It's very interesting to see how bubbles plays out. I do think cryptocurrencies are real and have big potential, but after seeing likes tron, verge, and doge, I also believe the current valuations are biggest bubbles of our lifetimes. Yet, you see people justifying ~10b$ valuation on the premise of a whitepaper written with broken english, then partnerships that are merely vaporware (remember iota announced msft partnership, yet it was more like iota was using azure products).
Interesting times. Just play into people's irrational decisions and you'd make big bucks.
With <30 transactions/s, which is state-of-art, they don't have any future. If a better protocol keeping Satoshi's goals but more scalable is invented, then we will see something that might not be just a bubble.
Technology isn't even the biggest issue - even if you had fast zero fee transactions you still have the problem of inherent volatility and deflation. Volume doesn't help with volatility here, at least not in the current designs that have fixed money supply - the incentive to hold becomes even larger the more use a coin sees - you make a contract for x coins in 10 months that's worth 10x - that just makes everything too complicated.
If someone figured out a way to peg the value of crypto to some other big currency that would have potential - but then the speculators wouldn't be making 10x.
Services like BitPay require transactions to go through quickly. If your transaction arrives an hour too late the bitcoin price in usd has changed and bitpay refunds you your money or asks you to send more money. In both cases you have to pay the transaction fee again.
I wouldn't be surprised if a high transaction fee increases the speed of deflation. Smaller transactions are stuck and will be forgotten. Spending the currency is difficult. All you can do is hold or convert to fiat.
