I have always believed that Bitcoin (like other revolutionary tech internet, cellphones, electricity, analog telephone, social media, etc) is on a 10 to 20 year path towards mainstream adoption. I said that two years ago and some people thought I was insane. They thought (or claimed to think
) that Bitcoin would be bigger than PayPal and the exchange rate north of $100 by now.
Bitcoin is very revolutionary in lots of different ways and that slows adoption.
a) It is decentralizing a concept most people assume "MUST" be centralized. It takes a while before someone realizes that "money" can be decentralized.
b) It is complicated. Without at least a basic understanding of cryptography (abstract) it is impossible to describe how Bitcoin works. So either people need to believe in it based no pure faith or spend a couple hours (or weeks) educating themselves. For most people it is easier to just take the faith route but that takes longer. If Bitcoin is still around in 20 years and still acting a store of value most people will never understand exactly how it works they will just accept that it does.
c) It puts 100% of responsibility on the user. Every other system gives users the ability to unload responsibility onto others. This is likely why we saw so many things like mybitcoin and pirate nonsense. People are use to the escape hatch and there isn't one in Bitcoin. This means mainstream adoption will require both advanced hardware wallets (i.e. formatting hard drive and not losing $100,000 because you have no backup) and a change in culture (i.e. not giving $5M to a guy named "Pirate" who offers Ponzi like interest rates but promises without any proof that it isn't a ponzi) to protect users from themselves.
d) Bitcoin is so new it is hard to quantity. For example FinCEN hasn't declared Bitcoin money or even made a definitive ruling that it is a "money substitute". Obviously that is the very FIRST step. You need to define something before you can start to regulate it. You can't regulate the nebulous. For example there are no laws about "meaness". There may be laws about stalking or cyber bullying but not something as vague as "being mean". FinCEN hasn't even gotten that far yet simply because Bitcoin is so radically different it doesn't fit into any of the nice boxes the government has already created. When new products and services come out the government usually looks to figure out which box is the closest fit. Is this a "security", a "commodity", "stored value" (now called prepaid access), a "foreign currency". Bitcoin is similar to all of those but doesn't fit into any of those boxes.
