Yup.
And that key feature of "sending money over the internet" thing hasn't worked out very well so far
I've been in it, found the entire system wanting, and got out. May get in again to enjoy gamble in speculative bubbles, but as a technology, it is still in the early and massively-sucking and increasingly-sucking days.
Like railroads in the 18th century, they utterly changed society, but most investors lost their shirts along the way.
Scalability, inconvenience, insecurity, and transaction fees all suck to varying degrees at varying times.
It used to be that transactions would take 5-10 minutes to confirm, and that seemed mildly inconvenient but acceptable due to low costs. Now, it varies wildly, e.g., between 61 and 426 minutes in the last week [1]. I just bought software last night and the transaction cleared in fewer seconds than I could notice, and that network handles orders of magnitude more transactions than does BTC.
Costs. BTC transaction costs used to be astonishingly trivial. Now, they fluctuate wildly depending on network congestion, and average well over $20/transaction. [2] This is nuts. A BTC transaction has to be over $750 to be better than break-even compared to a 3% credit card transaction fee. The days of buying a pizza with BTC are long gone, unless you want to pay more in fees than for the pizza. But it might make sense for buying a Tesla, if your fiat-exchange costs on the input side are not too high.
Inconvenience and insecurity. You can either keep your BTC with someone else, which means you don't control it ("Not your keys, not your coin", see also multiple exchange hacks and/or exit scams), or you must roll your own. This involves first, extensive research to avoid selecting a wallet that has either been deliberately designed to steal your bitcoin, or just has unknown vulnerabilities. Then, you need to have absolutely solid key management to avoid both having your BTC stolen bay targeted malware attacks, or losing it because you lost your key, crashed your drive, etc. I find this daunting with a solid tech background, getting individual users to successfully and conveniently do it is not going to happen.
Paul Graham made an excellent point about this yesterday [3]
In short, without MASSIVE improvements, BTC and many other cryptos are nothing more than gambling on vaporware.
And that is ignoring the deliberately engineered-in catastrophic energy consumption, which is literally more than the energy consumption of entire countries, when we need desperately to be cutting energy usage to minimize anthropometric global warning
Sure IFF [4] the system could be scaled to handle billions of transactions per day at a cost of pennies per transaction (compare with ACH network costs), and with a usable and secure UI/UX, sure it WOULD be fantastic.
But over a decade since those promises, all of the metrics: scalability, security, transaction time, costs, are tracking in the wrong direction.
I really wish someone could point me to some cruptocurrency that has these solved. I'd genuinely like to see it and would use and advocate for it.
But until then, I can only hope they enjoy their gambling.
[1] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/avg-confirmation-time
[2] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
[3] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1364986808900202513
[4] If and Only If