I don't think that's a fair comparison. Before Facebook was Myspace, and before that forums and BBSes. The concepts Facebook was built on are much older than it.
When does it stop being the early days? I don't know - it'll take decades I would guess for it to be widely used and the general population to be comfortable with it.
And Bitcoin was based on Hashcash and countless other distributed ledger systems before it.
> I don't know - it'll take decades I would guess for it to be widely used
Well we're already down one and a half decades. What if it never sees widespread use. Defining "very early days" as "there's no users yet" means you can always claim it's "very early days".
There's another issue here, which is that people point out hard problems and say "don't worry, smart people are working on solutions". This has been happening as far back as 2013, when I was poking my head into the Bitcoin-sphere. But it never accounts for: what if there is no solution that meets all requirements? That's politically appropriate, safe, secure, and efficient?
Maybe we can't claim magic future solutions will solve us when they still haven't been solved yet -- 1.5 decades in.
Like I said, I'm skeptical too. There is a lot of growth though - cash app and coinbase make it easy to buy, bitpay makes it easy to spend. So when I say it's early days, I mean that if crypto takes off I think it has room to be significantly bigger than today.
When does it stop being the early days? I don't know - it'll take decades I would guess for it to be widely used and the general population to be comfortable with it.