[esja]

I was an early adopter and I don’t recall anyone saying the internet was bad for the environment, or that it couldn’t scale. Quite the opposite actually! And there was very little fraud or criminality - most new applications and ideas were genuinely innovative and immediately and obviously beneficial. Yea the financial hype took over in the late nineties but the fundamentals were always sound and the potential was obvious. And over time that potential grew, it didn’t shrink like it has for cryptocurrency.

[doomroot]

Is a sovereign nation adopting bitcoin as a payment method an example of Bitcoin’s shrinking potential?

[esja]

Actually, yes. It's had almost 13 years to prove itself as a store of value, medium of exchange, and/or unit of account. It has failed to do that in any functioning economy because despite all the hype, it's remained worse than what we already have.

The fact that after all this time proponents are celebrating it being made legal tender in a tiny dysfunctional country is a very good sign of how the horizons have narrowed. After 13 years of the web no arguments about "potential" were even needed - the evidence was embedded in all our lives.