>Identity theft is a nuisance caused by large companies trying to dodge responsibility for negligence onto the public.

That's one way of looking at it.

>The failure mode is that your credit rating is damaged, not that all of your money ends up irrecoverably belonging to some guy in Russia – and you have legal means to solve these problems.

That's great and all but your identity is still stolen and your credit can never be fully trusted. In the case of Bitcoin the law clearly hasn't caught up with the tech, it will eventually as gov realizes they're not getting their taxes.

>Fewer people could afford them but 80s PCs were incredibly useful – things like VisiCalc and WordStar transformed offices, the gaming industry had grown enough to support multiple dedicated studios, etc. People were willing to pay large amounts of money to own a PC precisely because it had real tangible value.

Lots of people decried PCs as fads, the internet was a fad, smartphones were a fad. Believe it or not credit cards were declared a fad at one point.

>Other than paying off ransomware, what can an adopter do with BitCoin which is significantly harder / impossible now?

Send money to anyone on earth with an internet connection, for anything you want, fast with low fees.