That doesn’t mean that there are no problems with the status quo - for example, PayPal and western Union have many critics - but rather that the blockchain companies would have been much better off building things which were competitive rather than relying on MLM marketing. International remittances are so bad that even Bitcoin is better but there aren’t many cases like that and “slower, costs more, riskier, harder to use” is not generally a compelling sales pitch.
I think this is a mistake: your country’s laws usually apply to everything, which means that Bitcoin either doesn’t change anything because you’re using a legal exchange or you’re technically in violation of the law and leaving a public record for prosecutors. We’re inclined to technical solutions here but the banking system is a political construct and there isn’t a good way to change it other than engaging with the political process.
This also provides the answer for perceived negativity. The bad reputation is due to providing poor, often illegal, services and the way to change that is to provide something useful which makes life better for someone. For example, PayPal is pretty unpopular but many people still use it because it’s a necessary evil (broad reach, available in most of the world, etc.). If some of the many billions of dollars spent on cryptocurrency companies had produced a useful payment system which was fast, easy to use, had reasonable fraud and privacy protections, etc. a lot of people would switch. Instead, we had 14 years of people shilling Bitcoin despite it providing none of those things because they knew it had only the value they could talk buyers into believing, and nobody at PayPal, etc. is staying up nights worried that they need to offer customers a better deal to keep them.
Doesn't bitcoin's volatility affect your use case?
I had sat on a wallet for years, having opened one to get 5 BTC from Andresen's faucet in 2010. A couple faucets later I had a few more.
That's right! They straight up used to give away multiple entire bitcoins just for loading a website.
Eventually a "real" retailer started taking BTC so I spent approximately 1 of them on a new power supply for my PC.
The last purchase I made using Bitcoin was a power supply from Tiger Direct: https://i.imgur.com/8tW7bmN.png
I had bitcoin to spend and Tiger Direct was the first "major" retailer to take it. As soon as that slashdot post appeared in January 2014 I moseyed on over to check it out and made a purchase, probably the same day the payment method was implemented.
Almost immediately after this the first cycle of widely-publicized scams/grifts/schemes started. And then the cycle never stopped.
The market became flooded with cryptobros and instead of being used for basically nothing it became a vehicle for fraud.
Rather than being a cryptographic curiosity it became a distasteful embarrassment so I did a cost-benefit analysis found that it wasn't for me.
I still have several BTC. I do not care. 1BTC could equal a quadrillion dollars and wouldn't care. I don't want a quadrillion dollars, I want my rose bushes to look magnificent this year.
Besides, I'm a "smart tech" person so I make enough money and have no desire to live the greasy crypto lifestyle.
Where did the $24,000 in value per BTC difference between when I last touched my wallet and today come from?
It came from schmucks pouring money into a system that, eventually, will run out of schmucks.
My moral compass is such that I would rather die penniless underneath a bridge after having spent a decade in squalor collecting cans and shitting in bushes than participate in a market like crypto.
We do suggest that 99%+ of crypto value is not being spent like that. Most of crypto valuations is built on a vague promise of some future useful use cases when the underlying technology is just a slow database with no root password.
I don't think it will drop that much anyway, maybe 60% at most from current prices
Aside: what I really want more than anything else is for bitcoin to just disappear from the whole conversation, because it's been demonstrated to be unsustainable, especially since most other blockchains can be sustained on 0.00001% as much energy.