Paradigms
One way to think about when big things change -- when a paradigm shifts, as Kuhn would put it -- is when the existing paradigm accrues enough damage from how it mismatches the world (this is obvious) but also when there's something new that can account for those errors better than the existing paradigm (this is not obvious to most people).
In other words, it's not enough for the Current Thing to be broken; a suitable replacement must also be waiting in the wings. Or, as Carlota Perez would have it, the infrastructure for the New Thing has to be sufficiently built out:
Two decades after the big-bang of the Age of Steel, profound changes had to be made again. The ‘belle époque’ based on the unleashing of the full potential of the third paradigm, with its truly international markets, required world-wide regulation (from the general acceptance of the London-based Gold Standard to universal agreements on measurement, patents, insurance, transport, communications and shipping practices), while the structural changes in production, including the growth of important science-related industries had to be facilitated by deep educational reforms and social legislation.
More briefly: a lot of stuff had to be in place before the Age of Steel could take off, despite the importance and obviousness of steel's potential benefits.
It's also important to note that even if this thing waiting in the wings is clearly and demonstrably superior in regard to a really high-stakes issue, that alone isn't enough. A sad illustration of this is that a dude named Ignaz Semelweis figured out that having doctors wash their hands when they delivered babies reduced maternal mortality drastically. He demonstrated it empirically. But handwashing wasn't standard practice, people didn't understand why it worked, and doctors felt that it offended their dignity, for reasons that I've never understood exactly.
What do you think happened when Semelweis wasn't in charge anymore?
The director who took over from Semmelweis at his last clinic stopped the practice of handwashing. Maternal mortality rates immediately jumped sixfold.
[...]
The virtual elimination of childbed fever happened not because of Semmelweis’s contributions, but instead thanks to Louis Pasteur’s. Why? Because Pasteur changed not just a procedure, but an entire science. In the 1860s, he conducted a set of experiments that demonstrated to physicians not only that Semmelweis had been right, but why he had been right. [2]
Truth isn't enough, even when it's easily demonstrated and replicated. A slew of social forces have to be aligned, too.
A thought experiment
So this has got me thinking: what is the best possible reasonable scenario[1] for btc to be maximally successful ten years from now? At first I was going to define what maximally successful meant, but upon further review I'll leave it unspecified, so you can tell me what it means to you.
Once you've answered that, I'm curious about the converse, too: what's the worst possible reasonable scenario that would prevent bitcoin's success in ten years?
Notes
[1] I use reasonable scenario here to mean: something that could plausibly happen outside of your hopium-derived fantasies.
[2] The story of Semelweis vs Pasteur has been covered in a bunch of places, but I got this quote from this unlikely source.
BPRS
WPRS