It's not a peer-to-peer electronic gold system. It's by design a peer-to-peer electronic CASH system. There may come a time when microtransactions will need to be off chain, but that time will never come if we don't get a critical mass of users first.
Gold is money. Everything else is a scam.
That's an assertion, not an argument. Money is simply the most marketable (liquid) commodity. In many languages the word "silver" is a synonym for money. It's the thing that eliminates the need for a double coincidence of wants. Using altcoins is basically the same as going back to barter. That's taking money backwards, not forwards.