My bank charges nothing for instant transfers of up to £10,000.

That's both cheaper than and faster than bitcoin.

(And this isn't a cost hidden in a perk of a monthly fee, there's no monthly account fee either.)

I'm pretty sure if Satoshi re-appeared "he" would be lamenting those artificially keeping the blocksize small. The 2MB limit was put in as a temporary solution to a problem of too many worthless transactions. Bitcoin has the opposite problem now.

Does that stand for transfers over (nation) state borders as well?

Yes, at least in the SEPA area (EU, plus countries in the EU orbit):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area#Cove...

As a means of payment in the SEPA region, Bitcoin is far worse on cost (free vs $5-10 in my experience), and sometimes worse on speed (1 - 1.5 business days for SEPA to clear).

So in this geographic area, Bitcoin is literally losing to a combination of the legacy banking system, and a huge, multi country, multi lingual, somewhat unwieldy bureaucracy.

That is still an EU payment system, which has improved a lot since the start of Bitcoin. I just need to transfer money to strange places and banks are pretty often crappy at that stuff, best solution I have is to send my credit card around the world.

> That is still an EU payment system, which has improved a lot since the start of Bitcoin.

Which shows how pathetic the main development team behind Bitcoin is (the core team). The fact that they haven't managed to fix problems that are years old and steadily getting worse is inexcusable. It should be a walk in the park for them to out compete a massive, political entity like the EU and the traditional banking sector.

I hear you on the "strange places", that was where BTC was supposed to shine. It hasn't made any inroads into underserved markets that I'm aware of, e.g. less well-off countries and unbanked people. That is a pipe dream as long as the fees are so high to move funds around.

I'm not saying they are acceptable, i'm saying that $20 fees per average transaction isn't true in all cases except once in the history of bitcoin.

Is there reason to believe that sort of congestion won't reoccur?

There is zero reason to believe that, and I'd even go so far as to say it WILL happen again, and probably soon.

There are solutions being worked on, but they are not ready for primetime yet.

Every major blockchain is working on scalability (sharding, offchain transactions, and various other solutions are in the works)

So ideally there will be more traffic but less congestion

I think Bitcoin has maneuvered itself into a corner where the remaining dev team doesn't dare to do any hardforks in the future even if they are important to keep Bitcoin competitive.

It will certainly be interesting if bitcoin fails because it is less efficient than humans.