It's being widely adopted in countries with inflating currencies: Nigeria, Vietnma, and Argentina made it to #3 today (this link is slightly old). https://www.statista.com/chart/18345/crypto-currency-adoptio...
Maybe it's a "less terrible" solution in poor countries with inflation challenges, but I don't see that as a strong proposition for the utility of bitcoin. Cigarettes are used as a medium of exchange in prison. That doesn't serve as a strong argument for using cigarettes as currency.
There are long phases in BTC's history where 100% of holders are in very handsome profits. And that's the problem?
If you're just making long speculative investments in btc and volatility is skewed to the upside, well sure that's fine but you're not using bitcoin as a medium of exchange, you're investing in it as a security.
Most people use Bitcoin via exchanges, where they keep the coins. The average crypto user from Nigeria has zero interest in paying $10+ transaction fees every time they need to do anything with their money.
At this point, it doesn't matter if they own BTC or ETH or DOGE or whatever. They just want whatever allows them to move money around. The exchanges could simply keep balances in a database and reconcile them amongst each other via contracts, and it wouldn't make any difference as far as the end users are concerned (There are examples of this happening between exchanges).
Bitcoin is essentially a proxy for another currency. Mostly the USD. These people need a way to protect their assets from what their own governments are doing to the value of their native currencies.
They cannot buy securities or foreign currencies for various reasons.
Bitcoin gives them a way. A way to convert their native currencies into USD, a stronger currency.
So while it's a good use-case for Bitcoin, it's not exactly a situation that's applicable to the world at large.
Yes, but this is only temporarily. It's like refactoring systems. You create a new system and a proxy and then have the old system communicate with the new one via the proxy (or vice versa). Eventually, the old system becomes obsolete, so you kill it and get rid of the proxy.
In your example, Bitcoin would obviously be the "old system" if everyone wanted to use it for moving money around, because there are plenty of more advanced alternatives that work far better.
So why is Bitcoin so popular? Because it's a speculative investment. A new asset class divorced from fundamentals, making it impossible to say when the value is too high. That's why people like it.
