I've really come to appreciate the argument put forth by Eric Voskuil on his wiki page @ https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Cryptoeconomics
It has been previously argued by many (including prominent economists) that bitcoin cannot become money, like gold has in the past for example, because it has no non-money use-cases.
The lack of non-money use-cases causes some people to suggest that there is no floor to the fallout of the speculative(-based price) bubble that has been created by the frenzy and hype associated with bitcoin.
Furthermore, that governments can make bitcoin illegal to transact with when dealing with legal merchants, causes people to suggest that bitcoin has no future other than being a ponzi that will eventually collapse.
This is where Eric’s work gets interesting in my opinion. His work is premised on the idea that bitcoin’s solely exists to resist state and from this perspective it is perfectly unstoppable.
Whereas most people have an argument that bitcoin cannot have sustainable value because it cannot ever be expected to be accepted and adopted legally be governments, Eric’s argument is premised on the idea that governments likely never will make it legal to transact with-or at least they don’t need to for it to survive and hold value from the market/exchange perspective.
Here I think we can take this a step further and understand how context can render limitations meaningless.
We can think of a nation like Iran using bitcoin, as a black market medium of exchange, where the white market is policed by the United States.
From this context, and the perspective of a speculative investor, bitcoin may never have a non-money usecase but the lack of a local (ie United States citizenry) ability to use bitcoin on the white market is trumped by the external (ie foreign or black market) usefulness of bitcoin.
This EFFECTIVELY puts forth a floor as if the external black market use cases are non-monetary (in this case “non legal tender”).
