Once again, El Salvador is using lightning network which enable almost instant and practically free Bitcoin payments. PoS isn't perfect either and has it's own sets of problems.
1. Pay huge fees to take your money off the blockchain.
2. Whiz it around a new, totally independent, centralized network where you need an always-on connection to anyone you're paying or receiving from and need to trust any intermediaries you're using, with brand new fees for every transaction and even at rest (so you can pay a "watchtower" to help make sure you don't get cheated).
3. Pay more huge fees to put your money back on the blockchain when you're done.
4. Wonder how you got yourself into a situation where you have all the disadvantages of Visa and Bitcoin, with none of the advantages of either.
We already have existing coins, like Nano, that can handle transactions instantly, for zero fees, and with nearly no energy use, on the main chain.
Security and trust are a lot more important for currency, nano doesn't have that. It has easily been spammed [1]. It barely has a market cap of ~1B$ and has never recovered to it's 2017 prices, so it's not even remotely close to being an ideal candidate for a country's currency.
1: https://www.coindesk.com/nanos-network-flooded-spam-nodes-ou...
Ya know what doesn't have security and trust? Putting your entire country on two custodial wallets and having all your citizen's wealth in the hands of two foreign companies (channel factoried or no). No one in El Salvador actually owns any Bitcoin. It baffles me how anyone could get on board with the original ideals of BTC, then defend what's happening now.
But yeah, if you sell this to me as a test of lightning at scale, then I'm definitely more interested in it, while still thinking a super volatile asset is a bad currency.
The volatility will come down as the market caps get larger, but it'll never go away (I mean even fiat currencies and gold's price fluctuate on a daily basis).
The energy usage (not waste if you consider it to be a useful thing) will only go up as the price goes up, but it'll use increasingly renewable % and stranded energy and even bankroll new renewable power plants that wouldn't have been profitable to start.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tatianakoffman/2020/07/14/this-...
So, not the same kinds of returns and drawdowns as BTC/USD, but enough to make one's eyes water and stomach churn. Forex has always had a reputation for volatility.
I think when Bitcoin approaches Gold's price, you can expect similar volatility because by then large institutions/countries would be holding it.
Also on a long term basis, it appreciates an average of ~300% year over year which is much better than the dollar which is depreciating on purpose.
Gold isn't used directly because it's not convenient, are you gonna transport a heavy metal that you can't divide into small portions to pay for stuff? No! Lightning network wallets makes even tiny payments of couple satoshis very easy/instant/almost free.