Unfortunately, blockchains sprung into popularity right around the time traditional bank transfers were finally prodded into the 21st century (SEPA, UPI, FedNow, etc).
Which means they're now competing against a digital, trusted-counterparty system.
Which means they're now competing against a digital, trusted-counterparty system.
Basically Bitcoin exists because nerds wanted to play Wolf of Wall Street and thought the government was holding them down.
And because of poor timing as mentioned, they just seem like a shabby deal since nowadays it’s entirely possible to get nearly all the benefits in the existing system without the drawbacks.
Nobody actually uses blockchains for accounts or money transfers. (Nobody as in actually nobody.)
Lots of people use blockchains for speculation purposes, though.
The title of its white paper is “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”[0].
How is that not ‘competing with banks’?
No, that was "literally" the user-facing justification.
But it was created as a get-rich-quick scheme for nerds.
Sure you can argue that currently it is only used for get rich quick schemes.
But to argue that it was get rich quick schemes from the start is innecessary.
Also while get rich quick schemes are a problem with crypto, and there are crypto securities that evade regulation, there's also tax evasion, cybersecurity ransomware payments, drug trade, and not an insignificant amount of real legitimate transactions.
You can again argue that the real transactions serve to pool illegitimate usecases with legitimate ones, like an xkcd mirror on the Tor network.
But that would be a more nuanced and accurate take.