I agree. You have to write your own software (offline, perhaps), not use a mining pool, plus not use an exchange to be trustless. And you’re still having to trust the other end to actually deliver on what they’re paying for, although they don’t necessarily have to trust you. That last sentence is one of the few changes that Bitcoin makes: it moves power from the consumer (who has ability to charge back if the goods are not received) to the one accepting payment (who now cannot be charged back). I’m not convinced this is a good move.

And I agree with your overall point. The only issue is when you end up having unnecessarily high transaction fees, as we do now. Satoshi was trying to fix that part. But unfortunately, Bitcoin isn’t better on that front.

Bitcoin has high transaction fees because of the lack of scalability of the blockchain concept at scale while Visa has high transaction fees (although for most daily transactions, less than Bitcoin) due to network effects allowing them to charge near-monopoly rents.

What we need is government action to enable instant ACH/payments. And to make that common. Visa ought to be unnecessary.