That's the case where I think it will pick up. If the reason for its lack of use is perception based, then instances where its utility outweighs perception will gain ground.
There are numerous places and times around the world that you can look at the situation that occurred and see that Bitcoin would have been a boon had it been established at that time.
Future instances will exist like that, and perhaps that's a good enough role for it to exist on it's own. It can be the candle that provides light when the power goes out.
The irony of course that it doesn't work if the power goes out, but that's another degree of infrastructure damage entirely. It might even be sufficient to ensure the power doesn't go out during some crisis.
Bitcoin in particular can remain operational in extremely degraded conditions.
Its relatively long average block interval (10 minutes) and strictly limited maximum block size limit the total bandwidth requirement for a full node to a few kilobits per second, and you can easily run that on a laptop that consumes a few watts, easily supplied from a relatively inconspicuous solar panel or handheld gasoline generator run at a 1% duty cycle. Blockstream supplies a satellite feed of the blockchain that requires no internet connection, just a groundstation that costs less than a laptop and uses slightly more power.
Outbound bandwidth requirements from the place where the power has gone out are many orders of magnitude smaller. A Bitcoin transaction is a few hundred bytes, so outbound bandwidth requirements for transmitting one transaction at a time are a few bits per second without adding significant delay, and because the transaction is valid indefinitely in the absence of double-spending, potentially down to a small fraction of a bit per second if further delays of hours or days can be tolerated.
Now, it's true that power needs to stay on somewhere for the miners to keep running, and the miners need to be able to transmit their mined blocks to the rest of the network fast enough to avoid many orphaned forks, which requires bursts of somewhat higher bandwidth. But keeping the power on somewhere is much more likely than keeping it on everywhere.
I don't understand LN2 well enough to do this kind of analysis on it, but I'd expect it to be less tolerant of such extreme infrastructure degradation.
> would have been a boon had it been established at that time.
USD and/or EUR depending on the continent would have been used instead in such countries which have failing monetary systems.
Problem is that governments in those countries (like Argentina) often impose capital controls making it hard to acquire foreign currency. Bitcoin is almost always only a solution to that specific problem (i.e. government restrictions not currency instability).
There are numerous places and times around the world that you can look at the situation that occurred and see that Bitcoin would have been a boon had it been established at that time.
Future instances will exist like that, and perhaps that's a good enough role for it to exist on it's own. It can be the candle that provides light when the power goes out.
The irony of course that it doesn't work if the power goes out, but that's another degree of infrastructure damage entirely. It might even be sufficient to ensure the power doesn't go out during some crisis.