Bitcoin is meant to be an investment, not a mainstream currency that is meant to be used everyday. You don't buy groceries with bitcoin since it isn't ready to be used as a mainstream currency. We, the community are still working out the kinks to it.
I'd like to see where this is stated, even if indirectly, in the original whitepaper.
If you think about it, the block chain doesn't encourage daily spending. The way bitcoin was made, with the miners encouraged what you said, greed.
As block rewards keep decreasing, the view of looking at bitcoin as an everyday currency decreases, since to make up for the lost block rewards, miner fees would have to be increased. This makes bitcoin useless for smaller dust transaction fees, and encourages people to just hold bitcoin as an investment.
It took me about 20 min to write...all of that has been swirling in my head for years. This is just the first time I put it all down in one place. Thanks for the props. While you have a point that even if it's not stated explicitly on the white paper, there needs to be daily spending for the average person to trust it, therefore propelling it into the stratosphere. If the average consumer sees it as an "investment", BTC will be rendered to the same status as pork bellies in the next 2-3 years.