@serapath Oh, sure, but "Bitcoiners" is a very very very small group, and that group alone would have never caused Bitcoin to catch on.

The mass "adoption" of Bitcoin happened in roughly two stages; first, a bunch of actual shops and companies accepting it as a payment method, while it was being marketed as a fast and low-fees money transfer method, and then a ton of 'traders' (ie. capitalists, including commercial miners) trying to extract profit from it.

The traders then went on to spawn a lot of other cryptocurrencies, with a fig leaf of functionality that never actually became reality, because they fundamentally didn't offer much over Bitcoin anyway.

It's that first group that I'm thinking of here - in the US the existing payment infrastructure is generally nightmarish, both for consumers and vendors, and this functioned as a selling point for that group to adopt Bitcoin. Which then made it interesting to traders, which eventually sustained the hype themselves.

Had that first group not been there, the second group likely also would not have been, and it would likely have forever remained a weird nerd thing.