Less bitcoin itself, but the blockchain technology that backs the currency has a number of novel uses. The idea of a public, cryptographically secure and verifiable ledger could be used in everything from voting to domain name registration.

Your reply is the most valuable & important response of this entire conversation so far. Thank you for saving my faith in the HN community.

For international fund transfers, yes. It doesn't require using correspondent banks. It's a direct, point-to-point transfer of value.