People keep saying bitcoin will either go to the moon, or to 0.
But if it goes to 0 (or a few cents), I'll buy all of them on the orderbooks and trade with myself on stamp to bring it to an ath.
So its not binary.
It's binary with respect to each one of the failure modes (it either fails or doesn't). Most of them are technological. Some failures can be salvaged, as allured to by the core developers when they talk about "rebooting" bitcoin from an existing checkpoint.
With respect to valuation of the implied utility you are correct. As long as utility is not zero, bitcoin will be worth something - as you can see with alt coins.
What people tend to underestimate is the need to accumulate a target bitcoin position early on in order to participate in the new wealth scheme without too much drain on other resources. For billionaires a 10,000 BTC position is mandatory. For millionaires a 1,000 BTC position will do. (wealth distribution is not linear). Read posts from "rpietila" who elaborated on that line of thinking. It becomes exponentially harder over time to achieve a target position (if you neglect over-/undervaluation phenomenons).
