The amazing bull market of 2017 was fueled by wild optimism and adoption. People in the space were ready to rock. Then this optimism was massively interrupted by a terrible realization. Bitcoin would not scale.
It stopped behaving like BTC and started becoming more expensive and slower than regular credit cards. To use street parlance, it sucked. It was an amazing thing to have happened.
It was a true calamity. And to top it off, it was completely the fault of the guardians of the code. When the code would not adapt to broader use, the optimism turned to pessimism and
we experienced a huge setback.
Incredibly, some people with the keys to the kingdom of BTC actually came to imagine that they could develop a digital money without an efficient,
consumer-focussed use case. They drove a wedge between two functions: store of value and medium of exchange. This is not how much work. One function depends on the other.
