These are instant payments, not instant settlement. Your bank abstracts the underlying inter bank settlement complexity and aggregates all the minor transactio

These are instant payments, not instant settlement. Your bank abstracts the underlying inter bank settlement complexity and aggregates all the minor transactions and transfers that individuals do to a small number of larger settlement transactions, likely on the SWIFT network. When you make a payment, that transfer of money isn't instantly settled. The instantaneous feeling is a service that the bank provides you, but it's an illusion. There are similar experiences being built now on top of bitcoin, like http://strike.me http://strike.me, although the lightning network that Strike and CashApp are building upon actually is instant finality, unlike Visa/Paypal. This is why comparing bitcoin to Visa or PayPal is fundamentally flawed, since those are both layer 2/3 networks on top of SWIFT. The proper comparison is with other settlement networks that create finality, like SWIFT. Where SWIFT may take days to create final settlement of a transfer, bitcoin takes ~1 hour depending on how much confidence you want. Where SWIFT is secured by nation state monopolies on violence and global banking gatekeeping, bitcoin is secured by the most powerful computer network on the planet that no single nation state has the power to disrupt. Bitcoin is open and permissionless and anyone and everyone can join. SWIFT is tightly permissioned because it relies heavily on exclusive networks of humans who trust each other.