OK, but what has BTC been adopted for? One obvious answer is that it has been adopted as a speculative symbol of wealth that people seek to possess, at a considerable cost in energy and actual currency like the dollar. Capitalism is rife however with products that grabbed the early advantage and then were overtaken by better, cheaper, more useful versions. The history of personal computing seems particularly relevant, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers IBM and Apple both had clear "getting there first" advantages, both were overwhelmed by sharp competitors who capitalized on their mistakes and lack of vision.

Of course personal computing advanced by offering the average person "killer apps", starting with spread sheet and desktop publishing and exploding into the internet. What I haven't been able to see yet is a killer app for distributed ledger tech...other than as a vehicle for speculation. Don't know what I'm missing, probably a whole lot of things;)