Well hear what this analyst has to say about Prince Alwaleed: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/10/23/bitcoin-price-could-hit-50000-in-a-few-years-analyst-says.html
sorry, but your post seems confused. You say the whole point of encryption is to make it untraceable, then talk about how it would cost billions to counterfeit. Encryption prevents counterfeiting, double-spending, and theft - it does not make it untraceable at all. It's very easy to trace Bitcoin from one wallet to another, then a bit of legwork will reveal the owners of the wallets in most cases.
Well, yes and no. Anonymity "was" the point at the beginning of BTC's use. It's only been discovered recently that as you suggested, that anonymity argument is falling part. Here is a good article on that: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/why-criminals-cant-hide-behind-bitcoin If this is true, I disagree even more with Baron's thesis. But if he is right, then BTC's value is going to implode at some point.
I trade Bitcoin Futures, I have noticed that a lot of my old stratagies that stopped working on modern futures markets do well on Bitcoin. There are also Options on Bitcoin now too. I have noticed more and more bots are taking over the market making and cleaning up on the ineffieciences. I have found some good spread trades as well between the LTC futures and LTCUSD spot that work well, the best is Dash Futures spread against DASHUSD, the only problem is that DASH still has liquidity issues at times. There is definitly money to be made until we all see what comes of this. If bitcoin crashes to ZERO, I will trade it all the way down.
Taking advantage of the spread between to related assets price.... After Dash futures gets too far away from the underlying asset DASH/USD, it tends to fall consistently back towards Spot.
I've noticed that a lot of new money is in these exchanges, and people are extremely gullible and fall for bear/bull traps all the time. I think the market is easier to read but just moves a lot faster. I could see how seasoned traders would make a killing with proven methods from the market which may seem novel to crypto noobs.