BTC initially flourished thank to the D-company, AlQuaeda etc not because it hurt people but because for their activities they was the firsts outside the cypherpunks to understand the value of a free distributed currency.
Then State actors join. The current bear is Wall Street broken who try to save themselves but it do when some people start to understand the value of a distributed FLOSS currency. It's still to be seen how many will understand and when.
