I'm definitely not that familiar with Ethereum, my thesis research was on Bitcoin but I have been fairly tuned out since then. But wouldn't confirmations take,

I'm definitely not that familiar with Ethereum, my thesis research was on Bitcoin but I have been fairly tuned out since then. But wouldn't confirmations take, as you said, five minutes on a good day? I see people saying 5-20 minutes typical for Ethereum to reach 30 confirmations. And sure you can accept fewer but 30 seems a pretty widely accepted convention. That's still slower than wire transfers which are functionally instantaneous (in practice of course it takes a minute or so). And right when I looked now the base TX fee is $19.10, which is a few dollars lower than I thought, but I see that it fluctuates by a few dollars pretty quickly so it would depend on the moment. I don't know the Ethereum situation with regards to EIP-1559 in very much depth so if I misunderstand how fees currently work please correct me. This seems to put Ethereum basically right on par with what my credit union charges for wire transfers. Now $20 is on the lower end for wire transfers on a consumer account (I think $25 is common), but you can also get lower on commercial accounts. It just seems like they're fairly on par with each other from a fee perspective, and Ethereum is at least a few minutes slower.