Imagine paying $10 to send money in 2021. Crypto is a joke.
Ethereum mainnet has incredibly high demand for block space right now because there's hundreds of billions of dollars worth of value trading on top of it. And at that scale $10 is peanuts.
Your imagination is wrong in its estimate of absurdity: Western Union charges $60 to transfer $999 to the US:
https://www.westernunion.com/us/en/send-money/app/price-esti...
Up to $158 depending on what option you use, which is somehow even more than the claimed gas fees.
And your statement isn't even true. On layer 2s like Polygon you can send $0.50 anywhere in the world for less than a penny in fees. Think of Ethereum like the New York Times. You want to place an ad--so do many other people, and page space is limited. It's a pretty ridiculous critique of the entire advertising industry to say it's only for the rich because placing an ad in the New York Times is expensive. You can post your ad on craigslist for free.
I'd love to see some numbers to that effect.
Bitcoin in 2008 was as good for remittances as it is today - it's just easier to acquire and costlier to move (lightning being the exception). However, it manages by ignoring all regulations (Indian examples: [0], [1]). Whether these laws are just or proportional in a world where information moves at the speed of light is a question for democratic processes, not multinational corporations to answer.
Payments via SWIFT are slow not because the bits transferring money over SWIFT are much slower, but because international remittance regulations are genuinely complicated.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Exchange_Management_Ac...
[1]: https://fcraonline.nic.in/home/PDF_Doc/FC-RegulationAct-2010...
This is the problem.
Ethereum is for those who can afford the astronomical gas fees even on a slow transaction speed which is quite worse than card payment at this point.
Basically it is useless for anyone that pays for their groceries given that the gas fee itself will be more expensive than the food you are paying for.
Other blockchains already exist to avoid these issues from the start without relying on, fixing / patching, building on top of Ethereum.