BTC has no role to play in the real world affairs. People who try to create such a role are confused between asset and currency. The design itself only considers pure virtual activity with no touch with real world. People also mistake the buzz words such as "peer-to-peer", "border-less", "decentralised" etc as the problems to be solved. But sadly these are not real problems. The insignificant problems (speed and fees) are hardly enough to sell and these problems are going away anyway. I have no respect to Nakamoto because he ignored the most important element (govt and authorities) in social situation and still want to sell it as some solution to social situations. Hardly any country has regulatory framework that deals with btc.
The problems are rooted in the philosophy of crypto, not in the code. So, the beauty of blockchain tech is irrelevant for btc. It is like selling a bad app by showing how great Android is.
1) Bitcoin does not provide controlled visibility, because it doesn't recognise the existence of governments. Now if you make changes to provide visibility to authorities, ALL privacy is gone. If you don't, then ALL visibility is gone.
2) Fees are rooted in the design. Whatever consensus you invent for a public blockchain, you can't escape rewarding the work of validating transactions. So zero fees are not possible.
Public blockchains sacrifice all good qualities of a business application for the sake of trust-less environment which is not even actually a problem to solve in many contexts. Also they make it extremely costly to run small amount of code or small storage. Who wants their business code to be validated by all arbitrary people in the world?
Most ICOs are sharing economy concepts similar to uber model. Lack of a responsible intermediary and costs will make these "innovations" to fail, if they ever have to touch real-world activities.
Bulk of the blockchain activity will move to business collaborations which might not even look like a blockchain. Crypto coins will be used in most business blockchains, but these coins will be value-less tokens and very specific to the business or institutional activity.
Sorry to say but for me Bitcoin has a role in real world. Though it runs through a certain technology or not even regulated by government it greatly influence a lot of people. Why? It is just because there is money involved, they can gain their income when they engaged in this task. It is a great opportunity for every individual and families, therefore it has a role to every community as well as to every country who are patronizing Bitcoin.
