Don't be ridiculous-- he never intended a handful of factory megamines to burn more electricity than aluminum smelters. That's not distribution--that's called a cabal
There is some truth in that, and the reason is that the price of bitcoin rose way way too fast the last few years. In fact, bitcoin is somehow victim to its own success. At inflation rates of 10%, the market cap shouldn't have been in the billions. The fundamentals of bitcoin are at this moment still in the single or double digit range (that is, merchant adoption). The Mt Gox manipulations have pushed bitcoin's price artificially up way too much too early. What we are now witnessing is probably a return to normal. Unfortunately, that goes with a long price decline (from speculative heights which were totally artificial), and which give very bad publicity to bitcoin at a moment where it starts getting more visibility.
My idea is that bitcoin adoption was planned to take decades (corresponding to the inflation scheme), and that, due to manipulation and overly speculative behavior, the price rose way way too fast up to a point where the market cap had nothing to do any more with its fundamentals.
It will now take - IMO - a very very long time before it can rise significantly again, driven, this time, by its fundamentals.
In a single digit range Bitcoin would have a market cap of less than 150 million dollars. Forgetting the fact that VC funding was nearly triple that in 2014 alone, according to coindesk Bitcoin is a payment option for businesses with a market cap of 180 billion dollars already. Those two numbers are not really compatible given bitcoin's 'float'.
You seem to value bitcoin solely based upon its usage as a payment rail. Which ignores it's main role as a frictionless speculative store of value, a digital asset with sound money properties.
Although it is rapidly produced as absolute fact there remains no evidence whatsoever that Mt Gox artificially pumped up the price in the last bubble. I agree the implosion has damaged public perception of Bitcoin to a degree.
Finally the market cap of bitcoin has never really had anything to do with fundamentals except perhaps at the lower bound of a crash