working for thousand of years. Does that invalidate this statement?
You said that 'crypto has a lot unique intrinsic value that surpasses traditional currencies to date.' I see crypto more as tulips then anything else. In Holland this bulbs of those beautiful spring flowers. Anyone could grow and make more. They had a definite expiration period. Then someone said 'wait those are just flowers.' And Holland's economy fell apart almost overnight.
My issues with 'crypto' are:
* No real physical assets to back it up - Its just numbers and algorithms.
* Algorithms are broken over time - Just look at the history of SSL / TLS
* The issuing source can issue more 'units' at anytime - The single issuing source of hashes IS the central bank. This causes deflation and devalue the overall market.
* Inflationary / Deflationary Cycle - The currency will inflate until it gets so big that processing fees can't be paid.
* The rich get richer and the poor get poorer - You either buy the farming equipment right away or get the scraps from other people that joined the bandwagon.
* Corruption - Just look at the Coinbase 'alleged' insider trading