Its only interesting when compared with the US. Japan put in instant payments in 1973. And Nigeria, Philippines and many other developing countriesall have local instant payment systems.

I have been using BRL (a stellar based stable token) to pay a programmer from Europe. Zero fee, Sepa instant to PIX. Allows me to pay him daily as that is what he wanted.

https://www.ntokens.com/blog/brl-anchor-stellar

There are Argentian, Nigerian, South African, USDC, Chilean (https://kbtrading.org)

Limits exist, they're just undocumented. Fine for day-to-day expenses, not ok for business, real estate etc.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/labsnews.com/en/news/economy/br...

You're relying on a nation state to behave in a certain way. This never works out in the long term. The winds of politics change on a whim. That's just history for you.

With Bitcoin you instead rely on the intrinsic properties of the protocol. No ifs or buts.

you still need a way to turn that BTC into cash you can use daily, and that requires an on/off ramp. For any large amount, P2P is out of the question. You will need to go through an exchange which will have to comply with the local laws of the nation state.

On ramps yes, many bitcoin holders are waiting for the day where it's spendable and accepted by more merchants and that's going to take decades.

The core problem is that no mature economy will have any need to accept BTC payments. Their native currency will likely be stable and they'll also have infrastructure to support fast, cheap payments via legacy means.

There is really no incentive to accept crpyto for any large merchant. In fact, the number of online merchants I've seen who accept crypto has actually gone down over the last few years.

True and that's why I think it'll take many decades. Merchants accepting before the mass adoption of lightning and other layer twos are way too early, and no one wants to spend it before it reaches mass adoption.

Bitcoin only makes sense for emerging market countries with unstable currencies or formerly stable countries going through a crisis. In the former case it takes a long time for those economies to mature. In the latter case, it might be temporarily adopted by their citizens until they can escape to a more stable country or the country manages to turn itself around. These events take decades.

For now, it's just a store of value. You put it in a portfolio like gold as another uncorrelated asset that tends to go up over time as fiat currencies inflate which is what got some of the recent big macro/portfolio construction crowd interested last year and driving up price in this recent run up, and unfortunately the market cap is too low again for more serious allocation to it without driving up price too much.

We're a decade into an adoption curve that was planned to be over a century long

You aren't making a lot of sense here since you are relying on an unelected group of people to behave in a certain way. > This never works out in the long term. The winds of politics change on a whim. That's just history for you.

With a nation state you instead rely on the intrinsic properties of the law. No ifs or buts.

The law changes dramatically every time there is a new government. The bitcoin protocol stays the same.

That is not true. The bitcoin protocol can change and did change. If you fire up the original wallet it won't sync.

Small incremental changes based on almost universal consensus, yes. Not the same as political change. The big block size guys failed to make a big politically charged change. Bitcoin has shown its resistance to political change very clearly.

That's interesting - can you use it to send me a little money over the internet?

Bitcoin isn't good for this either any more, but litecoin, monero and bitcoin cash all work well.

Same with twint.ch in Switzerland.