Bitcoin is very obvious, it is incredibly obvious -- in fact, the strongest reason a bystander might have to feel skeptical toward bitcoin, is that the bitcoiners tends to have such a wounded ego, they think themselves clever for noticing a trivial aspect of mathematical partitions and process efficiency.

Throughout history, the merchant/business class have very rarely been the most powerful, so one might wonder if the appeal in bitcoin, more than the financial returns, is the idea and sense that one could subordinate politics and power to a simple numerical trick? Of course, fiat has been incredibly destructive in ways that are horrific beyond comprehension, but two questions here: 1) how do you know there are not various other, perhaps perniciously subtle factors at play that are invariant to the money; 2) how do you know that with the money fixed, there would not be new unimaginable horrors that arise for which there is no "pay to make horror disappear button."

Not that money is going away, but considering how nascent the industrial revolution is, the recency of large scale agriculture, and various other aspects of the world that are not exactly the same as they once were, I would be very careful about making reasoning by analogy too strongly at systemic level... are complex systems ones where large scale behavior is something you can anticipate, or can you only control the generative primitives? Given mercantilism has not generally ruled, why would bitcoin change that?

Finally, let us consider the main question, a bear market for money itself! Nick Szabo has some nice pieces on the origins of money, and what if in the lazy thinking following the self congratulation of the bitcoiner's genius, we forget to think about the origins of money and what it actually does? So, you solve the double coincidence of wants. It used to be months to ship some wool somewhere, and then it gets made into thread, and then clothing sold somewhere. Consider a computer chip and organizing many sub-circuits; they actually need clocks that consume lots of energy to coordinate timing and when different subprocesses converge because outputs of some things become inputs into another! Now that clock rate of the world is shifting in rather interesting ways and organization of humans is becoming quite interesting as the sharing of context transforms into new possibilities, where the bottlenecks transform.

Of course, the infinite abundance narratives are nonsense, no need to confuse me for one of those morons (what do those types fear if not the possibility of a huge resurgence and shifts in the violence markets...) but one might wonder if the importance of money itself could diminish, and in particular, its ability to act as a substitute for power or to provide either status or a sense of meaning.

In general, one may ask questions of meaning... but if we suppose there is a large scale epochal decline in the West, and part of the bitcoin ethos is resentment toward what can reasonably be called grotesque of societal organization, could the win of wealth, and even of a healthy, thriving, family, actually be too cheap a win to let palliate a resentment toward a dying world? Do you really think being a participant in a monetary shift and tawking was all you are meant to do?

Of course, this is largely as an American to the Americans, for the Europeans, within their deeper decay and lack of Faustianism may produce a more extreme reaction with less to hold onto, while if they could have a national pride it might keep them from having a better sense of what may be coming.