Throughout the last year we have been inundated with use cases focused on "blockchain 2.0" technologies. The decentralized ledger being such a powerful idea, it is expectable that people would come up with such an overwhelming number of different use cases.
This, I believe, has lead to a distraction from the true and original value proposition of Bitcoin : a better form of money.
This phenomenon is easily observable. It has in fact become arguably the primary talking point of Bitcoin in the mainstream :
"The blockchain is the real innovation"
"Bitcoin is more than just money"
"bitcoin is cool, but Bitcoin is the real deal"
If you haven't watched this video yet, I cannot recommend it enough :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lqqNU3fQs#t=850First, Wences provides a remarkably insightful run down of the history of money and exactly what it represents in our society.
Then, from 13:00 on, he presents his opinion about the 3 stages of growth of Bitcoin.
This is what I want to focus on because I find his account to be one of the most credible and honest explanation of the dynamics at stake in Bitcoin's growth.
Bottom line is : little to no one is buying Bitcoin to use as a currency. Bitcoin's store of value attributes is the reason we have gotten to where we are and it will remain, for awhile, the use case that will drive Bitcoin forward.
For this reason, it is disingenuous to point to Bitcoin's "inability" to catch on as a currency as a reason for its failure.
His analogy to email, while not particularly novel is very much correct. When only a couple of millions of people had access to email, it seemed far fetched to expect everyone to use it a method of communication. It remained far more convenient to use the phone or regular snail mail. It is only when everyone in your network had email did it become a prevalent method of communication.
"I think that something the Bitcoin community has to be honest about, at least amongst ourselves is what Bitcoin is about today and what we would like it to be. Sometimes we make it look like it's about things we want it to be in the future. The truth is when we look at the volume of people buying the "stock" of Bitcoin and the flow of people buying their first bitcoin. It's mostly about buying & holding. It's totally fine, it's a decent use case. It's not a two-sided market : for me to buy & hold it doesn't require a counterparty to accept Bitcoin. I simply have to agree to a price that someone is selling. It has been working for 3 years and I think we can depend on that. It's not some theory, some hypothesis, it's working and it can keep working"
Bitcoin will continue to grow organically with the help of its network effect and its value as a speculative store of value. Let's not put the cart before the horse people. Keep your eyes on the prize
He's just trying to lure in new suckers. I laughed so hard at "bitcoin standard" and billion users worldwide, what a bunch of bs and fairy tales. You can only dream that. Yeah, wall street, general population and governments can't wait to jump in late in a expensive, volatile, unregulated, obscure currency which is owned by early miners and geeks who got it cheap.
This is basically a sales pitch, with intention to make you feel good about your investment, and to convince new investors to join and continue inflating this speculative bubble.
. Then all of a sudden, these merchants are getting even more savings that they can pass on to the customer in even better deals, helping them gain an even greater share of their market. 
