Bitcoin is totally useless as a currency because it’s slow, has high transaction fees, and easy to trace. So it’s bad for both regular consumers and criminals alike.
Monero is a solid improvement because it has low fees (so far) and is very hard to trace. So it’s popular for criminals or intense privacy types. It’s still far too slow and hard to use to ever be accepted in your local grocery store. It’s also hard to buy with fiat because most exchanges are scared of it.
What’s really remarkable is how little any of this has changed since ~2016 which was two crypto boom cycles ago. Every single popular cryptocurrency still has the same massive flaws. They’re all either too traceable, too hard to use, too centralized, too slow, too expensive, or too energy intensive. Most of them are many of those things.
In 2010 I was a crypto believer. But the whole space has made so little forward progress in 10+ years. In fact there’s been a lot of backwards progress. Mostly all that’s happened is a lot of people have become obscenely rich from speculation, scams, or the intersection of those two things.
Those of us who hoped for a new way to pay for things in real life are still waiting.