I didn't know the UK had many credit card users. I'm used to Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, and most people get by without any credit card at all.

It's true though that a lot of retail merchant fees on their payment gateways are excessive, especially things like credit cards and PayPal, and especially in the US. In the Netherlands we have a somewhat cheaper alternative called iDeal, around 30 to 60 cents per transaction depending on what bank you pick. Bitcoin is certainly cheaper than PayPal, but you have to take into account other costs as well. Bitcoin needs a payment system like BitPay because you can't allow yourself as a merchant to have funds that are incredibly volatile and change 10-20% in value daily. BitPay asks 1% for their transactions, or a monthly fee, which is still pretty competitive, but not so much in countries where credit cards aren't widely used.

Also, Bitcoin isn't as cheap as it used to be. Heck I made some charts recently and wrote an article analysing Bitcoin transaction fees so I might as well expand on that a bit.

The black line shows the average Daily Bitcoin transaction fee per transaction in US Dollars, calculated on the basis of blockchain.info data. The second chart shows a close-up of this year:
https://i.imgur.com/Qst9HLT.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/VGbXzu1.jpg

Basically, this year miner fees went from $0.01 to, on average in December, $0.27 cents. Now that Bitcoin prices are dropping, I'm expecting miner fees to also fall. This is, actually, a good thing for Bitcoin as a payment system, because had prices kept going up, miner fees would've most likely gone up as well.

It's difficult to say though whether miner fees are more dependent on transaction size rather than Bitcoin price or vice versa. When someone pointed that out I made a chart looking at average transaction size, price, as well as average daily fee per transaction: https://i.imgur.com/ot98Uz5.jpg

It looks like transaction size is more important than bitcoin price for the average transaction fee, but I'd need to have a look at more minute data to see whether fees of small transactions, say $1, have also had to deal with rising transaction fees. They might not have gone from $0.01 to $0.27, but a rise from 1 cent to 10 cents on a dollar is relatively already quite a hike. That's a lot of detailed work on blockchain data though so I'm procrastinating on it. Also, that work becomes redundant when Bitcoin falls in price and miner fees drop again anyway  

Edit: Also, I realise I really need to check who pays the miner fee in BitPay transactions. Does BitPay take on that fee? The merchant? The customer? I couldn't find anything about it on the net and I really don't like not knowing things when I research stuff.

Not much of a point to Bitcoin in Europe though. With SEPA you can get money anywhere in Europe for free decently quick, and I can already withdraw money anywhere in Europe from any ATM machine, buy from every store in Europe, as well as pay any online merchant through my bank with no fees almost instantly.

Perhaps it'll be the centre of operations to run stuff in the US and elsewhere though, because the UK, especially the Isle of Jersey, is sortof a financial free-haven. But Europe itself hasn't got nearly as much trouble with its banking system compared to the ancient infrastructure they use in the US.

Exchanges that operate solely on the basis of crypto for crypto trades, say BTC/LTC, are far easier to maintain because for now governments don't regulate them nearly as much. A BTC/USD exchange on the other hand needs to register as a money service business with, in the US, FinCEN, for example, and I'm sure other countries carry similar regulations.

Also, it's really not that complex or cumbersome if you do it once. BTC-E and Cryptsy are both exchanges that require a minimal amount of personal information, at least for me in the EU. BTC-E also carries a few alt coins vs. USD pairs.

However, you are right in that it presents some difficulties if, for example, you intend to trade alt currencies. You are continually running Bitcoin-volatility-risk and cannot trade (most) alts independent from Bitcoin. This is a weakness for alts, but only as long as they stay small. Something like Litecoin is slowly getting its own services, but it remains to be seen whether it can actually get a function ancillary or as a replacement to Bitcoin.

Most altcoins are pretty much leveraged Bitcoin. When Bitcoin goes up, they often go up faster, when Bitcoin drops, they often go down faster. Litecoin and a few other big alts are becoming more independent the more people trade them, but big swings in Bitcoin impacts the entire alt coin market.

Just take a look at coin market cap to see how the alts move. Click on the charts for a longer time frame, and you'll see most of them look quite similar.

A few smaller alts can move independently for a while simply because they are small. I made a basket of alt-coins more than a month ago and cashed out a while back. WorldCoin, Megacoin, and Quarkcoin had a nice run back then, but unless an alt-coin gets its own movement going - in terms of innovation, marketing - any price movement in them is purely speculative and highly dependant on Bitcoin.