Suppose we have a technology at our disposal where we can move fiat currencies or anything else of value (that is not supposed to be double spent) using a distributed ledger system (allowing cheap, instant, global trust-less transfers) that is not dependent on the price of a native cryptotoken (that in this case you would not need) and using this distributed ledger system for smart contracts. In this case, should bitcoin be  valuable?


What do you think? Yes? No?
Why?



VC money in the crypto space is more interested in the blockchain that in bitcoin, as any statement from these entities clearly shows. They all agree that "the blockchain is the main innovation".

So far the criticisms to the "it's about the blockchain, not bitcoin, stupid" way of thinking (http://www.miscmagazine.com/its-the-block-chain-stupid/) consists in saying that the blockchain is dependent on bitcoin (the miners need an incentive to keep the network running, the price of the token needs to be sufficiently high because security etc).
Therefore no bitcoin = no blockchain  (https://twitter.com/nvk/status/522115773918359552)


But what if we had a system that works with decent security that doesn't rely on that cryptotoken? Wouldn't that make all cryptocurrencies themselves pretty much useless (unless they have a specific purpose that is not just a necessary security mechanism)?


Then sure, you might simply consider bitcoin to be valuable because it can be a store of value/new currency/replacement of fiat. But the world might not find these use cases to be useful, compromising bitcoin's high valuation scenarios.