How is this supposed to be competitive with the real world?

Paypal transactions, Swish (Sweden), etc. etc. are instant and often with zero fees.

There are many situations where it is a significant improvement:

* Fee is not dependent on amount of money you're sending. You can send $200M worth of Bitcoin to a company in China and it will only cost you $1.50, try doing that with a wire transfer.

* Transactions are "final": after 3-6 confirmations you can have a great degree of confidence it won't get reversed

* Compared to Western Union or MoneyGram, it's still faster and cheaper

But in its current state, bitcoin is definitely not a replacement for your Visa card when buying groceries at the store. Maybe Lightning will change that though.

1. I don't want to spend $200M worth of Bitcoin to a company in China. Something tells me that when you're ready to send that amount of money, bank fees do not even register in the expenses.

2. So, if transactions cannot be reversed, and I erroneously send money, or am tricked into sending money, I can't get it back?

3. So, BitCoin wins only when compared to Western Union and MoneyGram. Oh, what an achievement.

In it's current state bitcoin isn't a replacement for anything, really