Isn't it mostly being manipulated by drug traffickers and money launderers right now?
Edit : i’m also not asking for the list of legal shops that accept bitcoins, i’m wondering about the percentage of officialy legal bitcoin transactions vs the rest.
How exactly do you plan on converting fiat to btc and then paying for transactions? Every step of the way is going to be on the. public. ledger. Forever. Linked to each step along the way. C'mon.
BTC is for people who don't want to be at the whim of banks or paypal. Or it was anyways, until the fees became too high and the transaction times became too long.
The serious use is with other coins like ETH (powering smart contracts, dApps) and BCH (hard fork of bitcoin from August that doesn't have BTC's current issues). Or altcoins. Raiblocks and XRP have extremely quick confirmation times.
All of which have a public ledger by the way. If you want to do illegal activities, you'd probably want to use Monero or NAV, but first you'd have to prove either are truly private.
Plus, if everything was public an easily traceable to a person then why are exchange platforms hacked ? You could easily identify the authors of the hack and sue them... i guess there isn’t enough regulation to make tracing the bitcoin a big enough legal threat. Or that tracing to the wallet without being able to identify the owner is useless. Which means it’s still good for other illegal activities.
Tech moves fast, you know ?