Yeah I agree that's actually a really big problem in my country also there are basically no local or online stores where we can buy using bitcoins luckily I found a few traders on local bitcoin buying at a higher rate. And normally we don't see any stores which accept gold for making payments so it kind of makes sense.
Yeah, for us it's better to keep our coins or exchange them to our fiat money. I have the same situation that we only have methods to pay online or turn Bitcoin in to our currency by exchanges. Better to wait for it, but in some countries this process can be so long as in my country
In our country there are only few shops who accepts bitcoin but to exchange bitcoin to fiat is very easy, I can actually have it in less than five minute and withdraw my funds directly to an ATM. That was really awesome and I hope our local exchange sites will upgrade more for better experience.
In addition, I can pay bills and even purchase with some participating partners of our exchange sites using my bitcoin and for me that is already some improvement that was not realize in the past.