In my lifetime, if I were to compare 3 numbers - no. of hours there was no electricity (X), no. of hours there was no mobile data coverage so that I could continue doing transactions without electricity (Y) and no. of hours Fedwie/ACH was down (Z) which prevented me from bank transfers, I'd say X and Y and at least 2 orders of magnitude bigger than Z.

If Fed/ACH going down for a few hours bothers you a lot but electricity/mobile network reliability doesn't faze you, you must be living in a truly unique place.

My computers and network are powered by uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) which I highly recommend for every important system. I have a generator in case of extended outage, which I also highly recommend to everyone who is able to have one at home, regardless of whether you own a computer.

I personally have fiber, cable, and LTE feeding my home gateway. This might seem like overkill to non-tech folks, but I recommend it to anyone whose productivity/career is highly reliant on being online.

I realize this isn’t necessarily a typical home setup, but I also think most people are horribly unprepared for many potential situations.

This isn’t a claim that I have zero downtime at home. It’s only to say that if my Bitcoin node is offline then any hope of relying on fiat banking was abandoned much earlier.

> This isn’t a claim that I have zero downtime at home. It’s only to say that if my Bitcoin node is offline then any hope of relying on fiat banking was abandoned much earlier.

Even if I had a setup like yours, I'd give up on bitcoin before "fiat banking." You can't buy gas for your generator with bitcoin.

Yet.

I don’t mean this flippantly.

One of the cryptocurrency is going to win out for day-to-day usage; the question is which.

As Andreas likes to say: “email used to be a multi-step series of memorized commands from a green terminal in a University.

Now my Mom can do it with a touch of her finger.”

I believe we’ll get that in the near-ish future.

> One of the cryptocurrency is going to win out for day-to-day usage; the question is which.

I don't know why you're so confident about this? It's entirely feasible that none of them are ever usable for day-to-day transactions.

Personally, I haven't seen any evidence that Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) is ever going to enter the mainstream. Even if it did, I don't see any benefit to using it over USD for the vast majority of people.