> I don't think I have been wrong? Like I said, the ability to actually buy stuff with Bitcoin is in decline. I'd change my mind if I saw evidence of increasing Bitcoin adoption in the real economy.
Based on what evidence exactly? Consider that an entire nation state has since adopted it as its national currency, along the USD in the last 3 years; that means it works in parallel with the USD. Not to mention that merchant adoption, while as you said may be in decline (citation needed), what you have instead is more and more commerce being dealt with on LN: as was always intended due to network bloat.
Listen, I get HN is entirely averse to BItcoin at this point (look at my post histpory, I prove it time and time again it's based on stuborness rather than fact), what I fail to understand is why you persist in this folly in thiking becasue it doesn't work for YOU, you assume no one else has any use for it.
Again, most here who work in tech are not c-level corps or founders so you don't understand very much about the narrow mechanics of day to day because you are not rewarded for doing so, and quite frankly are paid very well for your ignorance on these matters.
But try to understand that if even China has backed off with Hong Kong dealing with BTC, you have to come to terms with the fact that adoption in trackable and metric based analytics are out the window at this point. Exchanges are one way to track transaction volume and that has been as healthy (perhaps more so, I don't know I'm not a trader) than it was 5-6 years ago. I know this because I was there, helping scale this tech and giving it more usecases that even it's most ardent proponents couldn't see and used similar points of view as you are making now (hence USAF and it's MANY forks before that).
You are wrong, and the fact that you can't even admit that possibility is what makes your point even more invalid because you refuse to see a contrary POV.