I've sent money internationally like twice in my entire life. Where is this demand for international money transfers coming from? Is this really a sufficiently killer feature to drive the price of BTC?
It's pretty common to accept small payments with zero confirmations. Maybe there's some fraud, but overall that's minor.
First transaction takes about an hour while the entire transaction is fully verified, card checked, whole nine yards.
Subsequent transactions, you get the benefit of the doubt and it clears with only the checks that can be done in a few seconds. I guess maybe the credit card company has insurance to cover the fraud or something.
There might even be a business model in rapid address check + fraud insurance for sub-$25 zero confirmation bitcoin transactions.
It regularly takes /days/ for visa transactions to go from "confirmed at the counter" to "arriving and unlocking in my bank account so I can use it to pay my rent". Over Christmas in Australia it's common for visa to just flat fail to keep up with demand, forcing shops to keep offline dockets for up to weeks after the product has left the store on the /trust/ that visa will let them redeem those pieces of thermopaper for actual spendable money.
Mere hours is, from the perspective of the merchant, amazing.
>B) Bitcoin fees are through the roof, it sometimes costs as much as 25% of the value of a transaction to send it
When I send money from Iceland to Australia, it takes about a week to arrive. I've had a transaction magically blink out of existence once (both banks told me it was the other banks fault), and while it is in transit approximately $70AUD is removed from it. This number is not exact and varies by up to $15 each time you send it, which means you have to send $90 more than you intend to pay in order to make sure you've paid at least as much as you intend to.
Mere hours is again amazing, and a 25% fee (that's probably not correct by the way, segwit has reduced fees from approx $5USD to approx 25c USD, check your wallet settings) is rather tolerable by comparison. In the process of paying Australian government bills and bank charges from Iceland (which are usually in the order of $20-50), I have definitely spent at least 1.5x as much on transaction fees as actual payments.
You're focused on the "coffee problem". You want to buy a coffee in person and have the transaction validated immediately so you can leave the till. Bitcoin is not great at this. However, the coffee problem is only one very narrow subset of how money is used, and you're also only considering it from a consumer-centric perspective. Bitcoin is considerably better than fiat at a lot of things, and in a lot of other areas it offers a different set of tradeoffs that might or might not work for you.