I don't think Bitcoin was designed as a scheme, but it's effectively been turned into an MLM scheme and a brilliant one at that.
I'm trying to hire a PR firm for a project and I've come across a handful of firms that have been hired to promote BTC.
Think about that for a minute: if BTC is distributed - then who on earth is paying massive $$$ for PR firms to be hustling BTC in the press? Massive BTC owners - that's who.
Also problematic is so many in the press reporting on it have positions in BTC they are not disclosing (although this might be changing).
And every owner of BTC seems to be a willing (or unwitting) participant in the propagandization simply by commenting it up on the various boards and chats around the internet.
It's an amazing phenom - the intersection of cool tech, the internet - and age old ponzi/pyramid schemes.
And it has not even yet hit mainstream - most readers here might think BTC is 'old hat' but it takes a long time for things to hit mainstreet - and even after they hit mainstreet USA, it takes a while to hit 'mainstreet globally'. Remember: when all your friends were on Facebook? It tooks several years for 'everyone in the world' to be on it.
The barrier to growth is that it is quite tricky to buy - my Mother is on Facebook and she will never by BTC unless there are some real changes - though I can see a 3rd party creating a solution.
Do you know Glen Beck's scammy 'buy gold from us' commercials, where people buy gold in coin format basically at 20% above market value?
The 'buy Gold' phenom used to hustle gold does well among those 'end of the world / I don't trust the government types' - the same people who buy 'end of the world seeds' (from Glen Beck as well!) - and BTC fits in perfectly with this narrative.
So - get ready for 'Glenn Beck supported Bitcoin Wallet' - then it will get really big, possibly go global. And then, who knows.
So many interesting outcomes: if there is too much noise about it being used in organized crime I can see a Scandinavian country banning it, with talk of EU banning it ... the US could move quickly to do something. On some level - this will actually strengthen BTC among the 'anti government' crowd.
For it to lose price, there kind of has to be a systematic reason for it to do so - and kind of a panic. Once the press starts touting 'BTC Crash' - you can be sure it will happen - though there are enough massive, institutional holders that it won't likely go to zero.
I think it will be around for a long while though - my guess is that there is some kind of crash at some point, but not to zero, some governments clamp down, and then people over a long period of time just stop talking about it and using it.