Thanks for the lucid description of how the consequences of the inevitable collapse will play out. What people forget is that it truly isn't money--at best, it's a form of cash, even in theory. There is no web of trillions of debts and obligations under it giving it the vast inertia of money. These obligations, debts, contracts, bonds, etc. all have different expiration dates which means that with real money there's an incredibly powerful network resisting crowd enthusiasm and panic. That Bitcoin cannot live forever is practically a theorem. It's value must peak some day--nothing grows in value infinitely. And once most people conclude that the value has peaked, the coins are no longer liquid because people will cease to believe they can make money buying them. The total amount of unredeemed dollars "invested" on that day is the lower bound on the total money that **must** be lost by someone. That's what people don't seem to get; while no particular individual investor must lose, some investor must lose every single one of those dollars. Every dollar and more, actually, because the cost of mining doesn't stop. The only thing that makes this not a theorem is that it's hard to prove that the value can't go up forever--you have to take that as an axiom. But really--forever?! Unless it can go up forever, it must someday stop going up even as the cost of mining it relentlessly increases. Just to say the problem should end the discussion! Yes, your brother in law did make a million. Lots of people did. But every one of those dollars came out of the pocket of someone who must lose it.