I wonder how much banks are the problem here. I am not sure if payments of a few cents can be realized online without loosing money on fees to payment providers or banks.
AFAIK, this is the "micropayment" problem, that people were hoping bitcoin would solve.
Bitcoin is only economical for very large transactions - the energy cost of even a single btc transaction is huge. It doesn't solve the micropayments problem at all.
Visa settles at the end of financials days with revocation possibly up to 80days out. Bitcoin settles every 10mins with revocation possible up to 1 hour out.
To keep the comparison accurate, you can transact many times within an “accounting block”. Bitcoin has the shorter accounting block and tier 2 systems laid on top of it seem to scale Bitcoin well beyond any accounting block maximum transaction cap.
The GP is probably not referring to speed of settlement though. Bitcoin solves KYC and trust and allows frictionless micro-payment.
AFAIK, this is the "micropayment" problem, that people were hoping bitcoin would solve.