bitcoins tx fee just to move funds costs ~20minutes to 1 hours minimum wage.
many africans learn about bitcoin. find out it isnt suitable and just use it as a gateway into altcoins which are cheaper and more suitable to transact with.
The same thing will happen in the western world when the price of bitcoin goes about a certain level. Probably $100,000 (a million?) Hard to say really, but with only 21 million bitcoins the likelihood of everyone owning bitcoins will get further and further beyond the reach of most people. Altcoins will have their place alongside bitcoin which will act as a clearing house for larger size transactions which is why in Africa bitcoins adoption is unlikely to occure anytime soon.
by gateway i dont mean clearing house. i mean learning experience. buzzwords, definitions. .. they will use bitcoin as a gateway to learning not a gateway payment
bitcoin wont be a clearing house for altcoins. people will just altcoin to fiat direct without btc as middleman.
do you really think people will use bitcoin as a 'clearing house' if it costs $20 a tx... when they could just fiat to altcoin for pennies without involving bitcoin.
this is where the bitcoin core devs should have stuck to coding a fee formula,rather that pretending they re expert economists and taking out fee mechanisms to introduce a fee war
think about it. if you have a bunch of nickles and dimes in a bag and you want to swap it for a bank note. would you bother swapping the small denomination coins for gold and then swap again to bank notes.