Try selling your small business and leaving Zimbabwe.

Or take a stroll to the ATM to try and withdraw your hard-earned savings in an attempt to spend them before the currency loses 80 percent of its value.

It’s no surprise that by October of 2017 (note that articles above are both from 2016) Quartz reported that “Bitcoin is breaking all kinds of price records in cash-strapped Zimbabwe.”

The Bitcoin network, despite its many imperfections, is proving itself as, at least, a moderate improvement in access to property rights and financial freedom for much of humanity.

Property rights issues cast a shadow that spans the entire income spectrum—whether you are a middle-class entrepreneur in Zimbabwe, who is not legally allowed to leave the country with more than $1000 in cash as the political and economic situation descends into uncertainty, or the world-famous investor Prince Alwaleed.

Decentralized cryptocurrencies do have the potential to shift the equilibrium noticeably in favor of the individual.

Ironically, shortly before being detained indefinitely and very likely expropriated by the despotic Saudi “government,” Prince Alwaleed called Bitcoin an “Enron in the making.”

Although it’s very possible that Bitcoin’s price has run far ahead of its underlying value (and certainly many of the people bidding it up—including myself on occasion—are speculators, not users), the Prince’s bubble ended up bursting first.

While people like Prince Alwaleed obviously have access to more traditional methods of evading capital controls and expropriation (offshore banking valued at well over $15 trillion, shell companies, and so on), it is clear that Bitcoin—and perhaps the even-less traceable cryptocurrencies like Monero, Dash, and Zcash—is at minimum a useful new gadget in the offshore banking arsenal.

Bitcoin is even more useful for criminals (who in all likelihood made up the first critical mass of its users). But they are a rather small market compared to the enormous potential market of law-abiding and semi-law abiding citizens hedging against expropriation, unreasonably high taxes, unfair lawsuits in corrupt courts, capital controls, and so on.

Obviously, Bitcoin is not a silver bullet—the classic $5 wrench XKCD meme says it all:

Governments, fair or corrupt, still have plenty of very effective ways of detecting income, collecting taxes, expropriating property, and carrying on all manner of other financial/economic despotism. One cannot live on Bitcoin alone. The government can still take your house, your car, your land, and so on. However, decentralized cryptocurrencies do have the potential to shift the equilibrium noticeably in favor of the individual.

My own parents were forced to give up all of their possessions when they left the USSR. In fact, they had to pay a fee in order to leave. Had cryptocurrency existed in the 1980s, they would have surely sold their Moscow apartment and other assets for whatever they could get in Bitcoin. In the event, I think they managed to smuggle several thousand dollars worth of gold sewed into the lining of a fur coat.

[Side note: It was popular among people emigrating from the USSR to have gold dental work installed in a bid to carry out at least something of value… imagine what the USSR would have been like if this was possible.]

Communist countries are a perfect storm for cryptocurrency—subsidized electricity and zero property rights. Venezuela is the best example.

However, even China, which is hardly Communist, only allows private citizens to take $50,000/year out of the country. Unsurprisingly there is a general, and well-founded, anxiety among wealthy Chinese that the government will take away what they have earned. Chinese money has been a huge driver of Bitcoin’s price.

Even banning Bitcoin-RMB exchanges cannot stop the outflow completely.

Valuation

I can’t make any price predictions, but the next decade of the cryptocurrency industry’s growth should be interesting to watch.

When reckoning the long term (years, not months) market cap potential of Bitcoin and other competing cryptos, it is important to consider not just its black market use cases or its competition with gold (gold has ~$7T market cap) and offshore banking ($15–30T market cap), but also the new value it may create if it proves, in the long term, to be a better mousetrap for individuals in their struggles with corrupt and ineffective governments/social structures everywhere.

Not only does Bitcoin create value by providing a new, albeit imperfect, way to secure existing wealth, it will likely encourage the creation of new wealth by individuals living under otherwise discouraging political regimes. Even governments may trend toward better behavior as they find themselves forced to contend with Bitcoin. I can’t make any price predictions—there is still no certainty that cryptocurrencies will stand the test of time and scale—but the next decade of the cryptocurrency industry’s growth should be interesting to watch.

Disclosure: I have been holding BTC and some other cryptos on and off since some time after India withdrew large cash notes from circulation—which got me thinking along the lines above.