Just wanted to say I read the whole thing, and I find it pretty damn compelling - I think you’re dead-on about narrative-driven hype, and the timed perfect-storm catalysts of EIP-1559, the Merge, Bitcoin flippening, and L2 scaling will fuel that hype (along with illiquidity from staking and DeFi).
I’ll be curious about the dynamic that emerges when staking becomes so profitable that we see extreme market illiquidity, causing high USD prices, prohibitively expensive transactions (even with L2 scaling), and narrative attacks from other chains (as is happening now with BSC). In that case Ethereum may become a walled garden for early adopters (including people buying in now). Hopefully at that point further scaling can be introduced, and in the long-term, price volatility for a speculative hyper-growth asset can shift to predictably reflecting the deflationary tokenomics.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.