Alternate explanation. These "rich" are in fact criminals. Now let's qualify that statements, but some things have become big business:

1) sending drugs ("real" medicine drugs/actual drugs/fake drugs) across state lines. You see, the government doesn't really check the mail very thoroughly, so you can just order heroin and have it mailed to you. (and these people also transact along themselves, for obvious reasons. That used to be a big weak point in the system and a way to trace it)

2) hostaging things (and, I'm sure, people). IT has become critically important for pretty much everything, and can be sabotaged. Properly sabotaged you can demand a ransom.

3) avoiding government scrutiny on things. This can go from tax evasion to just outright being an enemy over the government, or simply protecting what's yours. Now keep in mind that, despite people thinking otherwise, governments are the same type of organisation from a game theory perspective as a mob. Avoiding these might be judged moral, even by you, and may even be a necessity for life (e.g. Venezuela).

You might think "third world country", and mostly you'd be right. But do include Greece, Venezuela, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and Cyprus as markets where it is seeing very significant usage. For significant portions of the population, governments took away their ability to transact in their local currency (in Greece's case there was at least a plan by mr. Varoufakis to provide a "local" currency, but all others have simply not provided a usable alternative, instead denying there is a problem). So bitcoin has filled a serious and necessary void there.

You see, governments force you to transact in their currency, but they provide no support at all. In reality, dollar transaction either happen in a way that was not even new in 300 BC, and probably was not new in ~4500 BC (ie. cash), or using for-profit institutions of questionable integrity (VISA, ask any online merchant).

The fact that an underground economy like this can exist at all, with people unable to easily defraud each other allows for such economies to exist and grow.

As for the value, it is generally accepted that a currency's value is a direct result from the movement of value (not money) in said currency (so savings destroy a currency's value, and having money go around and not be hoarded anywhere increases a currency's value). This is why the dollar is so much higher than most other currencies. So conveniently, for most altcoins you can get a decent guess for the value of the currencies by counting the transactions. Because transactions aren't free, this can't be scammed for free, so there must be some level of truth in this.

(expressed in USD)
https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-...

(expressed in bitcoin itself)
https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume

Clearly, bitcoin is comparable in value to many fiat currencies.

Now you might ask if a bitcoin economy is useful or if we should support or oppose it, and of course all bankers will oppose it. Now of course there's 2 reasons for that. They may personally believe or not believe this is a good idea, but keep in mind that most are intelligent enough to understand that their livelihoods depend on bitcoin not growing too large.

Personally I think bitcoin is a very typical early market currency. It is a "gold standard" and it'll crash, for similar reasons the gold standard crashed. Ironically, because bitcoin is a criminals currency, people seem to be very reluctant to actually store value in bitcoin, and this is currently a great strength of bitcoin the currency. There is no other currency where the entire money supply circulates every 2 month (e.g. that's ~12 times as fast as the US dollar), and that's a lower bound in the bitcoin case and an upper bound in the US dollar case, to that factor could and should be larger.