I'd say that's a bad example, because the US is a bit of an outlier in struggling with adoption. Most developed countries switched without a hassle a long time ago (25 years ago in some cases). I actually wasn't aware there was something _other than_ EMV until I came to the US.
To me, this seems like a good reason a cryptocurrency COULD take off. The established payment companies are stuck in the past, and pretty much everyone just upgraded their point of sale equipment to handle chip and pin. We might be ripe for a revolution in the payment space. Credit cards have been dragging their feet, and there's a ton of money flowing through them.
Bitcoin confirmations take 10+ minutes, and there's no notion of a chargeback.
I could see crypto currency replacing Western Union, for sending money to family far away. Replacing credit cards has some gaps on both the consumer and merchant sides.
The advantage of Western Union is that the person receiving the money be unbanked, living in a cash economy, and not even necessarily be literate, never mind technologically literate.
To enable these people to receive and spend cryptocurrency there's a serious "last mile" problem that needs solving, and for everyone else there's usually already a better money transfer solution than Western Union, at least for legal transactions.
The developing world might have been impressively advanced adopting tangible digital goods like mobile phone minute allowances as transferable currency, but expecting liquid local markets in a highly volatile cryptographic tokens "mined" in foreign countries where mining rigs and cheap power are available seems like a big ask.
Agree with your main point, but I think the remittance problem is just as tricky if not more: the BTC MPesa gateway exists (https://www.bitpesa.co/), but so do plenty of reliable low commission ways of converting dollars in the US to MPesa overseas that don't involve exposure to Bitcoin and Bitcoin exchanges
A little aside, I've been using Linux as primary workstation for seven years now. It works great, so I've never understood this "year of the desktop" meme.
On the slashdot back in the late 90s there were breathless articles all the time about how this was going to be the year that the Linux Desktop was going to sweep across the world and surely M$ was doomed.
Two decades later Microsoft is doing quite well and Linux still accounts for a small percent of personal computers.
A phone OS marketed by Google that happens to be derived from Linux code is to "GNU/Linux is going to kill Microsoft and big corporations flexing their power in the software industry" what a hypothetical cardless payment technology run by Paypal that uses a blockchain somewhere on the backend is to "Bitcoin is going to kill fiat currency and the banking oligarchy"
It's not that it can't be used as a desktop OS (it obviously can), but that it will be see widespread adoption (like macOS or Windows) outside of the general Linux userbase.
Yes, I threw out the old meme, but I've been using linux as my primary system for 7-8 years. Despite doing so, I still don't think it will ever be mainstream unless you count android - but that isn't a desktop in my opinion. I'll be happy to count android as a linux destop when my phone replaces my laptop!