Until the end of the infrastructure phase at least. A lot of folks are going to get hauled off the prison, which will create new opportunities to challenge the dominant existing players. At this point the value being ascribed to the different blockchain assets is pretty arbitrary.

I suspect virtually all of it. People dismiss this viewpoint because they attribute it to Silk Road type activities, which can't explain the scale, but what I'm talking about is millionaires and billionaires funneling wealth out of China etc.

One thing that's certain is that bitcoin isn't really a currency. When you pay with bitcoin, the value is tied to and converted to USD, and the price paid is tied to USD. Bitcoin isn't the currency in those transactions, USD is. Bitcoin is more like a decentralized anonymous Western Union than it is a currency.

I also don't understand what proponents think the endgame is for bitcoin as an investment-grade asset. Everyone who buys some just becomes the world's first trillionaires, and we become a 2-tiered society of people who bought bitcoin and people who didn't?

Bitcoin might have some serious world-changing implications, but I seriously doubt it being an investable asset is one of them.

I mean if some big retailer like Amazon or BestBuy or Walmart to accept it, but only 0.02% of their daily transactions involved bitcoin would that be a success? It's a lot of money in absolute numbers, but it's minuscule as a percentage.

If it were 5% that would certainly be something to look at.