I thought of posting this as a comment to this post by @anon, but I thought of writing a full post for visibility. Kindly read that post first to make sense of this post, since essentially, this is a comment.

I sympathise with you, but also sense some undue frustration and bias in the post.

First off, not entire western Europe is Lugano or Arnheim. There are spots of the US (Austin, Miami, Tampa) and Canada (Vancouver) where you have decent merchant adoption, and it is growing.

To the extent you think Europe has bigger adoption, I would venture (you might even say speculate) two possible reasons

• Before Trump's tariff tantrum, both GBP and Euro were on a long term decline (against the USD) since the 2007-08 crisis. Much as we yell about the currency debasement by the Federal reserve, it might have stung more on that side of the pond.
• The currency landscape in Europe (even with the Eurozone covering a good part of it) is quite fragmented and a lot of trade happens with/within the Nordics (each having its own currency), UK, Switzerland. Even EU members of eastern Europe have their own currencies. This incentivises a marginally greater push towards a state-neutral (more universal) medium of exchange, and what's better than Bitcoin? Imagine if Florida had a different money than Texas.

As for Bitcoin going mainstream, I gave it some thought, and retail merchant adoption is the least of my concern/metric. I don't really care that much whether my next door ice-cream seller takes Sats (yet). He will, when the time comes. And he will regret why did not he do it sooner. But he is too small a fish anyway.

What I am trying to figure out, is how Bitcoin can penetrate the market for global trade settlement and dethrone Swift.

That is the plumbing of global finance, that is how the big capital flow happens, that is where the big guys (JP Morgan, HSBC to some punny bank in Africa) play. It is the Business-to-Business (B2B) settlement where very slow (but encouraging) change is happening. It is on the margin, on the fringe...but we all know the mantra-slowly, then suddenly.

What do I mean by B2B? Example: Emirates (the middle eastern Airlines), will accept Sats for ticket booking next year. Emaraat (an oil giant, also based in the UAE) already happily takes Sats. And Emaraat is likely also one of the suppliers of Emirates itself (those Boeing birds are nothing if not giant gas guzzlers), so imagine they decide do their quarterly settlement (worth may be 5000 BTC or more) in Bitcoin instead? I can totally see that happening in five years. Individually, both are adopting Sats in their own business, and only a matter of time before they figure they can get rid of the obsolete Swift rails.

And not just the future, even Chinese and Russian companies are starting to use BTC for offshore settlement (escaping Swift sanction or surveillance). Obviously, there is a lot of hush-hush around the specifics but bilateral corridors are developing in specific geographies and industries around BTC settlement. I did some study around this topic, and can potentially write a short essay around it, but this really is the most interesting area of BTC adoption one should look out for. Borderless, universal, state-neutral settlement layer...would not any big corporation supplying real commodity/service jump at it, unless the corporation itself is the gatekeeper of money (imagine JP Morgan, for example)? What still needs to happen is broader acceptability as an asset worth HODLing!

I wish someone like Saifedean Ammous would take a deeper look at this aspect of Bitcoin adoption (in addition to textbook economic theory, which, obviously, has its own value) and write/tell us more about how they see it. In fact, the whole eco-system of trade settlement/line-of-credit (denominated with Bitcoin and some hedge) and escrowing is an area ripe for innovation and even Strategy can become a big player here by contributing to the rails and collecting some fees (replacing the traditional banks). I bet a few Sats that the thought occurred in Saylor's mind.