Insight on technology adoption...
http://www.slideshare.net/louadi/07-technology-adoption-life-cycle-2014and..
http://www.lenvlahos.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/AdoptionCurve-crop.jpgI'm not sure we're even into the "early adopter" phase yet really.
Thinking of all the tech I've witnessed adoption of over the last 3 decades, what comes closest to bitcoin, seems to me to be MP3s, and forget napster and iTunes for a moment, they are not the be-all and end-all of MP3 history....
I can't find particularly good references for this, going on what I remember. Geeks invented mp3 compression of audio circa 1995ish and saw that it was good. Storage and bandwidth was highly expensive, or less obtanium, and MP3s allowed a somewhere around twentyfold reduction in time required to download or space required to store audio. At first it was almost a pure geek thing, you had to find a player, spend hours on slowass Pentium MMX or so CPUs ripping and converting, or use search-foo skills on the internet (no google yet) to find any. Then as geeks found out how "good" this format was in terms of being able to put hundreds of songs on a HDD and have them play instantly, in whatever order you wanted, and not having to mess about with a stack of CDs, word began to spread and the more hip tech aware people were into this too.
Now the music industry were the incumbents here, the proverbial 800lb gorilla, and they were fully invested in physical media. By '97 or '98 the geeks and hip to tech were petitioning them, "Look how great this shit is, sell your stuff like this." and got a big fat "No way in hell, and by the way stop stealing our shit, we'll sue you if you so much as back up your own CDs." in return, no acknowlegment even that at the time it was equivalent to personal use mix tapes or anything, they just flat out denied the tech and started working to get it banned completely. By this time, the format was really starting to gain traction and a handful of the first hardware mp3 players were produced, I think that newly available cheaper lower power flash memory synergized with this, but it was doable, so it was done.
This is about where we've got to with bitcoin I think, banks are saying "No way, no how, should be illegal" and we've got the first crop of hardware wallets appearing whereas in the past you had to have a specialist program on your computer.
AFTER the above, the filesharing movement took off, practically in response to and in direct defiance of music industry stance on MP3s, it was a case of "Well fuck you then, we'll get them another way, we'll distribute them ourselves" piracy had always been around,, but now it was a more mainstream endeavor, there was a better value product than the music industry was offering, you could do more with it, it was more portable, you could transfer it faster. Here entereth Napster, who industrialised file sharing. Then the music industry began to fight seriously, they were not going to stand for this upstart. Napster was taken down finally, but 3 more filesharing systems had sprung up in the meantime, along with the decentralised bittorrent gaining popularity. Finally they began getting a clue that this might be a fight that they would have to give ground on somewhere... this laid the ground for the partnership with Apple and iTunes, (Others were Zune etc)
Anyway, in terms of how that analogy to bitcoin works, I think we are still pre-Napster right now, we've got that fight to come, then when we win that, the real mass adoption "iTunes" phase.
