BTC is actually not very practical for payments and transactions for 2 reasons :
* High transaction costs
* Slow confirmation times
Yes absolutely right! but if you and merchants can use coinbase then it's going to easy and super fast.
.. but if your using coinbase... then you back to using third party systems again... which negates the whole point and purpose of what bitcoin was suppose to be about
EG
if your just going to swap 'balances' within coinbases user database you might aswell just be using paypal.
funny part is that if coinbase/bitpay say that they can send a merchant a FIAT wire transfer the next day.. it just proves that the FIAT wire transfer only takes a day
the whole point of bitcoin was that merchants should directly accept bitcoin for their goods and then that merchant pays salaries and its suppliers in bitcoin the same day. without the need to put funds into an account/address/channel that requires another persons agreement/control/signature
just having bitcoin as a asset currency but rely on third party services as they payment method/gateway/route makes bitcoin no better than fiat as a currency. which then just reduces its utility to be just a asset