Bitcoin still hasn't been disproven to be a fad :)

And it never will be :D. There was never any need for crypto currency to begin with and pretty much all of them fail to deliver on their core promise of decentralization. If they do deliver on that promise, they are so slow that the idea of global deployment is ridiculous...

The core idea of crypto currency (i.e. byzantine fault tolerance) is 2000 years old. The fact that this happens now already demonstrates that there never was any need for this and there won't be.

>There was never any need for crypto currency

Of course there was and still is. The three main purposes as I see them are as follows:

1) International money transfer free of regulatory oversight.

2) Anonymous purchase and money laundering

3) Decentralized currency free of government manipulation - Bitcoin falls short of this.

Cryptocurrency is a great solution for all of these needs. Of course I agree that most currencies add little or no value to their core product, especially the ICO crowd.

This is like that episode of the Simpsons when Apu is getting his citizenship and taking the quiz, they ask him the cause of the American Revolution and he starts going through a list with nuanced analysis. The testmaster stops him and tells him: "Just say slavery." There were some other very minor causes, but slavery was the biggest.

Similarly, you can just say illegal purchases. The other things have been largely debunked. Interestingly, you didn't even mention the giant primary use case of buying illegal things.

Er, wasn't the one-word cause of the American Revolution "taxation" ? (The one-word cause of the American Civil War would probably be "slavery", though).

> Er, wasn't the one-word cause of the American Revolution "taxation" ?

No, “disenfranchisement”. Read the Declaration, it was about usurpations of the right of the people to govern themselves. “No...without representation” is the key part, not “taxation”.

That's been inverted for propaganda purposes by modern anti-tax activists.

But, in a any case, “slavery” would have to be the Civil War, the Texas Revolution, or—indirectly, by way of the previous item—the Mexican-American War.

I think black market purchases fall pretty clearly under #2 above.

Oh wow. Did you just compare Bitcoin to the internet itself? Cameras too?! Please, get out of the crypto bubble.