That's a bold statement. For example, I'm in New York at the moment and I've used my credit card to pay for the hotel bill, for meals, cash advances, store purchases, rail tickets. How exactly would bitcoin be a more credible alternative?
It will take time Al, no doubt about it. It cannot do this overnight.
Disruptive technologies move rapidly though, so think about decentralised currencies as you would social media & mobile phones. It is unfathomable to think how far they have come since 2005. The internet of things is next up, and I've no idea how IOT & Bitcoin could be used together, but there are so many possibilities considering IOT designers and early adopters are the same types of people that are likely to adopt Bitcoin.
so on to your question. In store purchases typically require the consumer to have a card and the shopkeeper to have a scanner & register. This whole process is going to be turned upside down within 5-10 years imo. I already see so many cafe's these days using tablets at POS. Where there are tablets, there is the internet, so it's easy for developers to release api's to enable Bitcoin to work with all kinds of POS software, which undoubtedly run on android and ios.
From the customer's point of view, we are used to having money & cards. But this will begin changing too as people (initially internet natives) use their RFC phones for transactions. Sure if they have an phone with a barcode/scanner, they don't even need a cash register, they can simply scan, purchase and leave. I'm going to lump couponing & loyalty schemes in there too, as they will increasingly be used in phones, such as Wallet that i believe is available for quite a while on IOS.
There are a lot of websites, cafe's and so forth who are currently selling their products and services much cheaper if the consumer uses bitcoin. I've seen cafe's & clothes shops promote this fact, heck even a Tesla car was bought using them.
There are 2 reasons for items being cheaper:
1. No merchant fees. So it is considerably cheaper to sell via bitcoin as I said earlier.
2. The shop owners want to invest in bitcoins, as they will no doubtedly increase in value.
Will Bitcoin replace Visa & Mastercard?
No, I don't think so. We will use both due to the advantages and disadvantages of both.
