There has been quite a bit of bad news lately in regards to Bitcoin as a payment system and frankly I'm not at all surprised (I've always thought that Satoshi really hadn't quite thought this aspect through very well).

Although the blockchain invention is perhaps the most significant thing since HTTPS for the internet, Bitcoin as a payment system really doesn't work very well (and I was trying to use it myself for this purpose over the last few years but have basically given up now).

Apart from the slow confirmation times and the low TPS issues - for any average consumer what is the benefit of making an irreversible payment?

Adding to that the complexity of merchants having to deal with txs that may never confirm due to minimum fees with full blocks you simply don't see anything even vaguely threatening to the likes of VISA or Mastercard.

I've already stated that Bitcoin should be focused on the remittance market and as a potential replacement for SWIFT (as it is a very good fit for both of those) but still some people just seem to think that Bitcoin won't have "made it" until they can buy a coffee with it (and most of the people who are saying this are people who probably don't even have enough BTC to buy much more than one coffee).

Now I've thought about it more I think that those pushing for very large block sizes really are rather confused as to what they think this will achieve. If you can't reverse your payment (due to say not getting something delivered) then why would any online purchaser prefer to use Bitcoin (and talking about escrows is just silly as people don't use escrows when normally purchasing things with credit cards as they don't need to - you can generally just complain to your credit card provider and the merchant will lose out which is what most consumers prefer).

What Bitcoin can do *now* is act as a store of value (and is about the most superior such thing apart from the volatility which in recent months seems to be a lot less which is appealing to those wishing to use it for this purpose) so I think that it is far more important for the project to focus on this strength (and its potential to disrupt the remittance market) than on replacing existing payment systems (other than as a person to person payment system which is another great strength that it has).