What Taavet Hinrikus said:
But were not seeing real people use bitcoin. And we dont know what problem it solves.
What I think he meant:
But we're not seeing many affluent bank-customers use bitcoins yet. And that's an opportunity for us.
There's a whole thread on bitcointalk about how people spend their bitcoin and the near unanimous answer was, they don't. Most bitcoin is being held or speculatively traded. It doesn't interface much with traditional marketplaces and very few commercial entities accept bitcoin directly (without going through bitpay or some other provider that converts it to fiat). This doesn't mean it's dead, but it seems quite unlikely that bitcoin (in its current, anonymous incarnation) will be adopted into the financial industry. Many bitcoin supporters don't want that to happen anyway, they'd prefer for bitcoin to subsume traditional fiat. Not gonna happen. But it could continue to exist as a parallel currency used by a minority of individuals with other digital assets taking the place of the lapdog of banks and FIs.
you and many others who think like you do not understand ... bitcoin is not a competitor to the existing financial industry, it totally subsumes it.
Bitcoin users are doing things that traditional finance is not even dreaming of yet. Bitcoiners are getting ahead and making a quantum leap in efficiency versus economic actors bogged down in the legacy system. Bitcoin will be adopted because of competitive pressures, those pressures will not be felt by the mainstream for a long time because their competitors are not even on the same platform. Bitcoin is filling in the niches and edge cases that existing systems don't even recognise or provide services for. By the time mainstream legacy currency users start feeling competitive economic pressures from bitcoin users it will be too late, their business models will be so outdated they will have zero time to catch-up because if their competitors are using bitcoin effectively in such a way as to out-compete them, and they are not, they are already toast.
Think about the Internet users, the early ones, they were getting ahead doing things in ways that no-one dreamed of but made them orders of magnitude more efficient (after they invested in a learning curve, modems, installing browsers, etc) ... many businesses only went online because they had to (it was adopt or perish). Right now it is tech savvy bitcoiners who are making the early knowledge investments to use an admittedly clunky system but by doing so they can avail themselves of bitcoins myriad of efficiencies, particularly with cross-border and private commerce.
Just can't believe how guys like this Transferwise CEO can be so blind to the competitive threat he is facing, knowing everything we know now about technology adoption characteristics and curves. He's toast. Send me his lunch over now and I'll get it over with.