Surely plenty of people did this in the last 5 years?
in my area, i can buy food pay bills and live happily on bitcoin..
.. oh wait. now i remember i been in bitcoin since 2012 and over the time I spoke to my local stores and hlped them out.
unless you have many people in your town that are talking to merchants for you.. if you want something. you are going to have to ask for it yourself.
again bitcoin is just code. no legs, no arms.
it cannot get on a plane and come to your town. its something you have to do.
too many people sit their waiting for magic.
and they wait
and they wait
and they ask
"Even now in 2017, why is bitcoin *still* not accepted as a major currency?Doesn't make any sense TBH. We should've seen it starting to replace conventional currencies by now."
and they dont seem to understand that their local shop doesnt know that you want bitcoin accepted in their store because you never helped them to be able to accept it.
my advice:
do not sit there waiting for magic.
instead find out if there are other bitcoiners in your area and arrange a meetup at a bar/cafe to discus bitcoin. find out the main retailers in your area that all of you use (most popular retailers to actually benefit from accepting bitcoin due to regular customers) and then out of your group find out the most confident person who can help set things up and go to the retailer and help them.
the best successes are not to speak to managers of branches of national/international retailers as they are just glorified supervisors with no actual local power to make changes.. instead look for the non franchised independant stores where the manager does have decision power over payment methods
Where I live you can't do that. It serves as a store of value, but a very volatile one at that.
I don't expect bitcoin to really replace conventional currencies, it can't. It is too hard to secure, too slow and not scaleable at the moment.
If it were really used by the masses, which is 99.99999% isn't, it would fall under it's own weight almost immediately.
I don't know a single other person who owns Bitcoin, almost no one knows what it even is, why it is good and they have no idea how to buy it! They think you need to mine it!