In Marketing 101, the chicken-and-egg problem is an example of what to NOT do.
Bitcoin already solved the chicken-and-egg problem. Have you been in a coma since 2011, when Bitcoin obviously started rapidly taking over the world?
Because the TPTB used their mainstream media to promote it. Not because as you asserted that eventually users learn to become ideological after the discovery and learning about the evils of fiat.
You are delusional if you assert you are where you are today without the mainstream media and the elite promoting Bitcoin (in their usual Good Cop, Bad Cop hegelian methodology where they both restrict and promote simultaneously as they do for drugs).
You are a noob and so can be forgiven/educated on what actually happened:
E-cash had a widespread ideological following since the days of William Gibson and Extropy magazine (1990s). Unnoticed, it gestated in the cypherpunk lists...
Decades later, Bitcoin first gained mainstream exposure via the Streisand Effect, when some grandstanding banker-whore Senator (Schumer) held a press conference where his intern or grandson loaded Silk Road up on a laptop to give the press some Shock Horror jollies.
Silk Road worked splendidly as an actual Amazon for drugs, to the delight of thousands of 20-30 somethings who ignore any MSM beyond Daily Show, Gawker, and Conde Naste organs like Reddit and Wired (who mostly regurgitated FUD along the lines of 'Is Bitcoin a Ponzi Scheme for Terrorists?')
TPTB and their VC flunkies came late to the party. As did you. It was much cooler before all the lamers showed up...
you can't call me a noob. and you probably came after me.
what you're missing is that Bitcoin is money born from the internet, by the internet, and for the internet. it works on the same principles; it can route around damage. and a key tenet of it's ability to do that is that it is located widely in different jurisdictions round the globe. even if the US shutdown the internet, it would survive worldwide and the US would be back groveling in a few days wanting to get back on. especially after pressure from the financial institutions.
Bitcoin needs to have the same architecture and be spread worldwide to all corners of the Earth for maximum self preservation. it can't do that if we hamstring it where it is now with just 1MB. any idiot can see that.
you want it to be a SOV. it has the potential to do that. but it won't happen if you force all tx's offchain to centralized entities, SC's included, that can shut anyone's acct down. this requires increasing the block size. all the core devs "say" they want that but they've been dragging their feet for 3y.
as for digital gold, it won't happen if only 0.001% of the global population ever hears about it, let alone uses it. an African kid will never accept Bitcoin as digital gold as he can't touch it, feel it, carry it in his pocket, weigh it, or wear it. thus, he will need to be able to transact with it and be able to analyze that it does in fact not increase in supply. we know that he will have the tools to do this as fiber optic lines are being laid across Africa as we speak. $10 Android phones are now available and soon 21 and phone makers look prepared to practically give away mining phones to grab market share. but they have to be able to transact with Bitcoin in a reliable, cheap manner. only then will they appreciate Bitcoin as a gold substitute.