You can pocket Bitcoin like cash, so that's not a problem.

What Square did is enable payment network for merchants who don't care. They just increased the number of paying customers and money available to their customers.

Blame the politicians where blame is justified, but it's also true most merchants don't care about accepting Bitcoin. If they did, they could have done it self custodially even under MiCA - the crypto asset service providers are regulated.

So both are true. For network effects, you basically need to make one side super easy, sometimes even subsidized. In the US or outside of European union, entrepreneurs can innovate on both sides. In European union, one side of innovation has been effectively banned.