Great analisys, let the noise continue...
Indeed... Reminds me a little of the shifting online poker landscape.
In 2008, you'd take a virtual "seat" at a 6-handed online table, with 4 complete amateurs ("fish") and maybe 1 other competent player. By 2012, you'd be lucky if you found one amateur at your table (assuming it wasn't you). The easy money exploiting others at the table was gone. The games were becoming more efficient and more transparent. The large exploits that worked so well began working dramatically less. In many cases, the outcome would be an almost hostile, and in some cases self-destructive, spatting between the competent players. This led to significant spikes in variance, as aggression between those competent players picked up, naturally, and theoretical win rates began falling off. Amateurs eventually went "bust" or learned a lesson. In No Limit, those lessons come quickly and relentlessly.
If the "sharks" in crypto-currency are the traders and speculators, both at the individual and institutional level, they're certainly swinging at each other now. I would cite the high variance and back and forth battling we've seen over the past ~week, with the price sliding up and down $20 regularly like it's nothing. The amount of capital required now to push the market around is probably an order of magnitude higher, if not more, than when the exchanges were Mt Gox, Bitfinex and a few poorly understood Chinese exchanges. Naturally, there is less fear when there's more liquidity and more order books. It's easy when there's only one exchange that needs follow a move. Much more difficult when there's 10 exchanges, some with banking charters.
While this is a neat analogy and may have some truth, another truth remains in the current trading landscape currently and that is that China leads. In fact China has led since at least late 2013, early stages of bubble #2 that year.
China is also easily influenced by things like devaluation of the CNY. So patterns are still relatively easy to spot and understand. However, if you are just scalping maybe its more difficult, but longer term plays, are still pretty easy in my opinion.
Agree that longer term plays are still relatively easy. Those would be the high "win rate" plays. Losing edge on the shorter term plays will have a dramatic influence on variance tho. It's where the bodies are buried ! A slow leakage, that slowly hastens in time due to excess activity. The analogy being to the online poker player that met his own eventual demise by being overly aggressive and too "active" with other very competent players. Variance skyrocketed with few people noticing or fully appreciating it. Some of these otherwise competent players went bust from an extended "cold streak", farther stretched than anticipated. Some of them had a "hot streak" of course, which only instilled a false sense of confidence in one's "game" and talents. Those players would move up in stakes rapidly, with that confidence, before the variance would inevitably bite them in the ass.

Least in Bitcoin there's a simple solution, focus on the higher win rate plays which sometimes require sitting tight. Don't fly too close to the sun.