That's not really a great selling point. So far most cryptocurrency adoption has either been for speculation or illegal activity. It hasn't caught on in the mainstream at all, either as a currency or a store of value.
Reality: I think cryptocurrency is worse for illicit purchases than many realize and simultaneously better for legitimate purchases than many realize. Pseudonymity is more useful for average users than full anonymity.
Hard to really know for sure what dominates the volume, but based on folks I know with large amounts of Bitcoin, I’d actually guess its been mostly investing for a long time.
That said, I never store value in any crypto, but I do think it is underrated for more legitimate use cases.
The value of bitcoin has risen well over 100% for each year of it's existence.
I'd be shocked to find a person in the western world who hasn't heard of the name at least, while plenty of people I know haven't the slightest clue about slack, atlassian, etc.
But real cryptocurrencies can become popular -- they just need to scale and attach themselves to something that is convenient and popular. That could happen with lots of things, for example Status IM and Ethereum. Or Lightning Networks and some WebRTC sex chat site.
But if Libra gets in there before those other things take off, it could be lights out for digital cash.
The benefits of digital assets are obviously better than old-school pen and paper assets. The same arguments against the internet are being applied to blockchain, and blockchain is going to win just as the internet won.
Fiat currency inflates and is subject to the whims of government. Cryptocurrencies are managed by code. I prefer the code, and I imagine citizens of countries like Venezuela and Turkey would also prefer code over their corrupt governments.
The Internet had many popular use cases years or decades before investor money poured in. Blockchain has already seen a bubble and a bust with exactly one popular use case: trading cryptocurrency, which itself is only really used for speculation and scams.
"Managed by code" is also not really a thing. Humans write the code! And there's no real reason to expect the humans who create the cryptocurrency ecosystem to be any more trustworthy than the humans in government.
Cryptocurrencies have proven to be subject to the whims of the masses, shooting up in value (at least in part) because of speculation. At least fiat money backed by governments try to keep them stable (in general).