History , (financial) scams and criminal trials teach us a lesson: public institutions, companies and private citizen need cash to enter into “private” transactions.
Be the unofficial payment of a political ransom, the black fund to hide management wrongdoing or an attempt at run from the tax authorities, the assumption remains the same: currency privacy is an asset.
Cash ? as well as “institutional” electronic money aren’t good enough because use it in an anonymous way is fairly hard and costly.
Cryptocurrencies’ function as a quid-pro-quo has been made possible by the end of the Bretton-Woods Agreements, thus turning the value of a currency from a (more or less) objective parameter (the gold reserve of each country) mainly into a psychological trick: a currency worth something because we are available in accepting it as such.
So, why Bitcoins shouldn’t be held as a “good” to be exchanged with other goods? And who cares if, technically and legally speaking, Bitcoin is a currency, a check or a money order?
What matters is the economical function that Bitcoin is able to perform: provide everybody (not only the “big fishes”) with a certain amount of currency privacy.
Whether this is good or bad is not relevant: Bitcoin and its sibling are here to stay