If only we had a technology solution to payments and money transfer that didn’t depend on the whims of anyone, some sort of distributed cryptographically secured system?
The vast majority of US dollar transactions happen off of the Fed's official ledger. Similarly, the vast majority of bitcoin transactions need not happen on the blockchain. That's probably already the case today.
The problem with bitcoin today is that the price is too volatile. Bitcoin proponents believe that can change with time and increasing adoption.
This happens when people buy crypto using PayPal or Cash App or Robinhood, and at least thousands of times a second worldwide on crypto exchanges.
More generally, there is nothing stopping anyone from making a "PayPal of crypto" or a "Zelle of crypto."
In my mind, this is no way defeats the purpose of bitcoin. Bitcoin is like a Euro but for the whole world (which would never be politically achievable), plus cannot be manipulated (in terms of supply and interest rates) by a central bank (I think a huge plus, but obviously this is controversial). The point of bitcoin is not to be able to do illegal things on a blockchain.
Personally, I don't care about the other (i.e. non-bitcoin) cryptocurrencies. There's some interesting tech there that could change the world, but defi and smart contracts are addressing totally different things than bitcoin is.
How garbage like Bitcoin is still popular blows my mind. $10 for a single transaction?