I had not been making the strong link here; I assume BTC is used across the board, even by CIA to launder incoming heroin, but recent legal changes must be making BTC the gold of the future.
BTC seems like the universal go between, simply because of network effect. But eventually that will move to something else I assume, or many something elses..

I like the fact the ETH has so many nodes keeping watch (25K vs 7k of bitcoin).
The ETH blockchain is messy, but I assume it will soon overtake BTC as far as being easy to exchange for USD. And it seems ETH is able to advance it's technology faster than BTC.

The next contender for 3rd generation gold standard is?
(high transaction capabilities, easy to run a full node, most bugs are fixed before the genesis blocks are created)