Someone on reddit argued that the value proposition for Bitcoin I describe is not one that people (other than ancaps and libertarians) care about.  Here was my response. (Note that the discussion there also touched on "censorship resistance" as one of Bitcoin's important properties which I'd argue is simply a corollary of trustlessness.)


Well, I’d say that claiming that "no one” cares is obviously an overstatement. The people being censored care. Anyone who has ever purchased an illicit product or been paid in cash in an effort to evade taxes cares about censorship-resistance. The illegal drug trade is a 300-billion-dollar-a-year market. The broader "underground" or "shadow economy" in just the US is estimated at two trillion dollars. So censorship-resistance is absolutely important to a lot of people. But that doesn't mean that mean that many forms of financial censorship aren't popular. They are. To use the examples above, most people still support the drug war and coercively-collected taxation.


I actually think that's generally true, with some important qualifications. Certainly that's the case for most people if we’re just talking about trusting a bank to honor their deposit or properly effectuate an ordinary (not-likely-to-be-censored) transaction. Do most people trust their government to maintain the value of their currency? Well, the answer to that question is probably “mostly” and “most of the time.” When a fiat currency begins to fail, however, that trust can evaporate pretty quickly. I don't think most Venezuelans have a whole lot of trust in their government's current management of the Bolivar. And even for a currency like the dollar that's currently experiencing low inflation, people only “trust” the government / central bank to erode the purchasing power of their money relatively slowly. That doesn't mean that they like seeing their money lose purchasing power or that financially savvy people don't spend lots of money and effort on attempting to minimize their exposure to inflation. But is a little bit of inflation going to cause most people to immediately abandon the dollar? Obviously not. As I said in the linked comment, in the short-term, the network effect is by far the most important determinant of what’s actually used as money.

Now if you want to argue that most people / "the average Joe" don't currently recognize Bitcoin's value proposition, I would agree with you 100%. They obviously don't, or Bitcoin would have a much larger user base than (at most) a few million people and a much higher "market cap" than a few billion dollars. But Bitcoin doesn't need the average Joe to recognize its potential right now in order to be successful over the medium- and long-term. If Bitcoin's monetary properties are good enough to allow it to, over time, out-compete fiat as money (or, more modestly, just out-compete gold as a "store of value" / inflationary hedge), Bitcoin is still unlikely to get there in one giant leap by suddenly appealing to the masses. It will be an iterative process with adoption occurring at the margins. And again, the network effect of money is such that it creates the potential for a positive feedback loop as adoption begets greater utility begetting still greater adoption.