Rowan, I think the answer to your first question has to be yes, but only because they maybe can't yet see the benefits which would be had by all.

Given the choice, what would an Elite choose; to be; king/Queen of a doomed, hellish world, or an average citizen of something like Utopia?

At least it seems to be happening without involving any pitch forks.

So far so good!

I think and trust even the most hardened Elite can't be immune to truth, most folk maybe haven't seen the problems, as there was no better system to compete with it. But that could be changing now with the obvious success of Chinese businesses, we are seeing innovation which is impossible to compete with, using a purely profit driven system.

Hence the obvious hostility towards Huawei, but that reaction is in danger of killing the benefits of some amazing technology which was coming from there, which we have to hope folk will soon see is a pretty stupid thing to do, we need the internet as a whole thing, to realise its true potential.

Ironically, the way to compete with China, if their currency happens to hold despite everything, is probably for us (The West), to use our extraordinary agility to do a complete u-turn, and go all out free-money. The increase in our productivity and innovation would be phenomenal.

On the unlimited crypto-generator, I did some thinking on that previously too, it is here:

https://medium.com/@eric.bott/a-theoretical-personal-cryptocurrency-480cd1a97b7c