I certainly see Bitcoin as a viable "middleman" for trading and arbitrage between all the altcoins. Right now that seems to be the biggest use case.

That's only trading on an exchange though. That doesn't use the protocol.

Not really because transactions in BitCoin take forever to clear.

Your opinion is irrelevant. The market has the last word, and the market has already decided Bitcoin is the most valuable and useful. You can verify this by looking at hash rate, market cap, and distribution (amongst other things). You may not like it, so feel free to downvote me, but the facts are indisputable.

Well thank you for that. Noted. I'm going to give you an upvote just so I can have the satisfaction of seeing other people downvote you for being an asshole.

Yikes, please don't be uncivil even if someone else is, or you feel that they are. I'm sure you realize that it's against the rules here, and that we ban accounts that do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Do what brings you joy in every day.

Could you please stop posting flamewar-style comments to HN?

I would suggest you don't.