Assuming we talking only about "removing big banks from large long-distance cash transfers" which is also one of the few sane possibilities for crypto that I would want. I suspect that if it will ever work then in the fully regulated marked (e.g. we are transferring from regulated country to regulated) then the recipient will have to pay capital gain tax for cashing out on his side. This kinda defeats the whole purpose of the system.

The more I think and read about crypto and blockchain the less practical applications I see.

> removing big banks from large long-distance cash transfers

In practice, you need an account with a "big bank" to buy bitcoin. The recipient also has to have enough technical literacy and resources to safely convert the bitcoin into spendable money, sometimes at a significant markup. The buying power of the funds are also subject to wild fluctuations for as long as it takes the recipient to convert to usable money. Bitcoin is just not practical for this kind of thing.

I'll give you another use case. Cryptocurrencies are essentially programmable money. You can't write a computer program with a bank account atm but you can with bitcoin.

You can have your auto-driving car to go fill up it's tank or pay someone to service it.You can write a computer program that hires a developer to improve it or a million other things.