in the 1990s, the www did nothing for average people either.
I could list problems it solves and opportunities it creates, but it's boring doing that for the hundredth time. You would be correct in saying they do not all exist *yet*. But I'm betting with my wallet that they will within a few years.
The www was invented in what, 1993? 1994? Within a couple years, I was online with an Internet portal, and I was just a snot nosed kid who watched Nickelodeon all day. If I knew about it and was using it within such a short span of time, then obviously it had a significant impact on society. I could go online and find information about anything I wanted almost instantly via Yahoo or Alta Vista.
Bitcoin doesn't solve any problems for average people. If you tell people that it's more secure, then it's a lie, because nobody is backing the funds, and they can be lost or stolen with no course of action for the consumer. You can tell them it saves them on international transaction fees, but it doesn't matter, since anyone who actually cares about such a thing has a credit card that waives them anyway.
So what's left? Comparing bitcoin with the world wide web is a moot point.
The only thing that gets people's attention is when you tell them that it raised in price 10,000x over the past couple years. Money. That's all that anyone cares about, and until bitcoin actually provides real utility to users -- which it probably never will -- it's a flash in the frying pan of history. In 5 years, nobody will even remember any of this bullshit.
You error is believing the pool of money speculators in Bitcoin has been exhausted.
In fact, I will venture to say that the next wave of adoption will be again fueled by nothing more than speculation. I'm sorry to say this but we are not yet at a stage where the utility proposition is primary.
In fact, someone broke it down in such a perfect way on reddit today I will just copy/paste that here and let you address it.
Sorry to be a jerk. .. .but I've got to be brutally honest here: most of you seem to have a walmart playpool's worth of depth when it comes to understanding what bitcoin is and what it's primary value proposition is.
Bitcoin is not yet money. For the love of disco, let me repeat: It is not yet a currency. It does not fulfill the three main requirements of a money to a high degree (medium of exchange; yes great. store of value; not so great. Unit of account; not at all . . . yet) And this unit of account aspect is key.
How retarded or misleading can one be; to suggest that a commodity, or a would-be-money, is somehow fundamentally flawed, because it does not yet enjoy a great deal of liquidity and widespread adoption, or because it's exchange price with the current money is volatile!? I mean: how else exactly do people imagine this phenomenon could possibly take place? . . .that one day, some magical company called Bitcoin Inc., should just pop on the scene and declare their unit in their digital blockchain ledger to be worth X amount, and it will just be so, because they declare it?
Only governments can do this, because governments have guns, and a slightly insane population of state-worshipers who believe that their proof-of-violence kind of money is somehow a good thing for society. Anyhow, regardless of how you feel about anarchy. . . it does not change the fact that valuation of a commodity is either forced and enforced. . . or it is emergent on a market. It takes time, to say the least. It cannot happen all at once, and it is going to be a messy, ugly, fits-and-starts, snafus, highly dis-equitable distributions initially, frauds, thefts, evolution of best practices and safeguards, etc. A process of getting a large segment of the population to not only wrap their heads around a new technology to some extent. . . but to build out infrastructure to make it easier to use, and to have a large enough network of people and businesses demanding and accepting bitcoin.