Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to various online creators with no fuss. It's really quite simple, no need to overthink it.
Sure, maybe one day the price will crash or the peg fail, but for most intents and purposes it works fine. Monitoring crypto prices and fundamentals is not so bad compared with traditional finance folks having to read through hundreds of all-caps tweets to know how much value the USD will lose this month, or sifting through reddit WSB troll posts to know which stock to buy.
No, you just have to worry about how much your crypto will change in value each day. Bitcoin's value changed by over 7% in just the past month, and in the past year has dropped in value by over 20% twice. That's so much better than worrying about the fraction of a percent in the monthly deltas for USD over the past several decades.
You have the exact same problem with gold, which has increased 30% over the last few months.
USD is controlled by an entity which spends $680 billion / year along with countless lives and 270k barrels of oil a day in order to defend it.
Gold dug out of the ground, then put in high tech vaults which must be similarly actively defended.
That has always been a caveat of new network-effect dependent technologies.
In the early days, the internet wasn't useful to communicate with other people. It was way easier to just call the person on their phone instead of hoping they had a particular messaging application installed on their PC and had it turned on when you were hoping to talk. Its only value propositions were downloading porn for free or finding communities of geeks, trolls and conspiracy theorists. It served those niches well though, and from there slowly grew to attract more and more people and usecases.
Buying at a Bitpay PoS in Japan is just scanning a QR code, instant confirmation (Wechat easy but even foreigners can use it). A P2P sale for a non-insignificant amount of money (~$1.5k): rejected by Paypal, inter-bank transfer would take days to go through. BTC was 5 minutes to wait for a confirmation. Donations through Patreon or other require you to sign-up, go through convoluted systems that sometimes require sending your identity documents, crypto is just copy an address/scan a QR code and confirm in your usual, familiar wallet.
That's off by a factor of 18 even if you want it to be fast, according to https://bitcoinfees.earn.com
"The fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 110 satoshis/byte, shown in green at the top. For the median transaction size of 224 bytes, this results in a fee of 24,640 satoshis." = .0002464 BTC = $2.81
It's a deflationary store of value.
What is Gold valuable for? It's a deflationary store of value (though it does inflate slightly so it's not as good as Bitcoin in that sense).
Deflationary stores of value are valuable.
It's the same reason why a battery is valuable if you have solar panels. It captures excess energy from the system and allows you to store it for later use when you actually need it (like at night when the sun doesn't shine).
When the Fed is printing tons of money, the sun shining... You don't know what to do with all that excess energy. You could buy more electrical appliances to consume that excess electricity (e.g. invest in that hot new startup), but you already have more of them than you know what to do with... You may as well store that excess energy to use later for a rainy day.
