More accurately, after years of failing to be viable as a currency the salespeople started claiming the goal had never been replacing cash and instead was some sort of poorly defined “store of value” instead of what they’d spent the previous decade spinning stories about.
Since a real reserve currency is stable and backed by consistent demand, it’s unclear why anyone expects a pure fiat currency backed only by a small community of speculators to be successful.
Well, not really. BTC was sort of usable as a currency to a point. You could even buy games on Steam with it.
But it had a 1MB block size limit, which was initially implemented to prevent spam. This was obstinately kept in place, and that quickly destroyed its usefulness as a currency -- since now there's a lot of contention, transacting is slow and expensive. This doesn't bother the people who want an asset to buy once, but makes it useless as a currency.
It was technically possible but nobody seriously did it because the transactions were very slow and fees were massive compared to everything else, not to mention that the deflationary design meant that anyone who did would be mocked for not having held on until the value went up. Remember all of those comments about people buying a pizza with what a few years later would have been thousands of dollars? That sealed its fate as a currency because anyone who has an alternative will be better off using it as long as speculators are pouring money in.
I was using bitcoin as a currency where I could in 2015. 'Seriously'. There were lots of restaurants, businesses, and even people who would accept it for payment, and transaction fees were completely reasonable. There is a lot of corruption and perverse incentives in Bitcoin governance, and I don't use it or hold it at all anymore, so I don't know how feasible it is to actually use as a currency now, other than that the fees are out of control, but I think it's unfair to say 'nobody seriously did it'.
I think most of the people still tied to proof-of-work crypto despite the massive environmental concerns which have become obvious more recently, have switched to a variety of other platforms, bitcoin cash being the closest one to bitcoin (but without the block-size constrained, allowing basically fee-less transactions, though you still have to wait for confirmations)
For full disclosure, I don't hold or use any proof-of-work crypto now (other than perhaps Nano, which is sort of a hybrid that has very small proof-of-work performed by the user making the transaction, and proof-of-stake at the validation/confirmation layer)
I was using “seriously” in the sense of enough volume to be inconvenienced if the system disappeared. There were a handful of businesses around here accepting Bitcoin but it was a small fraction of their sales and I believe most of them said they were converting it to USD immediately.
I heard about this from a few people I knew who tried it but stopped because it was slow and they felt it was more profitable to hold Bitcoin. I’d be quite happy to have Visa/MasterCard see more competition but this didn’t seem like it was ever going to reach that point.
Fees were tiny before it hit the block limit. If you look at the stats before the blocks started filling up, the average fee was around 5 cents USD. Massive fees only started once the blocks started filling up.
And yup, the deflationary model certainly favors not using it as a currency.
Some people relying on 2017 price peak news headlines haven't gotten the memo that fees only spiked temporarily.
Fees are currently 5-10 cents to get in the next btc block and most lightning network transactions complete in 1-2 seconds and cost 1 cent or less in fees.
The speculators want to make money and they don't care how they get that money so they imagine something stupid like a major country adopting it as a reserve currency.
Using El Salvador as an example would be funny because they use Bitcoin as a life raft for remittances, not because the currency is a good fit for day to day transactions.
Since a real reserve currency is stable and backed by consistent demand, it’s unclear why anyone expects a pure fiat currency backed only by a small community of speculators to be successful.