>The only people for whom bitcoin is valuable are people for whom the former outweighs the latter, i.e. people for whom trust is extremely costly and zero-trust

>The only people for whom bitcoin is valuable are people for whom the former outweighs the latter, i.e. people for whom trust is extremely costly and zero-trust extremely valuable. Basically, criminals. There's a decent population of those, but it's still a small fraction of society and shrinking every day; drug legalization and the collapse of capital controls in the few places that still have them will destroy most of bitcoin's value. In the developed world, capital controls are definitely increasing. Financial regulations in general are increasing. Mass-surveillance of people's personal finances, and in particular, private transactions, is increasing as well, as cash gets replaced by identity-linked electronic accounts controlled by larger trusted third parties. There is demand for a cash-like electronic currency. In the developing world, there are billions who are unbanked, and with one-third of children being born without a birth certificate [1], and the trend toward increasing centralisation and regulation of banking making government identity documents increasingly necessary to get a bank account, there will likely continue to be a large number of unbanked in the world for whom a permissionless and censorship resistant electronic currency is extremely valuable. [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/220-million-children-who-dont-exist-a-birth-certificate-is-a-passport-to-a-better-life-so-why-cant-8735046.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/220-million...