Hey folks, first time poster long time lurker.
Interesting topic. Bitcoin has been gaining traction for years and although it's been around almost a decade it's still relatively new. As for more places you can use it on the brick and mortar side, out here in Las Vegas the casinos and as it would appear, certain gentleman's clubs are now accepting it. As far as crytocurrency goes, I would consider bitcoin the gold and litecoin the silver as the block chains are identical albeit bitcoin has a finite amount of coins (21 million- should be exhausted by 2140) that can be mined versus Litecoin which supposedly has four times that supply available for mining.
Cryptos aside, the thing that has me paying attention is Ethereum. Not because of the currency itself or the convoluted gas, gwei, and gas limit prices in which to send it, but the ability for the ether network to directly interface with smart contracts. Smart contracts are what banks and many other businesses are interested in pursuing. JP Morgan Chase is already investing money in developing its own block chain for smart contracts with folks over at block ledger for just about everything financial. Among these I hear that mortgages are of particular interest seeing currently they require tons of paperwork to be stored all over the place both at the bank, with the client, title companies, etc. Anything written to the block chain is absolute and cannot be changed or modified and they auto-execute given their parameters to do so. Companies are now looking at this to prevent voter fraud, a form of receiving news from more reputable sources (if that's possible), gambling platforms, P2P contract agreements, the list goes on. Also we can't forget the capabilities of ERC20 tokens which is an entirely different subject all together and how they essentially work inside of DAPPS on top of ether. Occasionally credit cards are involved in this especially when it comes to something like marijuana dispensaries for example which are cash only businesses. This allows merchants to not have to hold obscene amounts of cash all the time and actually hold money in an account by using USD>crypto token>back to USD in an account for that particular card. It also allows customers to pay with credit/debit card instead of cash only which is far more convenient. Again, just an example but tokens will be used within applications typically used for payment from customers for that particular platform.
So as far as cryptos go, block chain technology at least on the ethereum side is going to literally change how we do things globally. It's a big part of fintech and appears to be what all the big players in the corporate world are betting their money on, literally. I would even be willing to go as far as saying it will be worth more than bitcoin at some point. As for the 100's of other coins out there, many swear by them (monero is developing quite the fan base for it's anonymity and coin mixing capabilities) but honestly I'm following smart contracts in this particular space. That's not to say I don't also own a hardware wallet with various coins inside. I have zero intention on using coins to actually purchase anything except when an ICO with a nice white paper may rear its head. But that's pretty rare seeing most are pump and dumps.