Fifteen years is an eye blink in the grand scheme of things.
Let’s face it: Bitcoin is difficult to understand and aims to replace gold, at minimum.
Gold took probably a few thousand years to be understood and served as a good store of value for a few thousand years thereafter. We cannot expect Bitcoin to evolve so quickly. It will take time to embrace this paradigm shift.
However, today we live in an age when information is available to anyone who has internet/TV or reads newspapers regularly - so we can assume that at least 50% of people in the world have heard of something called Bitcoin. I think it's hard to compare BTC and gold in terms of how people perceive them, because I've often come across a lot of confusion from those who simply don't understand the concept of something that's not tangible compared to gold that you can hold in your hands.
A concrete example from my country perhaps describes it best - because a few years ago, in an attempt to get hold of the money that ordinary people keep in the bank, my government started issuing government bonds - and regardless of the relatively low interest rates (still higher than the banks offer), billions of euros started pouring into the state coffers, and this is still happening today. When ordinary people are asked why they invest in this way, the most common answer is that there is nothing better (safer) on the market.
Maybe it's just that people like to play it safe, or that they still think that BTC is some kind of internet scam or something that criminals use to launder money. Anyway, I hope it won't take thousands of years for people to understand what Bitcoin is, because I'm not very optimistic about such a distant future.
