When it was actually spendable without huge fees, and before any sane person thought of it as an investment vehicle, Bitcoin had a killer app: Poker and probably fair online gambling. That, however, did not fly with certain governments who didn't want to declare crypto a "thing of value," let alone a currency, but needed to in order to control and tax offshore and onshore gaming. Once you can't spend it on entertainment and it lost its function as a medium of quick exchange, it lost most of its reason for existing. That just happened to coincide with the deluge of suckers who wanted to hodl it. Source: I built a startup Bitcoin gaming site in 2011.