The problem with the comparison to Visa and Mastercard, is that settlement is never really final with those services. A transaction can be reversed even 6 months down the line, as anyone who runs a business probably knows. The cost of fraud-protection offered by these companies is the reason Bitcoin was proposed as a cheaper alternative. By making transactions final, the cost of fraud protection is put on the participants between each transaction, and not on every network user as a whole.
Bitcoin can be expensive to transact small volumes when the network is busy. This is due to a limitation in the amount of transaction data that can fit into a block, and blocks are limited to 10 minutes on average. A transaction fee however, is not measured as a percentage of the value being transferred, but is measured in the bytes occupied in a block. Since the transaction amount is just a 64-bit value, the transaction fees are the same whether you're transferring $1 or $1M. In the latter case, it will be far cheaper than existing payment processors and banking settlement systems.
This is why Bitcoin has emerged to become a settlement layer for larger value transactions, because block space is valuable (it costs money to replicate and store over hundreds of thousands of machines). People looking for a cheap payment processor for smaller value transactions are looking at solutions other than Bitcoin.
The trade-off is that to scale their own blockchains, they deprioritize decentralization (fundamental to Bitcoin), or they print own currency (undermining the idea of finite supply). Since anyone can do this, it becomes difficult to tell which are scams. As more and more blockchains exist, the value accrued in each blockchain will become less and less as it gets shared between them. The logical conclusion is that the value of tokens in this myriad of chains will converge to nothing.
On the other hand, if you could make a payment processor which does not undermine Bitcoin's decentralization or limited supply, then perhaps this would enable small, cheap transactions at a global scale. This is what the Lightning Network, among other solutions, are aiming to provide.
Bitcoin can be expensive to transact small volumes when the network is busy. This is due to a limitation in the amount of transaction data that can fit into a block, and blocks are limited to 10 minutes on average. A transaction fee however, is not measured as a percentage of the value being transferred, but is measured in the bytes occupied in a block. Since the transaction amount is just a 64-bit value, the transaction fees are the same whether you're transferring $1 or $1M. In the latter case, it will be far cheaper than existing payment processors and banking settlement systems.
This is why Bitcoin has emerged to become a settlement layer for larger value transactions, because block space is valuable (it costs money to replicate and store over hundreds of thousands of machines). People looking for a cheap payment processor for smaller value transactions are looking at solutions other than Bitcoin.
The trade-off is that to scale their own blockchains, they deprioritize decentralization (fundamental to Bitcoin), or they print own currency (undermining the idea of finite supply). Since anyone can do this, it becomes difficult to tell which are scams. As more and more blockchains exist, the value accrued in each blockchain will become less and less as it gets shared between them. The logical conclusion is that the value of tokens in this myriad of chains will converge to nothing.
On the other hand, if you could make a payment processor which does not undermine Bitcoin's decentralization or limited supply, then perhaps this would enable small, cheap transactions at a global scale. This is what the Lightning Network, among other solutions, are aiming to provide.