I've tend to chat with drivers when I take Lyft, and frequently mention that I'm a programmer. Several of the drivers have then asked me about cryptocurrency, mostly Bitcoin and Ethereum. I try to discuss how technically interesting they are, but how financially shaky; that there is likely a bubble and that they are probably not good long term investment options but could be worth buying a little bit for fun.

We are definitely in a very hype driven cryptocurrency bubble right now, and there are a lot of naive folks who are probably going to lose money to it.

And yet somehow, we haven't really managed to make any cryptocurrencies an actual, widely accepted, payment alternative, for anyone other than a few people with special circumstances (government restrictions on currency exchange, criminals demanding ransoms, funding organizations that governments are trying to shut down) or people who are fairly technically competent.

There's a chance the lightning network could be the last piece of the puzzle to make cryptocurrencies actually usable for payment, though even still, I have a hard time seeing most places wanting to accept payment in an asset as volatile as Bitcoin.

Or maybe we'll see a coin backed by fiat currency and real, regulated banks on Stellar, where you don't have nearly the same scalability issues nor gigawatts of power wasted just to try to solve Sybil attacks. If you have a coin backed by fiat currency, and low transaction costs, businesses are a lot more likely to accept it as payment as most of their expenses, taxes, debts, and so on are in the local fiat currency rather than than in any cryptocurrency.