First, there were never 130+ places (it was 20-30 at most) in Portsmouth that took crypto.
Second, to my knowledge, Bruce himself has never once (or very rarely) used crypto himself when he had the chance. If he wants to know why people didn't use it, he should ask himself.
Third, since 2017 Bitcoin hasn't been consistently usable for payments. Anyone who used it can tell you. I closed my bank to live all on Bitcoin, had to stop after a year. I ran a Lightning node, not workable for payments.
Fourth, let's be frank: lots of early Bitcoiners made a ton of money and just retired. No need to grind for adoption anymore, they made their bags.
Is it safe to say that 2017 is the year when holders of Bitcoin stopped using Bitcoin as money? It looks to me as if 2017 is the year people began treating Bitcoin like a share of Berkshire Hathaway stock.
That's when it started, because fees got too high. Some people still tried, and when Lightning came around people started trying again, but that didn't last.
Fifth, crypto tribalism caused BTC vs. Dash vs. BCH vs. Monero vs. BSV to prevent working together (the ones who onboarded all the Portsmouth merchants became BSV maxis and kind of screwed up adoption for everyone).
Finally, I'm still living on crypto, onboarding merchants, holding meetups, etc. I'm not asking what happened, I'm making things happen. Anyone want to live on crypto and onboard their local merchants, hit me up.
And yes, here's proof I've been using crypto, from the least likely source to give this any kind of publicity