Cryptocurrency still works the same as it ever did. I would be more concerned that the average bitcoin transactions costs over $11 dollars (down from over $37 USD a month ago)
You pay a lot in credit card fees, only that the true cost is obfuscated into the prices of the goods and services.
Also, bank transfers aren't cheap. For example, in Costa Rica, to transfer any amount from an account in bank A to another account in bank B, you pay a fee in the range of 1$-3$, irrespective of the transferred amount. If you consider transfer across countries, then you enter into 50+$ transfer fees.
I didn't think anyone would actually try to defend bitcoin's astronomical and completely unnecessary transaction fees. Cryptocurrencies can be a solution to everything you mentioned, just not bitcoin. Litecoin, Dogecoin and Bitcoin Cash are all bitcoin clones with more throughput and their transaction fees are a few cents to fractions of a cent while their transaction counts are on average in the same ballpark as bitcoin with a lot more headroom.
If you want an actual transaction on the actual chain that can actually be spent then you need to pay the giant bitcoin transaction fee. Why would anyone put up with the extreme convoluted nonsense of the lightning network when they could use any other cryptocurrency and have almost no fees because they aren't constraining their block sizes to sell a second layer?
There is no technical reason to do this, it was purely a political propaganda based move.
Before you respond with "but disk" or "but network" or "but cpu" look at the actual bitcoin throughput (about 700KB every 10 minutes) and look at how much hard drive space you can buy for the cost of one transaction. Then realize that individuals don't even need to sync with the chain to use cryptocurrencies. This is a well worn road.
If only. It's not off chain when you open a channel, rebalance a channel, or close a channel. On-chain Fees need to be paid at every step of the way.
High BTC fees impede the Lightning Network from being a true scaling solution, an obvious fact that has been dismissed for many years by adherents of absurdly small block sizes.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...