prepaid?

You could if anyone accepted lightning. But the fact is you couldn't do that with BCH, Monero, or anything else, either. There isn't "zero adoption" -- there's "zero merchant acceptance", because accepting ANY crypto is a pain in the ass (the tech, the security, the employee training, the taxes...) Bootstrapping circular economies is HARD, especially when the current system is "good enough".

Seems like there was more merchant adoption in 2013 than there is now. Bitcoin has gone backwards

It's not the tech, security, employee training or taxes. It's that prices aren't stable because no cryptocurrency has a mechanism to adjust the supply of money in accordance with goods and services offered in the economy.