The micropayments claim is a red herring. If Bitcoin were to actually take off for micropayments, it would no longer scale, and/or the operation of Bitcoin nodes would be limited to people with very serious hardware. At that point, we're back to the game that is currently being played by banks, just with different players in charge.

So it's understandable that many people hope that such a transition will happen and that they will end up in charge after that transition.

For the society as a whole, however, Bitcoin does not have an inherent advantage that is sustainably scalable.