RE: Who here uses Bitcoin for regular transactions (not trading)?
Actually I agree with Dave. I like Bitcoin but we should not kid ourselves it is not yet ready for day to day use to pay for things. I can give a simple example. I am currently on long term assignment in India where they recently pulled a lot of the circulating currency effectively forcing people to cashless payments. People pay with various mobile phone apps which usually take a few minutes to clear. The problem is the lines at the grocery store check outs stretch for miles. The customer cannot leave until the transaction clears. Each one takes a few minutes and everyone waits. Imagine waiting 10 minutes for each one. Cash is by far the faster option at the moment. It will change. It must change. But dont kid yourselves that it is better yet. The one huge caveat to that is sending money overseas there is simply no comparison there . Cyrpto wins and wins vs the long winded and costly badgering by the banks on every personal detail about the transaction.
You're saying that cash is still much more faster to process in a brick-and-mortar shop than bitcoin transactions, and you're right. It's needed with a very good PoS-system for any electronic payment means to be as fast as cash (except when the customer is an old lady counting hundreds of coins very slowly, or the clerk is inexperienced and don't know how to count the change). (I think that in the future, there won't be any cash register, the Point-of-Sale will be in the shop itself, instant micro transaction whenever you take something from the shelves in the supermarket and move it to the shopping cart - but I digress).
Anyway, I wasn't talking about cash - I was talking about Visa - or credit cards in general - there isn't a lot of competition in that market segment. I'm a late adopter to Bitcoin, I joined in March 2015. Back then Bitcoin was working pretty much optimal as a payment method. Anything Visa could do, Bitcoin could do better.
I could rant tens of kilobytes of text on how bad credit cards are. It was an eye-opener for me in 2010 when Wikileaks got boycotted by the credit cards - back then I understood the importance of Bitcoins, but unfortunately I was too busy with other projects to get properly involved. I wrote a long post about a particularly bad payment experience I had back at ebay.in, trying for more than a week to buy a cellphone there using my credit cards. I've also suddenly found myself stranded while being in-transit, unable to buy a bottle of water for my thirsty kids - surprisingly all my credit cards came up with "declined" in that kiosk.
Really. Everything Visa can do, bitcoin could do better - but that was two years ago. And yes, scaling is obviously an issue.