Do you know my biggest pet peeve about people’s understanding of bitcoin?
They think of it only as money.
This narrow scope keeps people from appreciating the bigger picture: bitcoin is the unit of account for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
Everybody can patch into that system and use it for whatever purpose they want. To date, that’s mostly buying and selling it. Within the next year or two, far beyond.
Scoff if you want. In the past year or so, ventures like Sovryn, Lightning Network, Opennode, and RSK built the foundations for scalable payment and financial rails on bitcoin’s blockchain.
Soon, sidechains, smart contracts, and settlement platforms will use bitcoin as a permissionless settlement protocol for all sorts of transactions.
It’s only a matter of time.
Do you know why you have such a large pet peeve?
The white paper that spawned Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies stated that Bitcoin is "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". Bitcoin was born because of the 2008 financial crisis, and it grew as the "Magic Internet Money" until the central banks noticed and crippled it.
And that's not it. You're thinking as if Bitcoin can be used for any physical thing now, and it's not. You need to pay fees to use Lightning Network. You need to pay fees to use Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Cash and other cryptocurrencies have managed to solve this issue in their own ways.