Yesterday the mempool cleared, an event I didn't believe I'd see again (discussion 1, discussion 2), given the current moment: ordinals, Trump, 100k, all of it. This hit right as I was digging into some big-picture questions about what could make btc an enduring money-like-thing in the long-term. It's easy to get lost in the current moment, forget that the game is way longer than you think. (And also shorter, but that's a different topic.)
One of the SN "similar post" suggestions was this one. I missed it at the time, but it seems exactly right: if btc is going to survive at all, and do what it can potentially do in the world, we are vastly, stupidly early. 16 years later, people all over the entire earth aren't even using the fucking chain intensely enough to fill up blocks at 1 sat/vb, even after the year we've had. And some number of SN people have not set up non-custodial LN wallets, even after all the sound and fury leading up to it. The principal use case, at scale, seems to be to hold paper bitcoin, and do nothing with it.
That's either a deeply optimistic thought, or a deeply pessimistic one.