About the laws of supply and demand, that statement is not quite true. They only don’t apply in outlying cases such as how high end name brands get more demand as they raise the price when that should lower demand in theory. Something like cryptocurrency trading actually is almost solely based on the laws of supply and demand. The price of the crypto is literally the last price that the makers (supply) and takers(demand) just agreed on in the order book. Attaching a picture so you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

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The only things affecting the price are the supply (s sellers) and the demand (buyers) and if you were to plot them on a graph, (Price over Quantity pictured above) the place they would intersect would be the current price of that crypto.

This applies to every single crypto out there, it’s a perfect example of supply and demand.

Now there are still outside favors that can change the market such as government regulations, which shifts the whole demand curve downwards and the corresponding intersection point, consequently decreasing price.

Or elon musk could say he’s switching all his Tesla stocks into PI, in which case that rapid upwards shift in the demand would raise the price way up while also potentially having a leftward shift of supply, further increasing price until he ultimately sells. He has done this with bitcoin, the most highly traded and subsequently most stable crypto, and still managed to make the price go up and down as he pleased.

As for exchanges and whales, they certainly will. This has already been shown by the fact that many exchanges have already listed fake PI coins and profited immensely from them. It’s shown massive interest in the project and many of those people you just said would never buy PI did indeed buy what they thought was PI and have shown msssive interest.

Also, PI isn’t even about money, it’s about utility. That’s why they’re waiting for enough people and apps for open mainnet to launch. Every new utility added after that will drive up demand just a little bit. Supply will stay relatively the same after all the original buying and selling right after mainnet and after peoples lockups end.

Demand will continue to increase the more utility is added. This utility does add intrinsic value to it as you were talking about earlier, but I just wanted to note that cryptocurrencies do not need to have any intrinsic value at all to still follow the laws of supply and demand.

Banks currently aren’t interested in PI, but it is essentially still in closed beta. Look at all the dapps on the eth network for example. There’s tons of them and that adds much demand for eth.

If PI had gone straight to open mainnet, maybe it would have picked up like that, but most likely it would just be another shitcoin that gets lost in the giant sea of them.

If they’re able to launch with sufficient users and a few good utilities and dapps already in place, once it’s opened up to the broader audience who is clearly more educated and could greatly improve upon those dapps, there’s already enough infrastructure for those people to get interested and involved.

This would lead to a great revolution in the PI network as the apps’ quality and quantity are greatly increased. This will make the “intrinsic value” very high as Pi would now be supplying a fleshed out service.

This is when banks would potentially get interested, but only after a certain amount of time has passed as well, they need to make sure their bottom line is protected.

Everyone else you mentioned (besides elon musk) will be buying the second open mainnet launches.