In the end, the continually growing computational requirements to maintain the ledger become infeasible even for the ASIC folks and the currency dies. It's all a ponzi scheme.
As much as I find the actual technical details of blockchain technology interesting (it's basically nerd crack) - the severe lack of utility to general society and the constant price bubbles are really astounding.
There are multiple levels of bubbles... the short term ethereum-led ICO bubble we are currently in, which is kind of overlaid on top of the long term bubble of cryptocurrency as a whole, which is itself overlaid on the tech bubble (where a lot of the disposable incomes getting poured in to crypto come from), which is itself overlaid on the broader world asset bubble caused by years of ZIRP.
Cryptocurrencies, BTC, ETH, ICOs, ZCash, Monero, etc - it's all just a giant blackhole of waste, greed, and criminal activity so ingeniously designed that it almost seems like some kind of weapon designed to harm society. But it's so much fun to work on and think about... that it is just hard to look away.
I also think you're failing to appreciate the benefit of having technologies that allow for a viable grey market. A third of people born today do not have government identification [1], and therefore cannot participate in the legal identity-based financial system. To increase their participation, the "crime" of unregulated commerce has to become more frequent in many countries.
In countries like Venezeula, cryptocurrencies are starting to play a role as a secure (by Venezuelan standards) safe haven for their wealth [2]. All of this activity is criminal according to the Venezuelan state, yet it is undoubtedly beneficial to Venezuelan society, in preventing corrupt state apparatuses from expropriating and squandering the meager private wealth of Venezuelans through hyper-inflation.
It also doesn't take much imagination to envision a future where tokenised finance on the blockchain helps millions of entrepreneurs around the world better access global capital markets. Speculation, which has created a token market worth billions [3], is just the first use-case enabled by this technology to conduct much more frictionless financial transactions. There will be more. I would also argue that this speculation, as chaotic as it is, is helping to bootstrap the industry, just as the dot com bubble did for the internet sector in the late 1990s.
So while I do think there is an enormous amount of hype in the cryptocurrency market, and that many will suffer losses from making bad investment decisions, I think this needs to be put in the context of the speculation underlying the value of major traditional assets, the promise the technology holds beyond speculation, and the capabilities it is already proving to have.
[1] https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/544994985414639616
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/venezuela...
This is one of the greatest use of cryptocurrency imo. If you go back even a few years ago, formerly stable countries like Cyprus were raiding bank accounts to make up for their shortfall. As costs rise, and there are less and less people of working age paying into the system, governments will become more coercive in order to fund healthcare and benefits for the largest voting block. Crypto is a storage of wealth and a way to protect yourself from government expropriation.
I think that number is closer to 100%. Most babies do not obtain government IDs on their date of birth.
Do you mean a third of people on earth? A third of people over a certain age?