Agree with your assessment that 100 million is an upper bound. I am curious about a deeper analysis as well that involves defining what "real users" are and then seeing how many transactions/wallets meet that criteria. i.e. of that "100 million", how many of them are simply buying and hodling? How many have done a non-exchange transaction (i.e. bought a thing, not coins. Buying NFTs counts! Or a pizza, or buying software, or staking or something)
The comparison to Diner's club is also relevant. 20 years from zero to 51% of all Americans.
Just getting to your "Why has blockchain user adoption been so terrible and what can we do about it?" section and will edit after that.
Edit: Well worth the read. If anything, the title and top image were a bit clickbaity, but the article itself was great, all the way through to the end.
Overall, the key question you point to is "Why did the web grow 10x faster than blockchain? Facebook 15x, and mobile 35x faster?"
I'm curious about this! Is there a recent technology that did grow at 10x over 13 years that we could learn from? Another way to look at this is blockchain is growing at 23% YOY over the last 13 years. What technologies should we compare it to?
Just to pull on the thread, is blockchain more like "hard tech"? If so, that would be really odd since it's not "hard tech". What has EV growth been like?
Here's a chart [1] from [2] that says about 17 million EVs have been sold since 2012. Let's call that 13 years for the sake of keeping the math the same, but the web grew 100x as fast. OK so cryptocurrency is growing about order of magnitude faster than EVs, but why is it slower than the web? What else develops at a speed that's 10x faster than the growth of EVs, but still slower than the web itself?
[1] https://www.ev-volumes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/WW-K-6... [2]