What did people think about bitcoin in 2015?

Lol, was reading an old book about crypto and got pinned about how optimistic they thought about crypto. They had to know how it’s easy to play everyone for 6 billion $ in 2022

Here is one piece from this book:

« For everything we've just set out, for all the promise and potential of cryptocurrency, it's still very much a niche product. Say there are 12 million wallets, and even one hundred thousand merchants accepting it, and even $500 million in VC money now invested in cryptocurrency projects. Those numbers pale next to the 6 billion people in the world, or the 23 million businesses in the United States alone. Nobody's fully studied how much business merchants are doing with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but actual and anecdotal reports tend to peg it at a low number, about 1 percent of total sales for the few that accept them. That's far below what the hype might suggest. If bitcoin is going to be this revolutionary, global force for change that its proponents fervently believe it is, some evolutionary things are going to have to happen first. For one thing, the stain of association that cryptocurrencies have with the Silk Road site and Mt. Gox is still visible; most people simply assume the whole thing is some kind of scam. At a bare minimum people have to feel as if cryptocurrencies are safe and not liable to suddenly lose value. They're nowhere near that right now. A mid-2014 survey found that only about half of U.S. citizens were aware of bitcoin, only about 3 percent had used it, and 65 percent said they were unlikely ever to use it (and those numbers were an improvement from a survey several months earlier). »