[abstractbarista]

They list the types of buyers, but forgot a fourth one: Those who buy it to immediately spend on things they cannot otherwise easily acquire with fiat currency. (I leave these things to your imagination.)

The first three groups may shy away if the price crashes, but the fourth group will (mostly) not. Because what the fourth group is doing (mostly) does not care what the price is.

They can buy their goods whether it costs 0.00001 or 100 BTC, because those goods are indexed against fiat prices. As Bitcoin goes down, prices on the markets that sell these goods automatically rise to counter.

Perhaps the price gyrations would be more aggravating for the sellers of these things. They rely on converting cryptocurrency back to fiat to finance their business, (although perhaps some are able to buy their wholesale product with crypto directly). Volatility exposes them to a risk of losing value if Bitcoin falls between the point in time a buyer places an order, and the time the seller is able to withdraw and convert the payment to fiat.

Ultimately these buyers and sellers support some price floor for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as they exchange real goods and services.

There's a lot of hype around cryptocurrencies, but ultimately this is the true killer use case. And there are millions of people who value that >$0.

[ganeshkrishnan]

> Those who buy it to immediately spend on things they cannot otherwise easily acquire with fiat currency

You dont have to leave it to imagination. For me bitcoin was the easiest way to pay content writers from remote places like venezuela or middle east.

This was when bitcoin was around $500 or less and I bought some bitcoins to pay this contract workers. There was nothing shady or illegal. it just was the simplest way to pay anyone across the world.

[jjeaff]

I used to use Bitcoin for paying some overseas contractors for that same reason, but it became too expensive. So now I use ALGO or a few others. I was surprised to find an actual use for BTC. But turns out, it is not really very useful for that purpose anymore.

[lmilcin]

(disclaimer, I don't know shit about bitcoin)

The one problem with this is trust.

Even shady enterprises need tools to do business they can trust, and if all funds they have suddenly devalue by orders of magnitude they will loose trust.

Another way a shady enterprise can loose trust is if everybody stops using bitcoin and everybody knows whatever is left is a shady business. It is like going around with a big bag of $100 banknotes marked "STOLEN".

There is only so much utility from bitcoin for shady enterprises if they are restricted to only exchange funds between themselves but being unable to convert to real money. They would also have to mine bitcoin on their own.

[desperate]

Don't you think these fourth buyers apply more to supporting a baseline price on Monero and not Bitcoin?