An article in the Wall Street Journal in 2019 observed, “It has been a decade since bitcoin was born, yet consumers hardly use it—or the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies—to pay for things.”

a. Why do consumers rarely use cryptocurrencies to buy goods and services? 

b. What advantages might using cryptocurrencies have over buying things with cash, a check, or a credit card? What would need to happen for those advantages to be sufficient to cause people to switch to cryptocurrencies from other means of payment?