Oddbean

Just as in any other system, it is difficult to impossible to make top-down progress. You cannot appeal to the current authority and hope your new thing makes its way down to the rest of society. It is always a bottom-up approach. This is also how new tech grows and how new financial startups grow. They tackle one area, and build up over time. I think bitcoin can take one of two paths: investment angle which will just take a long time because as you said, most people dont even invest. The other approach is grassroots adoption starting with small shops, and moving to medium sized businesses. When Visa wanted to grow their credit card business, they just shipped a ton of cards to people. They didn't set up offices and ask people to come in to pick one up, or to look through a magazine to order one. They just shipped them, no permission needed. When people start adopting bitcoin on an individual level and then on a business level, that's when it will start gaining mainstream recognition. Then larger businesses will be forced to accept it or lose business. Business only cares about business, it could care less if it's bitcoin or anything else they accept as long as it translates to profits. So.. yeah.. we have to spend it, but we also have to teach it. And all along the way we need to keep improving tools to make it easier. This is why I was initially and still am very bullish on Nostr. Because we can make bitcoin the currency of the internet without even telling people it's bitcoin. A zap is a zap. Of course the same has to be done in the physical world and I see more of that happening. The internet is the natural starting point for this sort of thing so we can embrace it and build out applications that are interesting beyond payments that just so happen to use bitcoin under the hood. It's all challenging and a bit discouraging at times, but this is how it would always be when people don't see a need for something when they don't recognize the problem. It'll shape up over time for people who need it first, and then others will hopefully take notice. It's also entirely possible that bitcoin takes decades longer to fully monetize - beyond our lifetimes and we may never see the day where it is mainstream. Maybe even beyond the lifetime of our children. I'm fully prepared for this though I will do what I can to get it into more people's hands faster... why wait?