Surely people here are not so short sited that they actually think these 'not useful' cases are really not useful or that these are the only use cases.
Right now you could travel around Thailand and bring only your phone and passport. There is a service that allows you to give btc and get a code that can be used at any ATM of a major bank and get cash. You can cut down the 8% spread of changing money at the airport to 1/3rd of that at least. That is something you can do right this second.
Not only that but paying for something online is fantastic. No excessive information, no transactions cancelled because of a companies' opaque fraud protection system, no chance of your card number being stolen, no need to generate a temporary card number, no need to worry about your bank's opaque fraud protection...
Seriously, if you think bitcoin isn't useful, try using it.
With your Thailand example, the author made the point that it's actually cheaper through P2P model (like Hawala) without the need to eat the exchange spread/fees by changing BTC.
And yeah, fraud is still a huge problem for e-commerce, but how does Bitcoin solve that? As stated in the article, it just pushes more responsibility to the user. Multi-sig doesn't solve that either, you still need a 3rd party escrow provider, who will charge a fee.
P2P? Meaning you have to go find people also on a service that I've never heard of until seeing is plugged in this thread? And why would people in Thailand want to buy a specific currency someone is selling anyway. Even USD or Euros would be rare, but every other currency would be hugely exotic. The service right now allows you to take out cash from bank ATMs that are everywhere.
How does Bitcoin solve fraud? It is devoid of fraud. It doesn't 'just push responsibility to the user' it avoids the broken concept of giving someone all the information necessary to charge money to you at will. The fraud you are describing would be fraud from a business not delivering which isn't on the same level as credit card fraud that is happening on a massive scale.
Right now you could travel around Thailand and bring only your phone and passport. There is a service that allows you to give btc and get a code that can be used at any ATM of a major bank and get cash. You can cut down the 8% spread of changing money at the airport to 1/3rd of that at least. That is something you can do right this second.
Not only that but paying for something online is fantastic. No excessive information, no transactions cancelled because of a companies' opaque fraud protection system, no chance of your card number being stolen, no need to generate a temporary card number, no need to worry about your bank's opaque fraud protection...
Seriously, if you think bitcoin isn't useful, try using it.