Depending how you define personal credit, its been around ~100 years (or more!), with the card format being adopted in the 60s. It's only been the last 15 years or so that not carrying cash has become a reasonable approach to day-to-day life.
So for bitcoin to become as big as it has as a brand new technology in only 14 years seems accelerated.
This is analysis complicated a bit by the fact that bitcoin is not a top-down tech like credit, there's no centralized group deciding who gets to use it. On the other side of that though - the tech infrastructure build-out that made credit cards ubiquitous also benefits and accelerates the potential adoption of bitcoin.
It's parabolic with respect to middlemen, but none of the other properties I care about. That isn't to say there are no advancements (I think privacy-preserving finance is an important frontier), but they don't stack up well, to say the least.
Depending how you define personal credit, its been around ~100 years (or more!), with the card format being adopted in the 60s. It's only been the last 15 years or so that not carrying cash has become a reasonable approach to day-to-day life.
So for bitcoin to become as big as it has as a brand new technology in only 14 years seems accelerated.
This is analysis complicated a bit by the fact that bitcoin is not a top-down tech like credit, there's no centralized group deciding who gets to use it. On the other side of that though - the tech infrastructure build-out that made credit cards ubiquitous also benefits and accelerates the potential adoption of bitcoin.