Here is an interesting article about why cryptocurrency hasn't been adopted more:
https://dashnews.org/why-buying-coffee-with-bitcoin-wont-get-cryptocurreny-mass-adoption/Now, using cryptocurrencies such as payments, and particularly Dash, does improve the payment experience from higher security to lower fees, and eventually the superior money and payment system will prove more attractive than legacy options. However, in the interim the difference between the two experiences is simply not great enough to provide a compelling reason to switch, and in many cases can provide disincentives due to the additional effort and costs associated with acquiring and offloading cryptocurrency.
What is needed for cryptocurrencies to build real adoption and regular economic use is to identify strong deficiencies in the current economic system and target them aggressively. These can be any of the situations where the paying experience is poor, from high-chargeback and expensive fee industries such as online gaming and remittances to areas with currency problems such as hyperinflation-plagued nations in South America, Africa and elsewhere. In these areas, there exists a significant enough gap between the experience of paying with fiat currency and legacy systems and using cryptocurrency to warrant a change.
However, a compelling use case alone isn’t enough. An industrious entrepreneur must find a way to turn an opportunity to use this particular tool into an all-in-one product that’s easily accessible to the targeted customer. For example, taking the use case of remittances, a potential user must be able to acquire and send funds via cryptocurrency cheaply and easily, with a one-stop shop approach where they can visit a single vendor and be walked through the entire process without complications. Distilling the rather complicated process of buying, sending, receiving, and selling digital funds all into a neat, easy to understand, and cost-effective user flow is a tricky business, and in particular may require the creation of specific liquidity providers and other tools to facilitate this process. But make no mistake, it’s necessary to make this whole adoption thing work.
In the early days bitcoin was used for gambling - but this has stalled, in part because wallets like the one operated by Coinbase close you down if you transfer your coins to a gambling website.