"Why would anybdoy buy into Bitcoin when it means only fattening the pockets of a few (already rich) mining syndicates?"
Replace Bitcoin with USD in above sentence and "mining syndicates" with "banks"
Namely, one where the majority of "little people" can mine the coin. Or one with a fair and equal distribution to at least hundreds of millions of people (preferably billions) before the coin is launched.
Those were some of the founders original ideas, that anybody with a CPU could mine the coin. And technology slowly took over...
This isn't to say that Bitcoin hasn't succeeded in a lot of fronts. Just that one of the key fronts - one of equal ownership of the money supply - hasn't been quite as successful as others.
Why go through the trouble of running a mining rig instead of just buying the coins sold by miners in the market?
It is true that the majority of Bitcoins are held by a few early adopters (NB: not today's miners!). They will diversify out as time goes on. Wealth can come from skill, hard work, luck, politicking, etc... Rejecting Bitcoin because it enriches a few people in a manner that you find objectionable is... myopic.
Look around you, almost everything you do enriches one capitalist or another. Many intelligent people have tried finding a way around that, with limited to no success. Good luck.
That's not why I think Bitcoin is dead.
It's primarily the fact that nobody can mine it anymore, thus nobody will be interested in it. All of my friends who I introduced to Bitcoin (and were fanatics while they were mining) don't even talk about it anymore. They're all just steadily hoarding their coins, not using them for anything, in the hopes of cashing out millions of dollars once all of the later "suckers" come along and buy into the blockchain.
It was the "free money" aspect that really sold the idea to most people. Nobody cares about the "exchange money for Bitcoin just because Bitcoin is so much more fluid" aspect.
The fact that the fair distribution of the coin is dead means that the entire blockchain will die imho. Bitcoin's price really exploded when the mining scene was lucrative for everybody interested in the coin. It tapered off rather quickly once mining became impossible for all but the few.
Why would anybody buy into Bitcoin now that one of it's original pomises of decentralized mining has been broken?
Why would anybdoy buy into Bitcoin when it means only fattening the pockets of a few (already rich) mining syndicates?
I certainly wouldn't, and I was a massive Bitcoin proponent for most of it's life.
Many ideas that Bitcoin brought with it will live on, but the Bitcoin blockchain in it's current implementation will "die" sooner rather than later imho.
The fact that one can transfer value from point A to point B for next to nothing and without government oversight is amazing. The fact that the majority of Bitcoins that will ever exist are held by a few individuals (and always will be while mining for the layman is dead) is not.