I think I touched on all this. These are advantageous to merchants for low fees and loss liability assignment. They offer very little to the payer who is banked and has credit. Of course more merchants are accepting payment methods that are highly advantageous to them, and the payment processing providers capture a better interchange by cutting out the middle men. But the person whose money is being used to transact gains nothing in this and loses repudiation (along with other incentive perks card issuers often provide for their interchange share). This was my point, and I don’t see any addressing of it. For the person paying (you) you literally gain nothing and lose card network loss insurance and other perks.

For bank transfers, again, you gain repudiation. You have a window during settlement to dispute the transfer. It’s short but it exists. This is seemingly inconvenient and not obviously useful until someone is trying to steal your money. Then it’s suddenly very useful.

As a general society the friction that transfer hold periods provide generally globally reduces financial crimes everywhere and provides global stability to the financial system that didn’t exist prior. These seem like stupid fuddyduddy things banks do but there was a time these didn’t exist and there was a reason they were created and that time was not a better time. It was materially worse for everyone everywhere. Having never existed in such a time makes it hard to understand that such a time might have existed and why it was bad - but for those interested there do exist books that explain how we got here.

The consumer benefit would be when merchants start charging lower prices to payers if they use crypto. For example, I know many small businesses that offer lower prices, some on purchases as large as $9k (below AML limits), if paying in cash because it's easier to declare less in taxes when using cash. Likewise if a merchant realizes that they pay lower fees and have lower loss on stablecoin transactions, I can see a world where merchants offer discounts for those transactions.

Obviously time will tell if there's enough margin to even offer a valuable discount to the purchaser and if merchants will become savvy enough to offer this dual pricing scheme.