That's not really the paradox behind Bitcoin and doesn't get to the root cause of the problem. The real paradox is - as Bitcoin is adopted by more people, the transaction fees goes up and the network takes longer to process the increased levels of transactions while also burning a lot more electricity than comparative payment networks.
The burning of electricity is debatable, if the price doesn't go up enough to make miners add more gear fees alone will not be able to make such a dent that will trigger a lot more power usage. Besides, the halving will take care every 4 years of a doubling in price, so at one point the consumption will be caped, by price, by ROI as the length grows, and by the prices in electricity.
Besides the fees can be bypassed with LN, and if you look right now at the chain, the fees are not the problem.
As for the paradox itself, it resembles what I've always said:
Yeah, just like the electric car dilemma.
You don't buy a car because there are no charging stations and there are no charging stations because people don't buy electric cars.
If poeple don't want to spend their coins merchants will not offer the solution for 1 client a month.
Merchants cannot accept Bitcoin legally if their government does not accept it as legal tender. A lot of these merchants are doing this via Payment processors to bypass these restrictions.
Just have a look at what happened in El Salvador when their government accepted Bitcoin as legal tender.... the Merchants quickly started to accept Bitcoin as a payment option... even the large food chains like Mc Donald and Burger King.
This is just wrong, there are merchants accepting bitcoins as payment all over Europe and bitcoin is not legal tender here.
Besides those merchants were not accepting bitcoin because they wanted to but because under the law of Salvador you must accept everything that is legal tender. Merchants in the US for example don't have this obligation.
Speaking of Salvador, has anyone any data on transactions made by day via that Chiva wallet?