I keep seeing pie in the sky hypotheticals like "supply chain trust" from people who think farmers are etching their cucumbers with serial numbers, but I've yet to see any use case presented for a blockchain that has real utility and isn't better solved by existing processes or systems.
We had a friend who lives in a commonwealth country working for us as a contractor, and figuring out how to pay them was a pretty big PITA. I was really close to just paying them in bitcoin, because it was that much of a hassle.
Ultimately I was too afraid of any potential tax/legal implications to follow through on that, and we ended up just using TransferWise instead. Still, it was that much of a pain.
They withdrew my funds. Promised a transfer date by the following date. Three days pass and the suddenly lock me out of my account and asked for a bunch of documents to complete the transfer.
For example, paying rent on a holiday home, or sending money to a son or daughter studying abroad.
Larger sums, or transfers involving Americans, are more likely to need the additional identity checks.
(Source: my usage, and feedback from people I've recommended the service to.)
That said, even before Bitcoin arose, most real-world (fiat) currencies were handled primarily through electronic transfers. There, the double-spend and scarcity-preservation was largely maintained through a combination of accounting convention, interbank agreements, audits, regulations, and occasional criminal prosecution (for things like counterfeiting). So "scarce digital assets" in the form of entries on the Fed's (or the ECB's) balance sheet existed before and continue to exist after the emergence of blockchain-backed cryptocurrencies.
Gold-backed ETFs represent another form of "scarce digital asset", but more of a hybrid asset since they only arose and kept their value stable after creation/redemption mechanisms were formalized, and continue to maintain counterparty trust through auditing. But they do provide a liquid means of owning electronic gold; gold being the traditional scarcity-based asset.
Money doesn't hold value because of its scarcity. Money holds value because of the faith and credit of the entity that backs it.
If a person issued a single unit of currency tomorrow and promptly died, it wouldn't suddenly hold any value simply because it is scarce and guaranteed to remain so.
To put it another way, money's value lies in the fact that it is "legal tender". That status is backed by a powerful organization and people have to trust that organization. When the trust is gone, the value is gone, regardless of how scarce or plentiful the units of money.
Other digital collectibles predate cryptocurrency (a fact pointed to be the name of a prominent, and now famously defunct, early Bitcoin exchange.)
Even treating Bitcoin as a settlement layer, and saying that we have "an electronic bearer currency that is deterministically produced and cannot be forged" is pretty powerful as a use case.
I'm a huge skeptic on the remaining uses of "blockchain" such as it is. If we define "blockchain" as a one-sided Merkle tree, then we have things like git that qualify, that are very useful in their own right. Similarly log-based database updates are also chains of blocks that are used to represent immutable updates that can be combined into a mutable view of the present, and those are also useful in databases and filesystems. But a bitcoin-like blockchain is not novel or interesting in this regard.
It's kind of like those free speech platforms. If you're a free speech anything goes platform, but everyone who isn't saying terrible things isn't encountering any problems on Twitter, then you end up with only people saying terrible things on the free speech platform even if that wasn't the original purpose.
All this is to say, I think for Bitcoin or crypto to overtake credit cards, it has to provide massive benefits above and beyond credit cards to get people who have no problems with credit cards to switch to it. Right now, that's not the case.
Credit cards are convenient because there are so many protections for consumers in terms of fraud, but that is an increasing burden on the consumer, as credit cards get rejected because of "unusual spending patterns", and dealing with credit card theft and arranging a replacement card, and having to answer questions like "did you spend $7.23 at MTG ENT LLC last Thursday". Consumers get the benefits of reward systems and deferred payment (which is a blessing and a curse for many consumers).
For vendors the advantage is clear (except for the problems involved in storing bitcoin); in a hypothetical world where bitcoin's value is stable, they could offer substantial discounts for purchases made with bitcoin instead of credit cards, because of the diminished counterparty risk.
All of that said, there's no reason that credit cards can't be offered for cryptocurrencies as the settlement currency, and offer many of the same benefits of existing credit cards; this more goes to the notion of Bitcoin as a settlement system.
The biggest problem with adoption of Bitcoin as a spending platform is price volatility, which is a chicken-and-egg problem; if the supply chain is denominated in bitcoin, then that will make the price stable, but nobody will denominate their supply chain in bitcoin unless the price is stable. I've expressed the idea before that power companies in particular could charge for electricity in bitcoin very easily, because the conversion is pretty direct -- the price of electricity is the number of bitcoins you could mine for that amount of electricity, and the electric companies have a built-in solution if demand falls too low -- they can just mine bitcoin with the "unused" power. This is a little pie in the sky, though.
Are you sure it's not the fact that nobody seems to be able to securely store bitcoin/other crypto, and that when your bitcoins get stolen there's zero recourse, unlike fiat currency where banks are regulated?
I also don't know personally anyone who had any stolen either. The generally available wallets are fine; you just get a pass phrase that you write down somewhere. Paper wallets are fine for cold storage (though the barriers are higher for the casual user).
And it's not regulation that saves banks, it's mandatory insurance. If the banks lose your money (through incompetence or theivery) the FDIC (in the US) will pay out (or national organizations through the EU). But this comes with built-in limits; the US maxes out at $250,000 but I don't think the insurance exceeds EUR 100,000 in any country in the EU.
Making an analog asset machine readable and tied to a trackable digital asset is certainly an entertaining thought.
Especially for an industry like the food industry where currently we have to trust that the state is controlling them correctly or even that they are controlling them themselves (which several food scandals showed that this isn't working very well).
But we're still early days in that regard. None of the existing crypto coins could handle the necessary transaction volume.
You can use any computer, wipe it and use something like Tails to access the blockchain. There is not a centralized supplier of blockchain manipulation devices.
It's not that the system can't be exploited, it's introducing incentives to make it economically unviable to do so.
* Porn
* Donations to wikileaks
* Pot
* Sending money to Venezuela
* Leaving Venezuela with your wealth intact
* Payments without giving all transaction info third parties (PayPal, VISA, etc). Look into Monero for untraceable transactions.
* Digital payments for the unbanked
These are all served better by cryptocurrencies than other alternatives.