Can any of you permabears actually imagine a 'worldwide adoption' scenario and how that might unfold?
No. The blockchain can handle
2.7 transactions per second. Meanwhile, Visa and Mastercard are handling millions of transactions per second. Bitcoin offers no security and no benefit for the average consumer. It's extremely slow, expensive, unstable, unreliable, cumbersome, easy to steal, and user-unfriendly. Were it to be adopted on a really large scale, hypothetically speaking, the blockchain would reach a size of 100TB and beyond within days, making storage impossible. It's simply not scaled to handle actual real world use. It's scaled to be a small experiment among a couple hundred crypto geeks.
Speculative value can still increase, of course, even if the blockchain tech has no potential for real world use. But the only real value of Bitcoin lies in its use as a small scale currency among a marginal group of drug addicts and child pornographers on the deep web. The price will eventually go to the single digit range to reflect that fact, even if a new Willybot or Markus might pump the price briefly up to $300 before that happens.
Bitcoin had its fifteen minutes of fame. It's not something the average Joe needs or wants, and the price development is simply a reflection of that fact.
This is reality. Now, that's not to say that things can't be streamlined in the future, but that would require consensus among many parties and a total overhaul of the infrastructure. I think that is unrealistic. My hunch is many of the Bitcoin venture capitalists were unaware of these limitations. They're wising up. A bit too much of the bandwagonism and too little quantitative analysis. How they manage to unwind their investments will be interesting.
Also, this doesn't even address the serious tax implications which come from using Bitcoins, since the IRS views them as capital, not currency. Now that is one huge cluterfuck of a problem.