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 current time i am not in favour of spending bitcoin or investing it in any other business, because to me i think if a person simple hold bitcoin, still he can get a good profit from bitcoin.
I have been using up all my dollars on day to day expenses for years and slowly transferring all my saved income into bitcoin.