> While there is a market for those txns the reality is that most adopters, and they recognize themselves as early ones, today, buy bitcoin as an inflation hedg

> While there is a market for those txns the reality is that most adopters, and they recognize themselves as early ones, today, buy bitcoin as an inflation hedge. That's my point - bitcoin is most useful for those who wish to engage in illicit activity (this accounts for at least 10% of bitcoin's market size if not more [1][2][3]) and for those who have ideological reasons to support it. Those who have ideological reasons to fear inflation and support bitcoin are primarily libertarians, who think of inflation as Satan incarnate and view it as worse than murder and only slightly better than outright theft. But that's hardly a consensus view. Beyond those two groups, bitcoin has no real use. I'm not saying bitcoin is worthless, I'm saying that there's a natural peak to its valuation based on its limited use cases (see above). Maybe bitcoin will make significant inroads in developing countries, and maybe then those $100 billion+ valuations will become reality, but I doubt it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)#Sales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)#Sales [2] http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/15/technology/ransomware-cyber-security/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/15/technology/ransomware-cyber-... [3] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/47942/what-percentage-of-bitcoin-use-is-legitimate https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/47942/what-perce... [4] http://www.ofnumbers.com/2015/04/22/the-flow-of-funds-on-the-bitcoin-network-in-2015/ http://www.ofnumbers.com/2015/04/22/the-flow-of-funds-on-the...