You don't need to hold BTC for it to be useful for payments. You can already hold USD at Coinbase and send USD to BTC addresses with an on-the-fly conversion (

You don't need to hold BTC for it to be useful for payments. You can already hold USD at Coinbase and send USD to BTC addresses with an on-the-fly conversion (although it will run you 1% today). Or conversely, generate a BTC address for your USD wallet and have all incoming BTC converted on-the-fly (also 1%). For a local cheeseburger in your own country it's never going to make sense to use Bitcoin but there are plenty of other applications where it already makes a lot of sense (remittances, online purchases, goods and services with a high risk of payment fraud, etc.)