Originally written in 2011 (?) and last updated in 2018. This is a pretty good discussion on the idea that Bitcoin is a "worse is better" idea and kind of asking why it wasn't created earlier.

There's a section underneath objecting to the claim, giving some reasons like ideological beliefs, obscurity etc. were the reasons why Bitcoin wasn't adopted faster.

I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea that cultural/ideological beliefs stop a lot of adoption. There's a lot of people breathlessly talking about how Bitcoin doesn't solve any real problems, is a MLM or Ponzi scheme and how it's only major use case is by criminals. I think this idea is mostly backed by people who don't understand how hard it is to get banked while poor and have a kind of "it works for me mentality" about our current banking system. For them, there's no real need for a digital currency like Bitcoin, so they dismiss it offhand. Same with the "criminal" aspect. On one hand they talk about fiat money is necessary and then look the other way when the government chokes the money supply from a whistleblower news organization to silence them.

I also think that dismissing the engineering, mathematical and accessibility of the technology shouldn't be underestimated. Gwern talks about how Proof-of-Work was discovered in the 1990s as a counter-spam technique yet I don't know of a single place that actually uses that technology. Most current anti-spam is captcha related or credential related (email, bank account, etc.). The engineering is intricate and, while "boring", requires some finesse to put the pieces together in the right order to make a system.

But the accessibility is still the major barrier to entry. How many people are actually running full nodes? 10k+? How many people are mining? How hard is it to actually get a node running at a reasonable cost? I've been trying for a few months and I'm still struggling with getting a node off the ground. We're still living in the dark ages of bandwidth and transferring 350Gb+ of data is still a massive undertaking for many people.

Anyway, good article, but seems kind of dismissive in terms of the difficulty of spreading new ideas, good or bad, how difficult it actually is to propagate an idea and Bitcoin's innovation.