But it seems that some people thought it fixes the "i want to get rich fast" problem, and was bloated as a result. It was never meant for that problem.
Not fast. Most cryptocurrencies have unbearably slow transaction or confirmation times. Maybe if you are buying a car, they will be confirmed by the time the paperwork is done. Even with initiatives like the lightning network, it's still slow. So much so that some of the major exchanges will tally your transactions off-chain, to be confirmed later.
> cheap
It really isn't. Be it gas fees or computational power
> secure
Eh, depends. Surely the transaction itself may be from the blockchain's viewpoint. But if your coins get stolen or your exchange gets hacked you really have no recourse. And that's just one issue. And before anyone says "hardware wallet", exploits have been found for those as well, assuming they were even secure to begin with.
> anonymized
They are not anonymous. With a few exceptions, all transactions are visible in the chain, forever. This works as long as you never need to convert to/from fiat. The moment you do, your identity is exposed - even retroactively. It's way worse than cash. Tumblers only help so much.
edit: forgot to add that it's also very energy efficient
No it is not. In banking and in payments, security typically means that there are guarantees your money will not suddenly disappear or get stolen by hacks and fraud, which cryptocurrencies have zero guarantees against. In fact, it is extremely likely that at some point your money will disappear, because the value of these coins is extremely manipulated. And that is not even getting into the huge number of defi hacks, rug pulls and bankruptcies that have happened recently.
If you want to send big money from an account to another, or from a country to another, Bitcoin is really cheap, secure and anonymized.
Crypto does not solve any of those issues. The actual solution to most of those issues is called a "payment service" of which there were many that existed before blockchains. How is it do you suppose that companies like ebay and amazon were able to securely and quickly process internet payments in the 90s? They certainly didn't need blockchains to do it. You could argue that they aren't anonymized, but neither is crypto; it is only pseudonymous at best, in practice it is not even that as the exchanges that do the bare minimum of fraud prevention will require you to identify yourself.
I pay people from Argentina to Ukraine and there are myriad ways I can transfer them money quickly (seconds, sometimes), cheaply (down to fractions of cent on the dollar) and securely without resorting to crypto. I have no need for total anonymity but from what I hear crypto is not great on that front, either.
I think the idea of digital cash is cool, but practically speaking, it isn’t enough of a upside to deal with crypto. I can’t even tell you the last time I used actual cash. It was at least a year ago.