From my view, and despite the initial promises of Bitcoin, it’s being used by people of means to get even more money than they already have.
It would definitely be better if the learning curve was shallower and the UI's easier, so that more people could be saved.
The system pays for itself via transaction fees, which are used to "lock" the transaction history in a completely decentralised way.
Bitcoin is very useful to those who understand it, but if it weren't so hard to understand to common people it would be an even greater success, it would be a practical option to those who have internet and smartphones, that's still a minority in the country, but not as much as zelle.
Despite that almost everyone have heard of bitcoin in venezuela, another big reason for the undeveloped potential of it is the black-mailing from local authorities to anyone they knew had bitcoins, mostly when price went up fast. There's fear in letting know authorities you have cryptocurrencies.
I'm not in Venezuela anymore, but I still use bitcoin on a monthly basis to send money across borders to my family.
And the security of it gives me a guarantee not offered by anything else, by far!!!. I won't get my money blocked, like it happened to me with a US bank account, for trying to spend all of my money at once (~2k$).
So theoretically a central authority should be able to offer all of that, but in practice, they're all made of human being's decisions, which rules change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and susceptible to whims. In other words, unstable and not trustworthy. We have also lived what those central authorities can become
Once you've understand how truly secure money can be, it's hard to go back.
It’s the only cryptocurrency that has institutional financial support.
Indeed, though I don’t see how BTC could help — it’ll just be one more currency you’re not able to convert local money into, surely?
It’s not that I don’t regret not putting £10,000 into BTC when it was worth $250/coin (I absolutely do!) it’s just that I expect that degree of variability to work in both directions.
In the US, people who wanted to donate to Wikileaks were forbidden to do so.