It costs me $0.07 to send anyone any amount via IMPS or UPI protocols in India.

I can't see any reason why US banks don't have similar protocols. American banks are honestly much behind their counterparts even in developing countries

For very large amount it seems rather obvious that BTC wins, the problem is that the cost of (on-chain) BTC transactions is not indexed on the amount being transfered but on the size in bytes of the transaction. So you can send $10k for $0.07 but you could also send $1 for $200 if you use many inputs or outputs. That's a problem for day-to-day purchases which tend to involve small amounts (especially if you follow the good practice to use disposable addresses for every transaction, meaning that you'll often have to combine multiple inputs to spend your money). It doesn't help that you have to wait for the transaction to be mined at least once before you can be reasonably sure that it's been validated.

That's what off-chain solutions are supposed to fix, although they come with their own caveats.

>That's what off-chain solutions are supposed to fix, although they come with their own caveats.

L1-enforceable L2 bitcoin transactions have risks for the recipients. If you're the sender, you don't care.

Mind elaborating on these risks?

State of the art in L2 transactions means that you can send a payment without needing to issue a L1 transaction. There's a small, defensible risk that the sending party could try to broadcast outdated state in the L2 transaction (trying to roll back the state) but the protocol is designed with counter measures to deter that. Basically if the receiver isn't online or all the miners DoS the counter measure (retribution transaction) then the receiver is at risk. It's very small but still ought to be known.

> It cost my girlfriend $40 to send someone $400 via wire transfer through Bank of America.

Comparing wire transfer to BT transfer is a false analogy

OP will pay more than $40 converting his Bitcoin back to fiat.

Bank transfers are largely no fee, at least in Europe.

That's because of entrenched monopolies.

If bitcoin's only long-term effect were to be to goose legacy money into competing better, well, that's not nothing.

Bitcoin is owned by a tiny oligarch and operated by an ASIC monopoly in China called Bitmain.

https://howmuch.net/articles/bitcoin-wealth-distribution

  As you can see, over 95% of all bitcoins in circulation 
  are owned by about 4% of the market. In fact, 1% of the 
  addresses control half the entire market.

There's a theory Bitfinex and Tether might have created aprox 3 billion in counterfeit USD in order to steal and launder Bitcoins and manipulate their exchange and as a result, the entire cryptocoin market.

Comprehensive investigation is detailed here: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed