Bitcoin inherently is unsuitable to ve used as a currency. Transaction fees are to high and the hash rate means waiting for to long for a transactiom to be approved.
Imagine standing in the queue at your supermarket waiting for a bitcoin transaction approval.
This is a poor take. Bitcoin can be made almost instant if paying via the Lightning Network. The downside is that you must pre-load some channels with satoshis that you can spend, which involves a bitcoin transaction which may take a few hours/days depending on how much you're willing to pay to have it prioritized.
Before you complain that "this is too slow," consider what the equivalent is in the banking world. Imagine you walk into a shop which only takes cards, and you have no bank account.
You must go to a bank, talk to a rep, fill out a bunch of paper work, wait for some background checks to be done, then have a card issued to you via snail mail. Now you can go to the shop (days later).
Your initial, flawed assumption is that people have already done this and already have a card to pay with. Most people in the developed world have this access now, but it didn't come instantly - it has progressed over about 3 decades. Back in the 90s, if you weren't paying with cash, you would be writing out a cheque in the store and holding up the queue.
So when you unravel your assumption, it's actually much faster to acquire some bitcoin and load some payment channels. Just few people have done it yet, and the software for doing it is under heavy development.
Give it a decade or so, like we have allowed for payment cards to proliferate, and the assumption will be that people already have some loaded payment channels which are ready to make instant payments. There will be no standing in queues waiting to pay.
This is a beautiful response, clear and to the point, perfectly addressing the parent comment... but do you feel like you're making any progress with the explanations?
It seems like every bitcoin thread on hacker news endlessly generates nothing but 2013/14 era FUD. I don't see people installing lightning wallets and playing around.
Sending physical dollars through the mail is also expensive and slow. That’s why there are additional layers built on top of the base layer, like lightning network and RGB.
Imagine standing in the queue at your supermarket waiting for a bitcoin transaction approval.