[beau_g]

You are comparing the transaction cost of credit cards/banking/trade to the transaction cost + infrastructure cost of bitcoin. Credit card companies, banks, financial institutes have millions of employees that drive to work, HVAC in their offices, etc. that is not required with bitcoin. This is ignoring all of the rest of OPs point that preserving the dollar system has countless other external costs.

[ipdashc]

I would think those employees exist because people demand a whole bunch of services from the financial system, like fraud protection, chargebacks/disputes, customer support, and so on. If you stripped down Visa or whatever to its bare minimum of just processing online transactions, I'm sure it could do it pretty efficiently. Conversely, if all our money ran on Bitcoin, I'm sure most people would still want to interact with companies that provide extra services and support on top, and then you'd be back in the same place.