There is a
good article from Charles Hugh Smith about Bitcoin on Zerohedge. Really interesting to read. I'll share it here to discuss the content and the opinion of the author.
The real demand for bitcoin will not be known until a global financial crisis guts confidence in central banks and politicized capital controls.
I am an interested observer, not an expert. As an observer, it seems to me that the mainstream--media, financial punditry, etc.--as a generality don't really grasp the dynamics driving bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies.
What the mainstream does get is speculative frenzy. New technologies tend to spark speculative manias once the adoption rate exceeds the Pareto Distribution's critical threshold of 4%, and opportunities to buy into the new technology become available to the general public.
Just as radio and the Internet sparked speculative manias in their boost phase, cryptocurrencies have sparked their own speculative frenzy.
Where the mainstream goes wrong is assuming that's all there is to bitcoin: a speculative mania. The Establishment often dismisses transformative technologies as fads or gimmicks; thus the infamous rejection of photocopy technology as only of interest to a dozen large corporations, personal computers belittled as being of limited utility (storing kitchen recipes), and so on.
