People may know the name bitcoin, but trust me - they know less than nothing about it (because the sum of what they know correctly and what they know incorrectly is on the negative side).
From what I can tell the general public thinks Bitcoin is internet money, a bubble, a Ponzi scheme, and something people buy drugs with, in that order of frequency. Outside of tech circles, I haven't met anyone who had the slightest clue about what's going on under the hood.
This is always true for complicated technical things. How many people can really accurately explain what “The Cloud” is? Wouldn’t you say the mainstream public is aware of “the cloud”.
I guess my original post doesn’t really discredit the main point being made which is that people aren’t aware of Butcoin’s scaling issues. I agree with that.
I do think it’s interesting that the bubble crashed once Bitcoin as a general concept was no longer really new for anyone.