Bitcoin Uncertainty and Privacy

There is a lot of uncertainty about the future of bitcoin. Some investors say it is going to pump because of the brand recognition, others, especially bitcoin cash fans, consider that bitcoin legacy has no utility. The first round of futures has expired with bears taking over the market. With bitcoin market cap under 35 percent, the future seems more uncertain.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-futures-cboe/shorts-on-top-as-january-cboe-bitcoin-futures-settle-idUSKBN1F62JA
While advocates imagined bitcoin to be used as a universal alternative currency, where you could quickly buy a cup of coffee, those days those far gone. With the lack of Segwit adoption and advent of huge fees and slow transactions the only viable use is a store of value and even that is threatened by halving value from the previous 20k. However, if we remember how bitcoin was initially used - it was as internet settlement where privacy mattered. Specifically illicit transactions for illicit substances. While silk road was repeatedly shut down, it recovered many times and is still accepting bitcoin. Once users understood that bitcoin does not guarantee privacy due to all transactions being public, they started using additional measures such as bitcoin mixers, where multiple buyers have their bitcoin mixed together before settling with multiple sellers making it difficult to track who bought what.
However, even this illegal use is being threatened by SilkRoad adding of new payment methods. From January they plan to accept LTC, XMR and ETH in addition to BTC. From those coins only XMR has embedded privacy features, however, even that one is not using a TOR protocol which the Silkroad uses to hide users IP addresses. Considering another cryptocurrency VERGE has TOR embedded as well as has released a new WRAITH protocol, making it impossible for third parties to snoop on transactions which have TOR enabled, it could be a perfect fit for its illicit use. I will further investigate the use to VERGE and the ease of use of the WRAITH protocol, just for academic curiosity :).
As such in 2018 it will be interesting to see if BTC adjusts to the reasonable expectations of its utility, or will it continue to soar just due to brand recognition, weather XMR will rise due to illicit use and if XVG will be adopted for illicit transactions.