[acdha]

> They keep insisting that it's all a joke, and yet every single day the level of adoption keeps on increasing.

Do you have a citation for that claim? The people hoping to get rich quick in the space are active but there's almost no usage by the general populace.

> I feel like I'm watching the internet be born again.

The early internet had huge barriers to adoption (computers were expensive, network connections were expensive and glacially slow), but each phase of expansion had immediate popular uses. As an example, the web was ~1990, NCSA Mosaic came out in 1993 (Netscape was 1994) and by 1995 it was a household term with rapidly growing personal, business, and government usage for a wide range of tasks. In the earlier era, things were more limited due to connectivity issues but there were still substantial numbers of people using email, usenet, FTP, etc.

In contrast, Bitcoin has been out for 11 years, didn't have any of the barriers to adoption like the early internet, but if it disappeared tomorrow almost nobody outside of the industry would have any interruption in their lives.