Nothing wrong with using Bitcoin as an investment, ETFs, entities besides individuals owning Bitcoin. That's all natural because Bitcoin is money.
But for sure it would be good if we could development a much larger ecosystem of decentralized exchanges. The ones I know of have almost no volume compared to crypto exchanges and so you don't get good prices on them. Also they are naturally harder to use.
I think getting a DEX movement going and getting people on LN is the way to go.
LN allows payment to be cheap and instant, which is the only way payments are going to get popular. Even if at first its just used how Venmo is used to pass money between friends, rather than pay at merchants which requires merchant adoption. Though taxes are of course a problem if you're passing bitcoin between friends that's all taxable. Though it'd be a a pretty small use of bitcoin (not like selling lots of bitcoin) and the IRS wouldn't even be able to track it so maybe that's the sort of thing that could slide under the table without any real issues, sorta like when workers get paid in cash.
And then if DEXes could get popular enough to get real volume their prices wouldn't be so far away from the spot price and they'd become more useful. And then you can keep your bitcoin privacy. But its hard to get to that point because crypto exchanges are just so much easier to use.
Realistically I think building p2p connections happens at the local level. There are small communities in various places in the world who regularly use Bitcoin because they have a weak currency or don't have easy access to digital banking services and stuff like that, so it benefits everyone in the community to use Bitcoin. I think p2p usage gradually spreads out from those places to encompass a wider and wider net. The average person in a first world country and lots of non-first world countries don't have a huge need for p2p payments. For those populations growing one's wealth and wealth sovereignty I think are currently the main use cases. Though of course eventually being able to easily spend the wealth, including in p2p ways rather than just customer-merchant ways, would be ideal.
I feel we over expected too much from bitcoin even if it has done doing fine in the past 13 years, fait has been around for more than a century now and bitcoin is just 14 years in, we can't tell how the next 29 years would be, scalability might be problem of the past and gas fees would get wven lower and affordable for people to use for daily transactions.
And for a innovation still very young bitcoin has been doing fine, not only has it proved to be a better money than all fait currency, but I has withstood so many challenges from government and many negative news that affected it socially like at the time of mt gox hack and so many early hacking that bitcoin faced at a early stage.
Bitcoin might also well not achieve scalability and that's why alt coins exist to back it up in some areas, so many other alts can be used for daily transactions with low gas fees, so this is still an issue for someone new to bitcoin and doesn't know his way around.
Bitcoin can only be approached as an investment cause that is the only working sector now, and to show that digital currency might well be the next phase of innovation in the economy, in 5 years from now I'm speculating counties having their own digital currency to help fix inflation of their local currency.
Im just sure we are making progress is quite goo early to be judging bitcoin.
By "invulnerable", I don't mean "always going up". I mean that it does not come with the aforementioned drawbacks of gold, stocks, real estate etc. That's why I consider it superior in terms of an instrument to put your savings to.
Bitcoin is also well reaching that sage of drawbacks, just imagine all this big companies has well bough quite the amount of the total supply of bitcoin which I see as their plan, dont you think they would have power to manipulate price of bitcoin, just imagine what one massive selling from any big companies now or ETF would do to bitcoin price now, a major bear spike can just be created instantly.
I feel every financial or investment asset starts out fine untill someone became too power to be able to control it and this is the inevitable future of bitcoin if big players are well in control of most of it.
What power does retail investors have unless to hold their bitcoin safely and wait, we can't even challenge anyone in buying, and if they all decide to sell now, bitcoin price to the gutters, so I think bitcoin also has those invulnerabilities mention, just we can't see it coming yet.