And what if the first impression of millions of mainstream potential investors in Bitcoin is that it's just a super-volatile asset that only seems to go down in price?
In the whitepaper, Bitcoin is not an investment asset.
Yes, that's true. But lots of technologies were made for one reason only to be used for another reason.
Bitcoin is simply not viable as a mainstream means of payment. There's no chance it can scale to even 1/10,000 of the price-performance necessary to take on worldwide credit card volume for instance.
Today, in actual fact, Bitcoin is used mostly as an investment asset, and it offers no advantages over other technologies for any other purpose.