You don't need to be knowledgeable about bitcoin specifically to know what happens, at the last financial crisis we got the same lesson.
Value is perceived, and value can evaporate.
If bitcoin completely fails, the value evaporates.
It's a bit like buying a house in Detroit a decade ago for a hefty price, and trying to sell it today. Your money wasn't eaten by the house, no-one ran away with it, but it's now worth significantly less than it was and effectively the value just disappeared.
(PS: And I hope you bought the house with cash you could afford to lose rather than debt you now owe someone.)
No. Its a closed system. For every dollar that someone spent on a bitcoin, that dollar was received by someone else.
Now, you can certainly say that the money was spent on things like electricity, or GPU hardware, that has little/no value now. But thats irrelevant - the money most certainly spent, rather than "evaporate" into thin air.
> Does the FBI even consider bitcoin as something that actually has any value that requires investigating an accusation of theft?
Market cap isn't money, its an estimate of value based on a premise that is not merely flawed but outright insane -- that every unit of an asset that exists can be liquidated at the current market price of a single unit (that is, that market clearing price is not effected by supply.)
Its used because its easily calculated, and people are prone to want to believe that values that are easy to calculate are also meaningful.
Just because I can buy a bitcoin from somebody for $1000 a few months ago doesn't mean that same person is willing to buy it back from me for $1000 dollars today. The value in that bitcoin has evaporated, disappeared, gone up in smoke. Bitcoins are only worth how much people are willing to pay for them; what was spent on them in the past does not convey to them any value today.
The value hasn't evaporated - if you bought a bitcoin for $1000 a few months ago and now you can sell it for $100, then value of ~$900 (assuming that 'real worth' of USD didn't change much) was transferrend from you to the guy who sold you that bitcoin back then.
You buy at $100 and sell at $1000. Where did the value come from that compelled the new guy to buy it from you at that inflated price? In my thinking, by your example, the new guy wouldn't pay an extra $900 because the value didn't already exist in the bitcoin you are selling.
No, initially you were in possession of the value, as you could have sold the bitcoin to somebody else for that $1000 dollars. The fall of value in a bitcoin did not somehow go back in time, find the person you bought it from, and transfer value to them.
Think of it this way, I buy a nice car for $100k. The person selling it gets $100k in cash, and I get $100k worth of car. A year later, I crash the car and it is now worth $1k in scrap metal. Where did my $99k worth of value in the car go? Did the dealer somehow acquire that value? No, I simply destroyed it. I destroyed the value of the car, it wasn't taken from me. The value of the cash I gave the dealer? That is more or less still the same, but that is his business, not mine.
Value is not zero sum. Creating and destroying value is trivial.
Value is perceived, and value can evaporate.
If bitcoin completely fails, the value evaporates.
It's a bit like buying a house in Detroit a decade ago for a hefty price, and trying to sell it today. Your money wasn't eaten by the house, no-one ran away with it, but it's now worth significantly less than it was and effectively the value just disappeared.
(PS: And I hope you bought the house with cash you could afford to lose rather than debt you now owe someone.)