I don't know about "grim" truth, but it's certainly the truth.
Bitcoin's original purpose was to provide a means of numerically-delineated transactions for people who could not safely use the normal means to do so, e.g. bank transactions, credit cards, and so on.
The audience for this product might be
very enthusiastic, but it is also
very small. Most people are fine with transactions that governments can track and scrutinize if they have a proper reason. Most people don't think they are criminals, or don't want to tangle with their government, or at very least, don't think the government would be interested enough in
them that they need to go out of their way to use a special system of value transfer that is slower, more expensive, and more risky than mainstream means.
As Bitcoin became more popular to use by criminals, authorities discovered what was obvious from the beginning: that Bitcoin's
public ledger makes it mostly useless, at least by itself, for criminals doing crimes.
Hence Bitcoin was left without it's original purpose starting about 10 years ago.
But nobody cared about that, because
Bitcoin's original purpose was long since abandoned and instead it took on a new purpose: speculation instrument. And it turns out that people absolutely
love a product that can be used for speculation. There are literally millions of such products available in the world, including some really big ones. And today, Bitcoin may be the world's
biggest speculation instrument that is "pure" in the sense that it has no other practical purpose besides speculation that isn't better served by some other product (in other words, while you
can transact with Bitcoin, it's ridiculously expensive--like saying you can use hundred dollar bills to light your stove).
Blockchain was
never meant to enable a worldwide mainstream payment system. Never. The architecture absolutely prevents anything close to the scale necessary--Bitcoin was
intentionally designed to be slow and expensive (e.g. PoW).
I am confident there will be a ubiquitous digital currency that will replace much of the world's daily physical cash transactions, but it will not be based on the blockchain architecture. Instead, it will be an architecture
specifcally designed to handle the world's daily transactions--millions of transactions per second, tens of billions per day.
Bitcoin and other cryptos will keep their place as speculation instruments, and may well be around forever in that capacity. There's nothing wrong with speculation and humans have been doing it since their time began.
