If I'm not mistaken (I haven't sent any bitcoin in the past 4 days or so), there was recently a lot of network congestion and transactions were stuck in the blockchain for about a day or two. It's all good now, but situations like those really take away from bitcoin's usefulness as a currency. Who in their right mind would want to use bitcoin and potentially wait a day for a confirmation when they could just as easily pay for something with fiat? That's always been a deal breaker in my eyes, and it's just one of the reasons why I don't like spending bitcoin on things I could pay for with cash or a debit card.
Yes there was a network congestion in the past week when the market started rising and if you are giving a minimal transaction fees, it would get stuck for days while a few days back it would get through in a couple of years, when the market rises and if there are more transactions the only way to move the coins faster is to increase your transaction fees, i did input less than ten thousand satoshi and it went through within the next few blocks, transaction fees are still lower.
Bitcoin will probably always be useful for things on the dark markets and for transactions where a little bit of anonymity is needed. It's also useful for legally grey-area stuff that banks and payment processors don't want to get involved with (cannabis seeds, kratom, you name it). Other than that, there probably won't be much progress. When places like Amazon and eBay start jumping aboard, then bitcoin will have hit mainstream. Until then, its main use is as an investment.
I do agree with some of your sentiment here, but if there are merchants accepting bitcoin, i am sure people will be using that to make their payments instead of using credit cards, you never know how secure those card details will be if you are using it for purchasing online, that is not the case with bitcoin and that is a major difference.
