My understanding of this appeal to institutional investors is that it's simply a good risk-reward macro speculation play. A decent amount of macro folks are for

My understanding of this appeal to institutional investors is that it's simply a good risk-reward macro speculation play. A decent amount of macro folks are forecasting some sort of monetary crisis or at least significant inflation in the years ahead. In the scenario that there is a full-blown crisis that requires a currency reset rather than just restructuring, what are we resetting to? Assign probabilities to gold, silver, a new fiat currency, or cryptocurrency. Given the small market cap of Bitcoin, a small investment would pay off incredibly well if that's where the chips fall down the line. At a market cap of ~180 Billion USD, Bitcoin has a market cap similar to Pepsi Co. The USD monetary base is something like $4000 Billion and all gold ever mined is worth about $7500 Billion. Of the three, Bitcoin is a growth play plain and simple. Even if it's the least likely system of the future, a probability above 0 means institutions will likely buy some as a hedge. (Edit: That is, if institutions are ever allowed to. Many pension funds in Europe are forced to buy negative-yielding government bonds... sigh.)