This is one thing I don’t get. In countries like China and India (to name the two countries I know about) mobile payment apps are ubiquitous. You go in to a shop, scan a QR code, and boom your payment is done. This is what crytocurrencies promised, but instead more closed apps came to fill the market. What happened?
1. You don't want to _ever_ wait 45 minutes for a transaction to potentially be confirmed on the blockchain. Even before the recent craziness and high fees this would sometimes happen.
2. The price fluctuates wildly. Pretty hard to reason properly about whether or not you'll be able to pay your employees this week if your "store of value" could drop 20% or more at a moment's notice.
3. The fees charged by exchanges to convert to fiat are exorbitant. Unless all of your suppliers and handymen take Bitcoin, you will get screwed by this on the regular.
The bulls usually scream "Lightning network, scaling, store of value" or some other nonsense, but the truth is, today Bitcoin is garbage as an actual currency.
Bitcoin Core betrayed the original vision of Bitcoin and hotwired it into a high-cost settlement system. The average transaction fee in Bitcoin is something like $38, which is more than the average weekly salary in many countries.
I believe that cryptocurrency will eventually attain mass adoption. The timeline has been pushed back a few years though because the main network has failed.
Bitcoin "as app" (once or if it works) will be more like cash payments, privacy wise. That is were I see the main advantage. I find it spooky what Visa and Mastercard now about all of us... at least about me.
One massive caveat is that all Bitcoin transactions are public, traceable, and permanently stored in the Bitcoin network. In most ways it's worse than cash, in some ways it's probably even worse than credit cards.
monereo, zcash, and eventually ethereum
the concept seems to make sense but I'd be curious how to audit such an obfuscated system
The system has been in place for years, and it works reasonably well. More competition would still help. And yes, a better network and better systems to cut out the intermediary would help even more.
In casual use with your mobile phone, you are shown a QR code, scan it, tap "OK", and it's done. Not that technical. Billions of people with smartphones could handle that perfectly. You're right about transactions being slow and expensive, and that is certainly a much bigger problem. That and the fact that there are still very few places accepting it.