In 1996 the internet was in every imp University campus worldwide and every CS dept had multiple labs working on a lot of the what most people take for granted today that allowed the internet to scale.
No such thing is happening with bitcoin. You can't scale something to internet levels if its banned in half the worlds research labs.
"Every imp[ortant] University campus" is a tiny subset of "all people". The total population of 4-year college students in the U.S. is 13.4M, roughly the same as the number of Coinbase users. In 2005 Facebook was in every important university campus worldwide, and yet people (including myself) continued to call it a fad until they started making billions in 2012.
No such thing is happening with bitcoin. You can't scale something to internet levels if its banned in half the worlds research labs.