As a means of payment in the SEPA region, Bitcoin is far worse on cost (free vs $5-10 in my experience), and sometimes worse on speed (1 - 1.5 business days for SEPA to clear).
So in this geographic area, Bitcoin is literally losing to a combination of the legacy banking system, and a huge, multi country, multi lingual, somewhat unwieldy bureaucracy.
That is still an EU payment system, which has improved a lot since the start of Bitcoin. I just need to transfer money to strange places and banks are pretty often crappy at that stuff, best solution I have is to send my credit card around the world.
> That is still an EU payment system, which has improved a lot since the start of Bitcoin.
Which shows how pathetic the main development team behind Bitcoin is (the core team). The fact that they haven't managed to fix problems that are years old and steadily getting worse is inexcusable. It should be a walk in the park for them to out compete a massive, political entity like the EU and the traditional banking sector.
I hear you on the "strange places", that was where BTC was supposed to shine. It hasn't made any inroads into underserved markets that I'm aware of, e.g. less well-off countries and unbanked people. That is a pipe dream as long as the fees are so high to move funds around.
