Agreed and setting fees stops spam transactions. What I don't understand is why anyone would send a transaction in Bitcoin, which is slow and expensive compared to say other reliable coins like my favourites #gridcoin or #solarcoin, which are much faster and have far lower fees (even when exchange fees are added).
Theoretically you would expect party A and B to negotiate a payment method that suits them both. Party A owes party B 1BTC; party A offers party B the market rate of 1BTC in an altcoin, party B complains about exchange fees to return the balance to BTC, party A counters that the uncertainty of block inclusion and speed of payment in BTC should offset party B exchange fees. Party B considers that value is value and accepts a far faster payment in the altcoin.
Then consider exchanges have zero fees and it's clear that using altcoins is faster and cheaper.
Current recommended fee is 0.1%,
Network effect, network effect, brand name and network effect.
"Everyone" has heard about Bitcoin, while even quite some insiders in the crypto-currency-community haven't heard about your favorite coins. It's needed with two parties to transact, and both parties needs to support the same coin. Even if both parties does support one other alt, the likelihood that both of them supports the same alt is small.
I believe that there are lots and lots and lots of ordinary folks that buys Bitcoin as an investment. Brand name matters; probably Bitcoin seems to be a much safer bet than some random altcoin.
And then the on-ramps and off-ramps matters too. If you have physical cash and want to exchange it into crypto currency, what would you do? Most likely you'd visit a site like Localbitcoins - and they serve only bitcoins, period. So even if you want to exchange your physical cash into some rare altcoin, you'd probably go via Bitcoin.
What I really don't understand is why organizations like OpenBazaar and BitPay still stick to their Bitcoin-only-policy. With payments being their bread-and-butter, it would most likely be prudent to diversify and give people options to use cheaper and better alternatives; particularly when even the current Bitcoin developers seems to think the Bitcoin is not for payments but for "store of value".
Right, I suppose I should have said crypto-aficionados! The general public are going to get sucked into whatever the headlines tell them to buy.
Also as you allude to, most people just want to get-rich-quick and aren't interested in a new payments system, let's hope that can get turned around at some point.
And that's most likely what's driving the crypto bubble - common folks searching for a profitable place to invest their savings.
I believe what gives Bitcoin value is the promise of usability as a means of payment. It is not and cannot be a safe "store of value" without a good usability value - if the only usability case is speculation on future bitcoin prices (plus some criminal corner-cases, including tax evasion), then Bitcoin is just an advanced ponzi scheme, it's bound to crash hard at some point.
I have some digital tulips for sale! Do you want to buy some?