I have yet to see a widespread other usage of cryptocurrency.
Of course bitcoin (like cash) limits your recourse against the seller, so you have to take that into account. Sometimes though, that is to your advantage when the risk is low enough (small transaction, trusted seller) that the hassle avoidance outweighs the risk.
This isn't possible with credit card or bank transfers.
And I’m not sure why I would want to maintain two currencies anyway, one for small payments where for some reason I don’t want protection, and another when I do want protection. Having to hold multiple currencies dependent on what I want the level of dispute resolution to be sounds like a huge step back.
The main risk isn’t that someone wants to reverse a coffee, it’s that their whole wallet gets stolen.
Or a credit card with spending limits?
In the U.K. with banks like monzo you can also raise/lower the limit instantly via an app. Also the fraud detection algorithms will automatically ask for 2FA on larger transactions or ones that look fraudulent e.t.c.
Yes there are modern banking solutions like this (we have instant transfers between banks with a comfortable QR scanning app just like google pay here in Switzerland) but this only works in Switzerland. For any international transfers we have to fall back to Swift transfers (slow) or credit cards (mentioned issue).
Yeah you can do that exactly with a debit card - just ask your bank to remove the spend limit and give you zero overdraft.
Once you realise effectively you are describing a debit card with less options then suddenly it doesn't look like such a good feature.
But now we are specifically just talking about international payments where you explicitly don’t want any currency conversion or buyers protection, and the use case is just getting farcically narrow.
Sure, those things exist, and cash also exists, and in physical real-life transactions you get to decide for yourself which one you want to use. With online transactions and without crypto, for the most part you currently don't have a choice, and that's not good.
Example: if I'm storing important archive data in AWS Glacier that has to be retained for years and I have to pay monthly, I'd be much more worried about data loss due to something going wrong with one of the monthly automatic card payments than with AWS defrauding me or with Glacier itself failing. So I'd rather pay with crypto (or ideally, pay years in advance up front and not worry about monthly payments at all), than leave it up to the whims and vagaries of some damn card company's flaky software.
Yes stuff like that has happened to me more than once in real life (not with amazon but with some other hosting providers).
So its not only about permissions and burocracy but also that their system is old and sucks.
I doubt the far majority does even know what an ICO or NFT is and most of them likely still have and use their PayPal daily.
There is really nothing shady about protecting your money from failing currencies by investing in something that works right now.
I'm not trying to hype you up, but I think that there's a lot of utility happening outside of your bubble. Some of that happens in countries you don't live in, other use cases appear between banking systems which remain opaque to you. That's not the same as "no utility".
See: Derivative based on bitcoin/ETH.
It's not a counterpoint, just a third category.